[Podcast] American Readers, Waiting Impatiently For 'The Girl'; NPR, 4/5/10

[Podcast, 4 min. 38 sec.] NPR; American Readers, Waiting Impatiently For 'The Girl':

"All this online book-buying did not escape the attention of book sellers, like David Thompson of Murder By the Book mystery bookstore in Houston. Thompson says the store wanted to honor the U.S. release date, but it kept getting harder and harder.

"We had gotten several very loyal customers who just absolutely needed the third book because the second one ends with such a cliffhanger you really, really want to read that third one right away," Thompson says. "And so we felt that it was really important to serve our customers and import these books that there was a desperate demand for."

Eventually Knopf found out that Thompson's store and others were importing copies of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and selling them to their customers. Knopf asked the booksellers to stop the practice, because says Bogaards, "it's a violation of copyright law."

But even online booksellers like Amazon.com are supposed to honor the U.S. release dates, which Bogaards says consumers may not know.

"What I would say to readers is, I would encourage them to shop at their local bookseller here in the United States or their online bookseller in the United States, where no laws are being broken and you are supporting the continuing discovery of world literature," Bogaards says."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125499739