Comments on "Cowardly Self-Censorship"

First, apologies if this double posts, what is up with Slog today?

Gawker says the Germans are going to publish the book:

http://gawker.com/5044898/germans-will-publish-novel-that-random-house-was-too-scared-to-print

I heard a British publisher will be releasing the book.

Authors need the money. Publishers don't, because they get their money from book sales, not book prizes. And authors possess little to no leverage with publishers, so they're not clout here. They're not going to budge.

Uh... there's no clout here

I swear my keyboard has an auto-typo function.

Wait, huh? Ok, I know this comment is way down here on the page & no one's going to see it, but most of the articles on Jewel of Medina that I've seen have been like the one in the Seattle Times a couple of weeks ago that said people were *worried* that there'd be hordes of angry Muslims, not that there *were* such hordes.

The quote that jumped out at me from the Times article was the Muslim guy saying, "you had a non-Muslim write a book, and you had a non-Muslim complain about it, and a non-Muslim publisher pull the book."

Have I allowed the unthinkable happen and let election shenanigans distract me from my beloved book-industry tantrums? (Can't be - I heard about the Twilight author thing).

But seriously, were there in fact angry Muslims?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008125629_yankedbook20m.html