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...Biblical scholars would have made R. Crumb - the counterculture cartoonist famous for creating Fritz the Cat - their no. 1 choice for reinterpreting the first book of the Pentateuch. And few among Crumb's cult following would have elected that he spend four of his creative years drawing pictures to go with Sarah Palin's favorite bedside reading. Yet the weird, obsessive, oversexed artist's pictorial interpretation of Genesis, which came out Oct. 19, has shot up best-seller lists: as of this writing, it's no. 1 on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list and on Amazon.com...
...buying it? There's pent-up demand among his core fans (his last book came out five years ago), but his editor at W.W. Norton, Robert Weil, thinks this book is reaching beyond Crumb's base. One sign he's right is that it's not just selling in comic book stores. Bookscan reported sales in regular bookstores increased the second week. Amazon says most of its buyers are coming from the West Coast, which is not as surprising as the cautious promotion the book got on religious blogs. (See 10 surprising facts about the world's oldest Bible...
...Crumb is the first to adapt the Bible in this way. There have long been comic-book versions of the Bible for children. Penthouse once serialized a graphic version of Genesis, which formed the basis for the book Bible: Eden, by Scott Hampton and Keith Giffen. There's a Manga Bible and one illustrated by renowned Mad magazine cartoonists Basil Wolverton. But perhaps because of the strange alchemy of the pairing, Crumb's Genesis has attracted more mainstream media attention than most graphic novels or reissued books of the Bible normally do, with an excerpt in the New Yorker...
...Clancy, Google's engineering director, said the deal affects only a neglected and unprofitable sliver of the book market. Competitors like Microsoft and Amazon aren't trying to digitize library books - Microsoft started a rival effort but dropped it last year - "and so the fact that they don't want these books accessible isn't a shocker," he said. "The vast majority of people I talk to are very excited about the idea that this content is going to be unlocked and opened up." Clancy acknowledged criticism that some parts of the settlement may be too broad but said changes...
Objectors have raised a dizzying array of criticisms: that the deal would put Google, the author's group and a small number of large publishers in the driver's seat of as-yet undiscovered e-book technology; that foreign authors and publishers weren't included; that the settlement was struck in secret; that many publishers and authors - particularly those in other countries - didn't even know about the case and weren't given enough time to respond once they found out. Publishers in Sweden and Germany complained that the settlement notification was so poorly translated that they had trouble understanding...