As a transatlantic transplant myself, writing on the 20th anniversary of my departure from the country of my birth, Ireland, I've occasion to note the weird disjunctures that territory-by-territory licensing of intellectual property engenders in the world of book publishing. That is, the little bits of fucked-up-ness that happen when books are published in the US and UK (and Canada and Australia, sometimes) months and years apart.

Our translation of Dorothea Dieckmann's Guantanamo was just published in the UK, and got this marvelous review last week in The Guardian—Michel Faber on Dorothea Dieckmann's delicate dissection of the horrors of Camp X-Ray—although we'd published it in September of 2007.

There's a lovely piece on vinyl fetishism in yesterday's [London] Times that mentions Travis Elborough's The Long Player Goodbye: How Vinyl Changed the World, which we shall publish in April or May of 2009, while Jessa Crispin loved Kevin Myer's "beautiful, brutal," memoir of covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland Watching the Door so much, she couldn't help but immediately review it in her column in the US-based The Smart Set, even though we're not publishing til April of 2009 also...

In fact, I suspect that facility with which news of good work now travels across licensing territories is becoming such that we publishers are  under increasing pressure to develop more reader-friendly approaches to how we handle the timing of publication...