UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

January 30, 2007

One Book – One Edinburgh

Filed under: General — SpaceDog @ 11:39 pm

February sees the start of “Edinburgh’s very first citywide reading campaign“. They’re encouraging everyone in the city to read the same book (“Kidnapped” by Robert Louis Stevenson) by giving away 25,000 free copies in various libraries from the 1st of February. There’s various events scheduled throughout February that tie in with the book and they’ve also created two new versions a ‘simplified’ version and a graphic novel. It’s interesting to see a literature campaign unashamedly plugging a graphic novel, I’m wonder if a few purists raised an eyebrow at that. I’m not sure if the whole thing will make that much of an impact but it’s a novel (if you’ll excuse the pun) approach to getting the city reading.

The cynic in me does wonder if, since the original text is out of copyright, the new versions are just a way of making some money once the freebies run out. Particularly since all the versions are also for sale and there’s two other versions of the graphic novel with the same artwork but different text (one using Scots language and one in more modern text) that aren’t going to be available for free.

Still it seems a worthy cause, I’m not convinced it’ll take off but I’ve never read the book so I’m might try and give one or more of the versions a read if I can get hold of a copy.

1 Comment

  1. I guess the chances of them picking Trainspotting were fairly slim.

    Comment by Dave M — January 31, 2007 @ 3:14 pm

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