Not surprisingly, other likeminded souls are putting their heads together on how 17th Street Productions packaged Kaavya Viswanathan's book to the point of alleged plagiarism. Says one commenter on the blog Emily Magazine, "One person suggested to me that maybe 17th Street made up some kind of proposal or guideline sheet that included these quotes from McCafferty's book as a style-to-shoot-for kind of thing, and someone (Kaavya or one of her collaborators) thought he/she could lift it, without realizing the original source. That seems like something that might easily happen in the too-many-cooks world of book packaging."

Ross Dousat at the American Scene is more blunt: "Who exactly are these people? How many "young-adult and middle-grade" novels pass through their hands? Is it a coincidence that a book so deliberately "packaged" ended up containing lines cribbed from a novel in the same genre?" To answer question two, quite a lot, actually -- off the top of my head, there's SISTERS OF THE TRAVELLING PANTS, GOSSIP GIRL (and its offshoot THE IT GIRL), THE A LIST, the CLIQUE BOOKS, and the grandmommy of 'em all, SWEET VALLEY HIGH.

As for who these people are, as an AP article put it last year, Alloy (the parent company of 17th Street Productions) is run by "a couple of thirtysomething men who work in an average office building full of white, Ikea-esque furniture."

And as for coincidence...you all be the judge, but the Harvard Independent's Shane Wilson sums it up fairly succinctly: "[E]ither way, Viswanathan lacks an obvious graceful exit. [By confessing] to plagiarism, she risks jeopardizing her professional and academic future. If she palms it off on her book packager, she risks discrediting her debut novel — to say nothing of its planned sequel and cinematic adaptation — as a fraudulent patchwork composed by committee."

Ron adds: One person who doesn't seem to fully grasp the implications of the book packaging angle, though, is New Delhi literary critic Nilanjana S Roy, who suggests Opal Mehta is proof "any reasonably bright person can hammer out a book in six months and have a decent shot at being published." Well, sure, thanks to the magical world of POD, but that's what Roy literally means is that the sales-driven marketplace would sooner take books written by ordinary folks than literary craftsmen. But a prodigy from a wealthy family whose debut novel came out of extensive consulting with a book packager hardly seems like the test case for that assertion...

Sarah on redirect: Interestingly enough, as soon as I read Roy's piece I got in touch to get her take on the plagiarism, which she wasn't able to comment on in print because the paper had gone to press when the news broke. Even though she hadn't gotten the sense that Visnawathan had actually plagiarized, it didn't matter: "I thought the novel was funny, and warm, but also very derivative," Roy said in by email. "My sense was that Kaavya had done a good job of mixing pulp romantic fiction with magazine articles. And I'm a cynic. Her publishers packaged a brand new hamburger; part of the package turns out to have been someone else's patented hamburger helper."