Repurposing classic fiction

The Observer’s Rachel Cooke comments on what’s become increasingly common for UK publishers to do: take classics like Jane Austen‘s body of work and repackage them with more contemporary covers to appeal to younger audiences – and move them away from being “education” to “entertainment.”

All well and good, so why does the new marketing of classics leave such a sour taste in Cooke’s mouth that she calls it “the publishing equivalent of orange-flavoured cod-liver oil”? Her answer is fairly straightforward. “I suppose it’s the knowledge that numbers have hardly anything to do with reading iself. Girly covers; the boiling down of plot into boy-meets-girl-and-you-know-the-rest; the compiling of ‘best ever’ lists,” she says. “Not all good books are difficult, and not all difficult books are good. But a lot of good books do require a concentration span longer than that of the average Big Brother contestant. Why pretend otherwise? Why must everything be made to seem easy?”

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