Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic books and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
Talk about the rapid dispersal of pop culture around the globe in the digital age. Today David Beckham and Paris Hilton are household names in India. I know it´s not right. But in the 1960s…
The Fab Four might have stormed Mumbai (Bombay in their day) long before they made it to the ashrams of [...]
I was just trawling through my archives and found this story - City of Fakes - from 2006, about Cambodia`s refusal to enforce international copyright laws. Of course, Cambodia is known to be a country where everything is for sale, if only one puts the right amount of dollars on the table. One glorious consequence [...]
While in Cambodia, I noticed that my non-fiction title Beyond the Pancake Trench, published by Orchid Books, is being sold in bookshops around the country, along with scores of other titles, as a photocopied bootleg.
Damn.
The majority of books currently sold in Cambodia are probably pirated products, as is the vast majority of DVDs, CDs, software [...]