Kaavyat Emptor?

I don't know and, to tell you the truth, I don't particularly care if Kaavya Viswanathan did or did not plagiarize YA author Megan McCafferty in her now-controversial debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.

It doesn't really matter much to me whether this alleged plagiarism was conscious or un-, even now that Little, Brown has withdrawn the book, clearly under pressure from Random House, McCafferty's publisher.What does concern me, though, is what this says about the publishing process, and about how and why books get bought and sold.

For years now, book people have been complaining about the commercialization of publishing, the philistine sensibilities of the corporate overlords, the fact that our precious "art" has been cynically morphing into just another form of media. But on the other hand, we hear the siren calls of "market niche," "know your readers," "who's the audience?" Read a standard author questionnaire and you see the presumptive hope that a publisher is not only buying an author's book but an enlisted corps of readers, complete with e-mail addresses, just to make the whole thing a cinch.

Enter book packagers, who traditionally respond to a perceived market opportunity by researching, commissioning and producing books for publishers. Our bookstores are filled with decorating and entertaining titles, film and TV tie-ins, many of which are sumptuously produced, well marketed and perfectly fine this way. But in recent years—and this is what is disturbing—the kinds of books packagers do has widened. As is now generally known, a packager called Alloy Entertainment not only shares the copyright with Viswanathan on Opal, but has had a serious hand in the making of some of the most successful YA books around. The packaging of Opal has caused a particular stir because it has been published, despite its young themes, as a novel for adults. Such "real" novels we consider to be personal works of art, or entertainment, anyway, not something produced by a committee awash in demographics.

Okay, call me naïve. Before the withdrawal, one longtime book packager told me she thought packaging of "crossover" books was just beginning. But, she said, it's not so much about subjugating good old-fashioned publishing to a marketing survey, but about the fact—maybe you've heard this one already?—that most in-house editors "don't have the time" to put blue pencil to paper on all the manuscripts they buy; they're way too busy lunching and acquiring and managing up.

We've known for years that publishers, probably including Little, Brown, have long employed freelance editors and "book doctors," of which packagers are just an institutional version. But Little, Brown has to resort to this? Realizing that a major house is willing to pay major money for a book that executives knew was going to require major work smacks of something majorly disturbing. It suggests that even the most well-bred publishing houses are not as desperate to find promising writers and great novels as they are to find attractive authors (preferably with interesting backstories) with whom they can match up test-marketed, packaged stories. And then they can take all the credit.

Or blame, as the case may be.