Kaavya Viswanathan----Here We Go Again!

What's going on in this industry? This is so reminiscent of the Nora Roberts/Janet Daily fiasco when Daily plagiarized Roberts' work!

From the times:

Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel, acknowledged yesterday that she had borrowed language from another writer's books, but called the copying ''unintentional and unconscious.''

The Harvard Crimson, alerted by reader e-mails, reported Tuesday on its Web site that "Opal Mehta" contained passages similar to Meg Cabot's 2000 novel, "The Princess Diaries." The New York Times also reported comparable material in Viswanathan's novel and Sophie Kinsella's "Can You Keep a Secret?"

In Cabot's "The Princess Diaries," published by HarperCollins, the following passage appears on page 12: "There isn't a single inch of me that hasn't been pinched, cut, filed, painted, sloughed, blown dry, or moisturized. ... Because I don't look a thing like Mia Thermopolis. Mia Thermopolis never had fingernails. Mia Thermopolis never had blond highlights."

In Viswanathan's book, page 59 reads: "Every inch of me had been cut, filed, steamed, exfoliated, polished, painted, or moisturized. I didn't look a thing like Opal Mehta. Opal Mehta didn't own five pairs of shoes so expensive they could have been traded in for a small sailboat."

Uh..what? Unintentional, huh? Damn...hate it when that happens!!

They also say she was paid a half-a-million dollar advance. For an unknown 17-year-old (at the time) that's a mother load of mullah.

I'm frightened for the direction the publishing industry's headed in. Scared to death.