Little, Brown and Company, which printed the book in the United States and Britain, asked retailers and wholesalers to take it off their shelves.
BOSTON: The debut novel of a Harvard University student who acknowledged she unintentionally imitated passages from another author's work was pulled off the market on Thursday, a bookseller said.
Little, Brown and Company, which printed Indian-born Kaavya Viswanathan's book in the United States and Britain, asked retailers and wholesalers to take it off their shelves and return it to the publisher, Amazon.com spokeswoman Patty Smith said.
“We did get a request from the publisher to remove the title and we'’ve done so,” Smith said, adding the book, ‘How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,’ could still be purchased on the Internet bookseller's Web site but only from third-party sellers.
Calls to Little, Brown seeking comment were not immediately returned. The 19-year-old Harvard student has apologized for having unintentionally used sections from Megan McCafferty's ‘Sloppy Firsts,’ and ‘Second Helpings,’ which she said she read in high school. Viswanathan promised to amend future editions of the work.
Viswanathan''s book was the first in a two-book deal worth $500,000 signed when she was just 17. The movie rights have been acquired by DreamWorks studio.
Crown Publishing Group, a unit of Random House, which published McCafferty's work, said more than 40 passages in the student''s book, contained either identical language or common scene and dialogue structure to two of McCafferty's books.
“This extensive taking from McCafferty's books is nothing less than an act of literary theft,” Crown Senior Vice President Steve Ross said this week.
The book is described on Amazon.com as a `lively and irresistible’ novel featuring an overachieving teenage girl who finds she needs to have more fun in order to be accepted at the college of her dreams.
Viswanathan is the latest writer to face accusations of ethical impropriety that have shaken the publishing industry. Earlier this year, American author James Frey apologized publicly for fabricating parts of his memoir ‘A Million Little Pieces.’
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