What is a Scottish Book?
It's a tricky question, and one that lies at the heart of BooksfromScotland.com. We had to come up with our own definitions, to ensure that we were as comprehensive as possible, without diluting our unique selling points. For our perspective, a book is from Scotland if it is:
- Published in Scotland
- Is significantly about Scotland, her people, landscape, history or language
- Is written by a Scottish author
The second is trickier, but it doesn't take long to identify the Scottish content in a book.
The third is our biggest challenge. Iain Banks is clearly Scottish; so is Alexander McCall Smith (although some of his most popular books are set in Botswana, thousands of miles away). Loiuse Welsh is Scottish (but she's currently living in Germany); Arthur Conan Doyle is Scottish, but he is best known for the terribly English Sherlock Holmes stories. William Boyd was born in Ghana, lives in London - but considers himself to be a Scottish author, and so do we. It's the "Rod Stewart" clause, if you like. Science Fiction writer Charles Stross was born and raised in England, but he now lives in Edinburgh and, significantly, all his books have been published since he moved to Scotland.
So our aim is to be as inclusive as possible. But we do make exceptions. Recently, we deleted around 800 medical textbooks from BooksfromScotland.com. Many of these were published by Edinburgh-based Churchill Livingstone, or one of their derivative imprints, but most aren't written in Scotland, the content certainly isn't Scottish, and we've no idea where the authors are from. This still leaves over 800 medical books.
It's an ongoing task, and sometimes there will be books and authors we missed, and there will be others which will leave you scratching your head wondering "Why is that a Scottish Book?", but I hope this clears things up.
Now, I have a book about paranormal cricket matches in Eastern Europe, written by a Scot in Canada, to find a space for on BooksfromScotland.com... Watch this space!
Liam
