Saturday, December 11, 2010

Scribe acquires rights to Inside WikiLeaks: my time at the world's most dangerous website

Scribe is the first publisher to acquire English-language rights to Inside WikiLeaks: my time at the world's most dangerous website by WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

Scribe has arranged for the book to be translated from German into English, and expects to publish Inside WikiLeaks in Australia and New Zealand in April 2011. The book will be published first in Germany, by Ullstein, in early 2011.

The book will be a tell-all account of the operations of WikiLeaks from one of the organisation’s highest former figures.
Scribe publisher and founder Henry Rosenbloom said of this acquisition: ‘I’m thrilled that, as an independent Australian publishing house, we’ve become the first English-language publisher to acquire rights in Inside WikiLeaks — a book that is bound to arouse intense interest. I’m also very pleased to report that, as the lead publisher, we’ve been able to commission the translation from a very fine translator, UK-based Will Hobson, who is a contributing editor to Granta magazine.’

About Daniel Domscheit-Berg
Even before his involvement with WikiLeaks, Domscheit-Berg was active in the online freedom-of-information scene. After meeting with Julian Assange in December 2007, he started work on expanding the website. He resigned from his job at EDS in early 2009 in order to look after WikiLeaks full-time, and moved to Berlin to do so.

The German IT-specialist has now become the best-placed man in the world to provide an insight into the whistleblower project, to which he dedicated his life and for which he sacrificed all his savings, as WikiLeaks does not pay salaries. The break came in September 2010: Domscheit-Berg, who, under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, had until then been, alongside Assange, the face of the organisation, fell out with the founder and left.

Today, Domscheit-Berg is working together with others who have left the original to launch Openleaks, with the aim of building a better WikiLeaks that will avoid what they see as the old project’s mistakes.

The Age reports today that Daniel Domscheit-Berg plans to launch his rival site this Monday: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/anger-at-slave-trader-assange-wikileaks-loyalists-decide-to-break-away-20101210-18s0w.html

To read about why Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg fell out: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/wikileaks-revolt/

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