Julian Assange dumped his Canongate memoir deal but his quill is beginning to stir again. The WikiLeaks founder, still stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy, is writing another book. It is entitled When Google Met WikiLeaks, and is due out in September. The new work documents the encounter between Assange and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, when they met at Ellingham Hall where Assange was holed up 2011.
The book includes an edited transcript of the meeting during which Assange explained the importance of WikiLeaks, while Schmidt celebrated Google’s expansion as a collaboration with the US State Department. Unsurprisingly, Assange isn’t a fan — “technocratic imperialism” is what he called it.
There’s no love lost from Schmidt’s side either. “We went to visit Julian Assange when he was on his, shall we say, GPS locator service,” Schmidt told a magazine recently. He came away with the view “that we don’t want random people leaking large amounts of data… I don’t think that serves society”. We asked Google whether Schmidt agreed to the publication of their conversation but have had no reply.
Assange’s previous attempt at a book proved disastrous for Canongate Books. It reported a £363,367 loss for 2011 after Assange pulled out of a deal. He had promised a “part memoir, part manifesto” and received a rumoured £500,000 advance, but “after sitting with a ghost writer for more than 50 hours of taped interviews, he decided he wanted to cancel the contract”.
The new book is less of a risk for those involved. It will be published by OR Books, which runs a print-on-demand service. If no one buys the book, the only hurt will be to Assange’s ego. Not that humility has ever been his strong suit.
