The basic difference is that CliffsNotes does not use particular names of writers, whose rights were bought, while Lall’s publishers use a particular name, leaving a ‘scope of dispute over royalty’ if all the books are not authored by the prolific writer. Lall’s publishers have almost emulated Clifton Keith Hillegass, who founded CliffsNotes in 1958 in the US with “a line of 16 Shakespeare study guides” to help tertiary students meet their examination preparations. It is hard to consume that Ramji Lall who, according to one of his distributors Amazon, is a formerly principal of Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi, has been this prolific without the aides from ghostwriters. Students of English literature in Indian subcontinent in the past 30 years or so are quite familiar with the good name of Ramji Lall, who himself is now a ‘brand’, by writing study guides on almost all masterpieces from Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare, John Milton to John Dryden and John Keats to Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad to T S Eliot.
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