Swedish news agency TT says Le Clezio on Saturday accepted the Stig Dagerman Prize, worth $8,000 Cdn, at a ceremony in Alvkarleby, a small village 150 kilometres north of Stockholm. Le Clezio was awarded the prize for his ability "to fill the book's white pages with the most delightful combinations of words," the Stig Dagerman jury said. The award is named after Swedish author Stig Dagerman, who died in 1954. The prize was established in 1996 and honours efforts to promote the freedom of expression.

British writers were yesterday coming to terms with the death of the doyenne of the London literary scene, Pat Kavanagh, paying tribute to her strength of spirit, tenacity and straight-talking.

Kavanagh, 68, who was married to the novelist Julian Barnes, was at the summit of her profession, representing writers including Ruth Rendell, Margaret Drabble, Robert Harris, Joanna Trollope, Andrew Motion, Clive James, and Wendy Cope. What the writers had in common was their fierce loyalty to their agent, who died yesterday morning from a brain tumour.

The novelist Robert Harris - a client for 27 years - said everyone was reeling from her loss. "She was fantastically efficient and just the person you wanted to have represent you. There was no one quite like her really. And she was exotic, like a bird of paradise. She was unflappable and she didn't let you get above yourself.

"She always described herself as being like a family doctor or a country solicitor. She didn't believe in trying to screw an enormous amount of money out of publishers. Pat was always quite indiscreet and very funny and you know, in a world full of bs, there was no bs from Pat. She didn't suck up to her writers."

More than 31,000 Americans will have a hand in publishing a new edition of the Bible. Zondervan Corp. is starting a 90-city, 24,000-kilometre cross-country tour to mark the 30th anniversary of its new translation of the book.

The tour will stop at special events, churches, landmarks and other places to allow people to write out Bible verses. The collection of handwritten verses will be published and sold after the tour ends in San Diego on Feb. 12. Most will come from regular people, but the publisher also hopes to get verses from U.S. President George W. Bush, the Rev. Billy Graham and other luminaries.

The impenetrable-sounding book, a comprehensive record of Greece's postal routes, is published by the Greek Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain, which "exists to encourage the collection of Greek stamps and to promote their study".

The Diagram prize is The Bookseller magazine's award for oddly named publications, and this 72-page book has won the Diagram of Diagrams, for the weirdest title in the past three decades. It nipped in ahead of People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It, and How to Avoid Huge Ships.

"I think the voters wanted a feelgood story about rural postmen because of all the news of post offices closing around the country," said The Bookseller's charts editor Philip Stone. He has so far been unsuccessful in his attempts to contact the book's author Derek Willan to let him know about his win. "There's no prize but the boost in sales is surely prize enough," Stone said. "When we announced our last shortlist, sales increased by 1,000%, from one copy sold in the two weeks previously to ten afterwards."

The Diagram prize was launched in 1978 as a way to relieve boredom at a particularly tedious Frankfurt book fair. The Diagram of Diagrams saw the public voting for their favourite odd book title from 30 years of former winners. More than 1,000 votes were received, with Greek Rural Postmen taking 13% of the public vote.

Rushdie's lawyer Mark Stephens said today that the authors of the book now "accepted that much of the story published in the Mail on Sunday was false". He said that Evans had been "over-egging" his position at the time: "He was a police driver making out he was an armed special protection officer," he said.

Stephens added that Rushdie had made no requests for damages, nor for any changes in opinions in the book, merely for "the falsehoods" to be changed. "The authors have admitted that there were falsehoods in the original manuscript and have made amendments accordingly," he said.

The ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will leave the rights in the hands of Penguin Group Inc. and the heirs of Steinbeck's widow, Elaine Steinbeck. John Steinbeck died in 1968; his wife in 2003. The appeals court in Manhattan said a lower court judge misapplied copyright law in awarding the rights in 2006 to the son, Thomas Steinbeck, and granddaughter Blake Smyle, who already receive a portion of the proceeds of sales.

The recently reopened message board on the Twilight series Web site has been very active, and on Amazon-where the novel remains ranked #1 in sales-the book has generated more than 1,600 reviews (nearly twice the reviews of the previous book, Eclipse) and more than 1,000 "customer discussions." Unhappy readers expressed a variety of opinions, including incredulity with certain plot points or the way threads were tied up, while others felt the writing wasn"t as strong as in the previous books.

In one heavily trafficked thread entitled "Unhappy with Breaking Dawn? Don't burn it-RETURN it!," commenters debated whether returning the book was a valid way to express unhappiness with the book. "Technically, reading a book and returning it is theft of knowledge," read one post, while the original commenter, a former bookstore employee, wrote, "I don't advocate making a habit of buying new books, reading them, and returning them. But once in a while... I do think mass returns are a useful form of consumer protest." Another poster recounted, anecdotally, returning the book at Borders: "They took back my book with no problem. Got into a discussion with the cashier about how I was the 15th (!!!) person to bring my book back today."

The publisher of a book that Salman Rushdie says portrays him as "mean and arrogant" has delayed publication for a week following Rushdie's threat of legal action. On Her Majesty's Service by Ron Evans was due to be published yesterday, but John Blake Publishing has moved this to August 11 in the hope that once Rushdie has read the book in its entirety he will see it as a "light-hearted and affectionate" portrait.

Rushdie's lawyers contacted John Blake earlier this week over excerpts in the weekend papers from the former Special Branch officer's memoir. These claimed that the security guards protecting Rushdie during the fatwa against him "got so fed up with his attitude that they locked him in a cupboard under the stairs and all went to the local pub for a pint or two". Evans also claimed that the guards nicknamed Rushdie Scruffy, which Rushdie said was untrue.

Managing director John Blake said he was confident that once Rushdie had read the whole book he would realise it was no threat to security. He added: "If anyone should be defending freedom of speech it should be him ... I can't believe that he'd really want to ban a book because it says that detectives named him Scruffy -- in a way that's almost affectionate."

"We really want to maintain and have a greater leadership position in photography," said Nina Hoffman, president of National Geographic Books. Leah Bendavid-Val, director of photography publishing for National Geographic Books, said the books in the Focal Point series "will appeal to connoisseurs, professionals, collectors, serious students of photojournalism and all lovers of photography."

As such, the books are moderately high-priced; the fall list includes three $40 hardcovers—Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World by Alexandra Avakian, The Life of a Photograph by Sam Abell and Odysseys and Photographs by Maynard Owen Williams, Volkmar Wentzel, Luis Marden and Thomas Abercrombie—as well as a $75 tome: Reza War + Peace by Reza. Hoffman said that while the fine art photography market is small, "it is at the heart of National Geographic. We want to stake a claim, and we do in the magazine world. We want the same recognition in books."

Amazon and the publisher Grove/Atlantic will give away the electronic download of a new novel, Spirit House, by Christopher G. Moore, to Amazon Kindle customers beginning Friday, in advance of the book's release in print on Aug. 28, the companies announced on Wednesday. Morgan Entrekin, the president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said in a statement that the deal with Amazon "is a great way to expand Moore's audience even further." The Kindle, a portable electronic reader that downloads books, newspapers, blogs and magazines, sells on Amazon.com for $359.

Dante, the father of the Italian language, fled his native city in 1302 after being sentenced to death for crimes including fraud and extortion. Florence council was to have healed the 700-year rift with the poet by presenting the city's golden florin to Count Pieralvise Serego Alighieri. The count, however, believes the Florentines are not sorry enough.

Last month, a meeting of the council's cultural committee, held to annul the expulsion order, prompted the kind of rancorous divisions that led to Dante's exile. Five councillors voted against the annulment and several others stayed away.

Count Pieralvise said it was "anything but a collective 'mea culpa' and symbolic ending of [Dante's] exile". "I could have wept when I read the comments of some of the councillors," he said. The proposed reconciliation, the initiative of two councillors from Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party, ran into fierce opposition from the radical left. Nicola Rotondaro, the leader of a communist group on the council, said Dante "did not need the council to rehabilitate him".

"If he had been sent to his death, would we perhaps have asked for his resurrection?" he said. The count said it was "as if the people of Stratford-upon-Avon had quarrelled over an event in memory of Shakespeare".

Never heard of her? Well that's probably because you are not 13 and female. But you soon will. Although five million of her sales have been in the US, momentum is growing in Europe and with the release of a film of Twilight, the first book, scheduled for early next year, the books are expected to take off here. British bookshops are planning midnight openings on the day that the fourth book in the series is published in August.

*****

She says that some people are surprised that a Mormon is writing vampire novels, but they generally haven't read her. "When you think about vampire novels, there is a lot of gruesomeness, a lot of sexuality, a lot of darkness, blood obsession. When you read my books it is completely different. Really, the whole vampirism thing is a metaphor for feeling trapped in a certain role. I never got into any trouble from the Latter Day Saints people. My strongest fan base is probably in Utah." How Meyer came to write about vampires, however, is a mystery to her, given that she was very far from steeped in the vampire tradition. She is too "chicken" to read horror and doesn't watch R-rated films because “there are things that you don't need to have in your head. There are R-rated movies that I would like to go and see - I heard The 40-Year-Old Virgin was hysterical. But when you have an unbroken streak, you don't want to mess that up."

[I]ts Reader Digital Book will be able to read electronic books published using the .epub format that many of the largest book publishers are using. Until now, Sony's e-book reader could only read books available from the Sony e-book store, PDF documents, and DRM-free text. Starting next month, the new PRS-505 Sony Reader model will be able to access secure DRM- and non-DRM-protected content in the .epub format, formerly called the Open eBook format.

The Sony Reader Digital Book is the first e-book reading device to support the .epub format, which is the XML-based standard format proposed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It allows publishers to convert books to different formats, protect the copy using DRM (digital rights management) and has the ability to resize PDF e-books and other text to better fit the reader's screen size.

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"This upgrade opens the door to a whole host of paid and free content from third-party eBook stores, Web sites, and even public libraries," Steve Haber, senior vice president of consumer product marketing for Sony Electronics, said in a statement.

The announcement is the latest move in a standards war over e-book formats pitting Sony against Amazon. Amazon's Kindle e-book reader and e-books it sells support the proprietary .azw format. Amazon also acquired Mobipocket, which offers a format for texts read on PDAs and BlackBerrys and its Kindle can read DRM-free .mobi files.

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but a magic wand is more powerful than either, or at least according to this year's Forbes' list of the world's richest celebrities. Harry Potter author JK Rowling earned more than any other celebrity, according to the annual Celebrity 100 list, taking home $300m (150 million pounds) last year. There were other strong British performances from Keira Knightley, announced as the world's second best paid female actor, Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe and David Beckham.

Police have recovered a 400-year-old volume of Shakespeare stolen in England a decade ago and worth millions of dollars (pounds) after a man walked into a library in Washington, D.C., and asked to have it authenticated.

Police in Durham, northeast England, said Friday they had arrested a 51-year-old man over the theft of the First Folio edition of 1623, which scholars consider one of the most important printed books in the English language. It was among seven centuries-old books and manuscripts stolen in December 1998 from a display case at the Durham University library.

*****

he mystery began to unravel two weeks ago when a man brought the First Folio to Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library and asked to have it verified as genuine. The man claimed to be an international businessman who had bought the volume in Cuba. "We have people come to us from time to time with questions about books," said Garland Scott, head of external relations at the library, one of the world's leading centers of Shakespearean research. "It's not every day that someone walks in with a First Folio."

Scott said library staff members soon had their suspicions raised. The book was largely intact, but the end boards and some early pages -- which bore marks that would have identified them as the Durham copy -- had been removed.

Previously unseen documents, postcards, sketches and personal belongings of the Czech-Jewish writer, who wrote in German, have been gathering dust in the home of Esther Hoffe, the former secretary of Kafka's friend and executor Max Brod since his death in 1968. Hoffe's refusal to relinquish the documents led to a literary game of cat and mouse between her and the state of Israel, under pressure from the country's cultural elite, which on one occasion even led to her arrest on suspicion of smuggling Kafka's writings out of the country.

Now, following her death at the age of 101, Kafka lovers hope the row may have come to an end. Researchers are ready to pounce on the contents of Hoffe's flat, fully expecting the items will throw new light on the mysterious writer who died at the age of 41, as well as his friendship with Brod, his greatest champion.

But authorities in Tel Aviv have warned that the papers, with their high sulphuric acid content, may have stood up poorly to conditions in Hoffe's damp flat in the centre of Tel Aviv and to the hordes of cats and dogs which she kept until two years ago when health inspectors intervened after neighbours complained about the stench.

A Child Called It was a horrific tale of sadistic abuse at the hands of his alcoholic mother, who kept him locked in the family basement, force-fed him dog faeces and ammonia, and stabbed and burned him. A sequel recounted his childhood in foster care after police and teachers rescued him at 12, quickly followed by a third volume charting his journey through the US air force to become a juvenile counsellor, bestselling author, motivational speaker and living legend of the daytime Oprah circuit. His books have been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a decade, breaking every record since the list began.

*****

Pelzer believes people like his books because they put their own problems in perspective. "A Child Called It was a story about resilience, it was never about boo hoo hoo, it was about a kid that didn't quit. I never sat down and thought: I'll do it to commercialise it, or for morbid fascination. I did not know until I came to England, on a book tour in the late 90s, that there was this thing about a morbid fascination. That's when I was accused of it, of being a morbid writer. That had never happened in America."

How does he feel about the criticism that misery literature feeds a voyeuristic taste for cruelty? "I can't help what other people may think." But he must have an opinion, surely. "You know, that's not my job, ma'am. My job's to do a good job. That's my opinion."

That jaw-dropping sum got the house world English rights, which means they'll be able to publish the book-described to Media Mob as a collection of comedic "rants" -- through any of their international units and sell whatever rights they don't want to other publishers.

Because Mr. Brand is a much bigger star in England than he is anywhere else, the UK unit is covering the lion's share of that massive advance, our source said. Stateside, the book will be published through HC's Collins division and overseen by editor Gillian Blake.

Mr. Brand, who is currently working on a second movie with Mr. Apatow and recently wrapped one with Adam Sandler, published a raucous memoir last year about his addiction to drugs and sex that was a huge bestseller in the UK. That book, entitled My Booky Wook, originally involved a ghostwriter, but Mr. Brand didn't like what he saw of a first draft and decided to write it himself -- in Tuscany! -- over the course of about a month.

The launch will mark the end of the two-week festival, coinciding with the veteran actor's 78th birthday. Festival bosses said the James Bond star's "eagerly-anticipated" first book, entitled Being A Scot, will shed light on his views about many aspects of Scottish life and culture. Connery is expected to attend the book launch, which comes at the height of the city's world-famous festival season. Book festival director Catherine Lockerbie said a number of other James Bond themed-events - including the launch of Charlie Higson's fifth and final Young Bond novel - would be held to mark 007 creator Ian Fleming's centenary.

Unveiling the programme today, she said: "In this special year it was obviously essential to bring Sir Sean back to the city of his birth, on the day of his birthday, for a world exclusive launch of his first book, Being A Scot." "What we will unveil is a rather remarkable document, written in conjunction with his friend, the brilliant Scottish film-maker Murray Grigor."

It's a good enough package that my guess is that digital readers will soon become common, perhaps even the usual way we read books. How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won't last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices.

Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors' other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it's good enough for me.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won't work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.

But they'll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we'll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

And I meant every hyperbolic word of it. See, sometimes you can judge a book by its blurber.

"I have no idea at this point how many books I've blurbed," says humorist Jonathan Ames, who is approached frequently to dish out book-jacket praise.

"It may be about 50. It might make some long, strange poem if I was to collect them all."

In fact, one of his blurbs was even declared "best blurb" by New York magazine for "The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own," which Ames notes, "on the title alone, deserved a great blurb."

While he tries to blurb honestly, he does admit, "Once I promised someone that I would blurb their book, and then I read it and didn't feel so strongly about it. This was years ago. But I blurbed it anyway, and then a fan e-mailed me and said they bought the book because of my blurb and were sorely disappointed. I felt bad about this. But I guess it shows that blurbs actually do work once in a while."

Oh, they totally work. Even if it's just to generate an article about blurbing.

Publicist - and now best-selling author - Sloane Crosley (who, yes, has a blurb from Ames) has seen press from Radar to New York magazine about her bevy of notable blurbs as a first-time author, the question being whether she "cheated" by using her publishing clout to secure out-of-sight blurbs.

The world's largest software maker is under pressure to show it has a coherent strategy for turning around its unprofitable online business after its bid for Yahoo Inc., last valued at $47.5 billion, collapsed this month.

Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company's plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search and advertising group, in a blog post Friday.

Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.

Microsoft entered the book-scanning business in 2005 by contributing material to the Open Content Alliance, an industry group conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo. In 2006, it unveiled its competing MSN book search site.

Unlike Google, whose decision to scan books still protected under copyright law has provoked multiple lawsuits, Microsoft stuck to scanning books with the permission of publishers or that were firmly in the public domain.

The company said it will give publishers digital copies of the 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles it has amassed.

Microsoft's search engine is a distant third behind Google's and Yahoo's, in terms of the number of queries performed each month, despite the company's many attempts to emulate Google's innovative search features and create some of its own.

The first of six books, all centred around a small, vivacious, ginger-haired girl called Ugenia Lavender, is published today by Macmillan. Halliwell is full of ambitions for her young doppelganger, who she describes as summing up "what being young is all about". "She's streetwise, sassy, has a sense of humour but most importantly has a sense of right and wrong," she said. "I believe Ugenia can conquer the world, and I really hope people will love her as much as I do."

*****

The first of six books, all centred around a small, vivacious, ginger-haired girl called Ugenia Lavender, is published today by Macmillan. Halliwell is full of ambitions for her young doppelganger, who she describes as summing up "what being young is all about". "She's streetwise, sassy, has a sense of humour but most importantly has a sense of right and wrong," she said. "I believe Ugenia can conquer the world, and I really hope people will love her as much as I do."

In a dig at fellow celebrity-turned-author Katie "Jordan" Price, whose My Perfect Ponies was recently nominated for a Nibby award, Halliwell has been keen to emphasise that the writing of the books was all her own work. "I know there is a prejudice against celebrity authors, but if you read my stories you'll know they're not ghostwritten - only that I could be bonkers," she confessed to the Hello! Magazine website.

Scholastic announced today that it will create a children's book line from the BBC program Planet Earth. The company holds U.S. and Canadian English and French rights for the Planet Earth children’s books program and will publish and distribute the titles through its trade, school book club and school book fair channels. The books will be printed on 30% post-consumer waste recycled paper.

*****

The program will launch in September with the full-color, 48-page Planet Earth Scrapbook and Planet Earth Reader. The program will continue with three January 2009 publications (a second reader, a board book and scrapbook), followed in April 2009 by a full-color 98-page Guide to the Planet timed to coincide with Earth Day. The program will include paperbacks, board books, phonics books, novelty books and scrapbooks. It will target preschoolers, middle-grade students and teens. High-quality 30% post-consumer waste recycled paper will be used for all titles.

Publishing officials are reluctant to discuss sales figures, but say that they have seen double digit increases in ebook sales since the Kindle's release, and renewed interest in downloads for the Sony Reader. Sales for the most popular ebooks are in the hundreds, comparable to the number for the Reader, which came out in 2006.

"The Kindle has increased awareness. Publishers have told me that in some cases the Sony numbers were double or triple what they had been," says Michael Smith, head of the International Digital Publishing Forum, which tracks ebook sales. Selling through Amazon.com for $399 (£199), the Kindle is thinner than most paperbacks and weighs 0.29 kg. It can hold some 200 books, along with newspapers, magazines and an entire dictionary.

The Kindle has been praised for the selection of texts available -- more than 100,000 books, blogs and newspapers -- and for the speed of delivery, which averages less than a minute. Fans include authors such as Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis and Neil Gaiman.

Doubleday has acquired North American rights to bestselling Shadow of the Wind author Carlos Ruiz Zafon's new book, following an intense seven figure auction that came to a head when Doubleday's publisher, Steve Rubin, found himself facing off against Deb Futter, the new editor-in-chief of Grand Central Publishing's adult division whom Mr. Rubin trained in the ways of the business when she worked for him. Both Mr. Rubin and Ms. Futter were apparently in the auction-- conducted by Tom Colchie on behalf of Spanish-based literary agent Antonia Kerrigan-- until the very end.

Ms. Futter and had been working at Doubleday for many years, and serving as deputy editorial director there when she left for her new job. She started at Grand Central in January.

Alison Rich, the executive director of publicity at Doubleday, confirmed that Mr. Rubin had acquired the book, and that Doubleday editor-in-chief Bill Thomas will edit. Ms. Rich would not comment on the size of the advance.

Borders Group Inc., the bookstore chain that put itself up for sale last week, rose the most ever in New York trading after Goldman, Sachs & Co. said Barnes & Noble Inc. would benefit from buying it. Borders rose $2.18, or 43 percent, to $7.25 at 4:02 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, the biggest gain since the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company sold shares to the public in May 1995.

The bookseller put itself up for sale last week, halted its dividend and borrowed money from William Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management LP because it wasn't able to get bank financing to remodel stores and pay for new technology. Pershing is Borders's largest shareholder and holds the second- largest stake in Barnes & Noble.

"We see improved prospects for a deal," Matthew Fassler, a New York-based analyst with Goldman Sachs, wrote in a report today. "Barnes & Noble could generate significant accretion from an acquisition of Borders." Barnes & Noble may add more than 10 percent to profit if it paid as much as $13 a share for Borders in an all-cash transaction, Fassler said. An all-stock transaction of as much as $10 a share might also add at least 10 percent to profit, he said. "Closing stores and sending a chunk of the volume to surviving nearby stores would drive further accretion," he said.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans...

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

Michael Cader, who tracks book deals for his electronic newsletter, Publishers Lunch, counts 295 memoirs signed by publishers last year, compared with 227 debut novels and 214 memoirs in 2006. Memoirs accounted for 12.5% of non-fiction deals, up from 10% in 2006 and 9% in 2005.

Citing two recent best sellers, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a post-divorce travelogue, and Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, about her bizarre parents, literary agent Amy Williams says memoirs share reality TV's voyeuristic appeal. Memoirs can "make us feel better about ourselves because whether we're honest about it or not, we all like feeling as if someone has it worse than we do, or behaved in a way we never would have," Williams says.

Agony sells, especially when touted as a true story. Of course, memoirs can be exaggerated or falsified. After acknowledging inaccuracies in his best-selling addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey is now writing a novel. "Frey gave all of us a black eye," says Janice Erlbaum, whose second memoir, Have You Found Her, is about volunteering at a homeless shelter where she once lived. In her first draft, "I went overboard trying to prove the story was true. I didn't want to leave anything out. In the end, I knew I was dealing with something stranger than fiction."

With Cathy's Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233, a genre-bending mystery for young adults by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman that was published in 2006, the authors learned that product placement could be a touchy subject. After their publisher, Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books Group, revealed that the authors had agreed to have characters wear specific makeup lines made by Cover Girl in exchange for promotional ads for the book on beinggirl.com, a Web site aimed at adolescent girls and run by Procter & Gamble, Cover Girl's parent, the book came in for criticism. Ralph Nader's advocacy group, Commercial Alert, urged book review editors to boycott it, and the novelist Jane Smiley wrote a disapproving op-ed article for The Los Angeles Times; The New York Times wrote a critical editorial as well.

Now the novel - which features a series of clues that are given out in voice mail messages, Web sites, letters and other documents included with or referred to in the book - is set to come out in paperback on Monday, and all the references to Cover Girl’s products have been removed. A drawing in the hardcover edition, for instance, shows Cathy wearing "Cover Girl lipgloss 'Demure,' " and "Waterproof Mascara -- 'Very Black'," but it appears in the paperback version without any makeup noted. And at the end of the hardcover edition, Cathy talks about wearing "a killer coat of Lipslicks in 'Daring'"; in the paperback she just says, "a killer coat of lipstick."

"We did a whole bunch of pretty innovative things with that book," Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview. But, he said, the main topic of conversation, "instead of being about the other 18," was about the product placement.

The first Quills event took place in October 2005 to celebrate the best in book publishing while promoting the cause of literacy in the U.S. Former Variety publisher Gerry Byrne chaired the Quills Literacy Foundation, which was overseen by an Advisory board made up of 40 members of the publishing and media community.

"To help create a program to celebrate the written word was a privilege," says Byrne. "Thank you to all my colleagues at Reed, NBC and throughout the book publishing world for their support." Acting as Partner, NBC televised the annual black tie awards ceremony on the owned and operated stations and affiliates. As part of the dissolution of the Quills, the remaining Foundation funds will be distributed to First Book and to Literacy Partners.

"The Quill Awards have truly helped us advance the cause of literacy for the hardest to reach children in our country, helping to give them the skills and resources they need for a hopeful and successful future," said Kyle Zimmer, First Book President. "First Book is tremendously grateful to the Quills Literacy Foundation; their legacy will live on through their generous contribution as we continue to provide beautiful, new books to the children who need them the most."

"On behalf of Reed Business Information, we wish to thank our publishing colleagues, including the publishing houses, booksellers, librarians and our sponsors for their support of the Quill Awards program," said William McGorry, Quills Director.

Amazon has increased its presence in the spokenword audio market, announcing this morning that it has agreed to acquire Audible, Inc. the country's largest provider of digital downloads of spokenword audio. Amazon is paying $11.50 per share and assuming Audible's outstanding stock-based awards, making the value of the deal about $300 million. Audible's stock price was at $9.33 the day before that deal was announced, although its shares were selling at a 52-week high of $14.22 in November. The purchase is expected to close in the second quarter.

For the first nine months of 2007, Audible had sales of $78.8 million, an increase of 34% over 2006, and a net loss of $1.5 million compared to a loss of $7.7 million in the first nine months of 2006. Commenting on the purchase, Steve Kessel, senior v-p for worldwide digital media at Amazon, said Audible "offers the best customer experience, and the widest content selection in the industry."

"The opportunity to work with the American master Tom Wolfe is the kind of thrill and challenge that people entering book publishing dream of," Little, Brown Publisher Michael Pietsch said Wednesday. "Tom Wolfe is one of the great writers of his generation and he has been one of FSG's most significant and best-loved authors," Farrar publisher Jonathan Galassi said. "We are sorry to part company, and wish him all happiness and success in this next phase of his work."

*****

His new novel, "Back to Blood," will be a "Bonfire"-like tour of Miami, taking on "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition." Among the characters: a Cuban nurse married to a French sex doctor, a Haitian woman "who passes for Anglo" and "a freshman journalist on the trail of a Russian-mob-comes-to-Miami story." Publication is scheduled for 2009.

*****

According to a publishing official familiar with negotiations, Farrar, Straus and Wolfe could not agree on a new contract: Having lost money on "Charlotte Simmons," the publisher was offering a reduced advance for "Back to Blood."

Baldacci named his character for film director Oliver Stone, whose controversial movies include JFK. "It was a perfect name for him to take," Baldacci says. "My Oliver Stone is a big-time conspiracy theorist who doesn't trust anybody. So I thought it would be a tip of the hat." Baldacci says he admires Stone's movies because "they take a position, they're courageous and they stir up controversy. And that's never a bad thing." The prosperous-looking Baldacci appears to be the antithesis of the jaded Stone in his novels, whose tattered wardrobe makes people assume he's homeless.

"Someone asked me one time, 'How cynical are you about the U.S. government on a scale of 1 to 10?' I think my answer was 8.5 to 9.3," Baldacci says. "I have given it a lot of thought. I don't have a low opinion of all politics or all politicians, but of the substantial majority of them and how they do their business and go about their work."

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"In The Camel Club, I had the audacity to make a complex issue complicated instead of very simple, black and white," he says. "I posed the question, 'Wouldn't it be smart to understand why a normal person in the Middle East might become a terrorist?' I was exploring things some people didn't want explored. They wanted John Wayne." The roots of terrorism he explores in the novel include economic and social pressures faced by young Muslims. Because of early criticism, Baldacci was convinced The Camel Club would not be popular with the reading public, but it turned out to be his biggest seller in hardcover.

"In every thriller written about Washington, particularly after 9/11, there are good guys and there are bad guys, and there's no gray area at all," Baldacci says. "Good guys kill all the bad guys, and they do it any way they can because that makes the world safer and better. That's total BS, but it plays well to audiences. "For me, the gray is where I live, and that's the only reason I write books like this." Those who fight for justice in his novels don't always survive or win their battles. But critics and fans appear to like Baldacci's less than black-and-white approach to good and evil.

Even by the standards of the book world, 2007 saw more hand-wringing than usual, as well as some unexpected good news. The year was punctuated by anxiety over the decline of many newspaper book review sections and worry that publishing, with its old-fashioned way of printing books on paper and shipping them to stores or to online services, can't keep up with a fragmented, increasingly distracted and digital world.

A flurry of bookstores, especially independents, fell victim to the chains, big-boxes and Amazon.com. In Southern California, that meant the shuttering of Dutton's Beverly Hills, Book Soup's Orange County branch, Anaheim's Book Baron and several beloved used-book stores. Leimert Park's Eso Won Books and Pacific Palisades' Village Books are hanging on by the skin of their teeth: Village owner Katie McLaughlin said she's waiting to see how holiday sales go before deciding whether next year will be her store's last.

And because of price discounts, the final installment of the Harry Potter series didn't give many stores the shot in the arm they were hoping for. Even literacy itself, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts, seems to be on a slow but steady decline. Add to this the destabilizing and ever-increasing pace of change. "It's one of those years -- they come along every once in a while -- where everyone worries and pulls their hair," said Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World.

As one reviewer has reported, 'baby-sick lit' has taken over from chick lit as 'publishing's latest craze'. Polly Williams' previous novel, The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy, delved into the turmoil of new motherhood and its corresponding loss of a sex life/decent wardrobe/sense of identity. It's all quite sharp and entertaining, with some funny insights about the weirdness of postnatal groups and the disorientation facing the onetime girl-in-PR when forced to adapt to a life of tracksuits and buggy-pushing. Like Fiona Neill's Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy, which projects the struggle with maternal identity further forward into life with school-age children, Williams' brand of baby-sick lit abounds with the contradictory impulse to love one's child and escape from it; suspicions of one's partner having an affair and temptations to have an affair oneself; and a rather peculiar obsession with personal grooming.

To the extent that it connects with a new generation of career-girls-turned-mummies, to whom babies are alien creatures and coffee mornings foreign lands, baby-sick lit has its place, just as Chick Lit does in the life of the busy commuter girl. (As Chick Lit author Jenny Colgan once famously remarked: 'We do actually know the difference between literature and popular fiction. We know the difference between foie gras and Hula Hoops, but, you know, sometimes we just want Hula Hoops. But when it comes to what we might call piss-stick lit, in honour of the ubiquitous home urine tests for ovulation and pregnancy, things become rather more uncomfortable.

Attorney Larry D. Drury had urged U.S. District Judge Richard J. Holwell to approve the deal, which offered a refund to anyone who bought the book before Frey's falsehoods were acknowledged. The Manhattan jurist said he would bestow final approval on the settlement because it was "most fair, adequate and reasonable." Although the book was a huge hit that exploded in sales after Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club, only 1,729 readers came forward to benefit from the settlement, Drury said.

In January 2006, the website The Smoking Gun revealed that Frey's memoir of addiction and recovery contained numerous fabrications. Frey and his publisher then acknowledged that he had made up parts of the book. Drury noted that 93,738 copies of the book were sold in the seven months after the controversy erupted. The various lawsuits filed by readers were consolidated before Holwell, and a settlement was reached. It called for refunds for readers who felt duped by the book, which earned its author more than $4 million.

Although Random House set aside $2.35 million in a fund to cover costs related to the lawsuits, advertisements in 962 newspapers and elsewhere drew only the 1,729 claims for reimbursement by the deadline, costing just $27,348. Another $783,000 will be paid out in legal fees, as will $432,000 in costs associated with publicizing and carrying out the settlement. As part of the settlement, Random House agreed to include a warning in the book that not all portions of the book may be accurate. In addition, an author's note about the subject was to be included in copies of the book until this December.

The settlement also calls for roughly $180,000 to be divided among three charities: the American Red Cross, the Hazelden addiction treatment center and First Book, a non-profit that gives children from poor families a chance to read and own their first book.

"He's not in very good shape. It's breaking my heart," ex-wife Carol Mailer said yesterday. "He went in this time because his lung collapsed. . . . They got the scar tissue out, and the surgery was successful. "But I just don't think he's doing well. My heart is heavy," she said. Mailer, who was raised in Brooklyn and grew up to win two Pulitzer Prizes, was hospitalized over Labor Day in Boston for asthma.

But the 84-year-old dad "insisted on leaving the hospital to be at [daughter Maggie's] wedding" Sept. 8, even if he was too weak to walk her down the aisle, said Carol Mailer. An in-law at his home in Brooklyn yesterday said, "Everything's fine. He's recovering." Carol Mailer said: The kids are [at Mount Sinai] every day. "Norman still has a huge spirit and is making jokes," she said. "He was even thumb-wrestling. "He's an extraordinary man. He's a fighter."

There, we've done it. We've gone and changed the name of Holtzbrinck. Just like that, we're Macmillan. Actually, we've been talking inside about the name change for so long — over a year now — that it's somehow shocking to see it finally happen. Of course, this is much more than just a name change. (Although, I confess that it will be nice that my English mother will finally know who I work for.)

In Macmillan, we in the US are adopting a name that Holtzbrinck has been known by internationally for years. But it's not only our business cards and boxes that are changing. That's the easy stuff. Undernea