Mr. Boyden's triumph prompted the now-obligatory standing ovation by the invitation-only black-tie crowd of 500. Earlier in the evening, they'd dined on slow-roasted beef tenderloin and mustard seed spatzle, with bitter-chocolate mousse for dessert. The founder of the feast was Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch, who started the prize in 1994 to honour his late wife, journalist Doris Giller, then in 2005 brought Scotiabank aboard as corporate sponsor.

Among Mr. Rabinovitch's guests last night were former Ontario premiers William Davis and David Peterson, broadcaster Moses Znaimer, former Toronto mayor David Crombie, dancer Rex Harrington, lawyer Clayton Ruby, Indigo Books and Music head Heather Reisman, super-agent Michael Levine and, of course, the three Giller jurors. They read 95 books submitted by more than 35 publishers and released between Oct. 12, 2007, and Sept. 30 this year. A long list of 15 titles was announced in early September.

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.

The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes said a team of historians and researchers found a document written by the SNB, or Czech Communist police, that identified Kundera as the person who informed on a man who was later imprisoned for 14 years. The reclusive Kundera, the author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," lives in Paris. Phone calls to his publisher seeking comment were not immediately returned.

According to the file, published on the institute's Web site, Kundera in 1950 informed on Miroslav Dvoracek, who had been recruited in Germany by the Czech emigre intelligence network to work as a spy against the Communist regime. Dvoracek visited a woman in Prague and left a suitcase in her apartment. She told her boyfriend, who later told Kundera, and Kundera went to the police. Dvoracek was arrested when he came to collect the suitcase. He was later sentenced to 22 years in prison and eventually served 14, working in uranium mines.

*****

Kundera joined the Communist Party as a student, but was expelled after criticizing its totalitarian nature. After the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the liberal reforms of Alexander Dubcek, he left the country. The books Kundera wrote after his departure were banned from publication in his homeland until the Communist collapse in 1989, but his work was respected among dissidents.

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."

Telegraph Media Group has signed writer Alexander McCall Smith to pen a serialised novel exclusively for Telegraph.co.uk. The website will publish the first of 100 successive episodes of his new novel, Corduroy Mansions, on Monday.

In what is believed to be the first project of its kind on a UK website, the serialisation will include simultaneous daily podcast editions, narrated by Andrew Sachs, available to download through iTunes. Edinburgh-based Alexander McCall Smith has published more than 60 books but is most famous for his series of novels that started with The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It achieved global recognition in 1999, selling more than 20m copies and has been translated into 44 languages across the globe.

It was subsequently made into a film produced by the late Anthony Minghella. "Over the last five years I have come to realise how enjoyable it is to write a daily serial novel for a newspaper. I am particularly pleased to be starting a new one for the Telegraph website. Corduroy Mansions will be written as it is published, giving readers the opportunity to influence what happens in the story. I can't wait to begin," said Alexander McCall Smith.

The controversy kicked off when Brand introduced "Twilight" stars Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Cam Gigandet and Robert Pattinson for their much-hyped appearance. Strolling into an aisle to introduce a performance by Paramore in a re-creation of Hollywood's Whisky a Go Go, the actors each took a turn reciting their lines — but before Pattinson could conclude their moment in the sun, Brand cut off the 22-year-old heartthrob.

"This is a confusing concept," the VMA host rambled as Pattinson could only stand there, politely waiting his turn to speak. "It's bloody confusing, but something exciting is about to happen. Paramore are going to perform from the Whisky ..."

As Brand continued to go off the page, Pattinson tried once again to say his line, but all he could get out was a barely heard, "Please welcome ..." Suddenly, his position of honor (being the "Twilight" star to get the final word) had turned into a perceived embarrassment.

"He insulted all 'Twilight' fans," a Twilighter named Sukiyaki posted on MTV.com. "MTV, I hope you have enough space to house all the hate mails about Russell Brand."

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.

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."

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".

[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.

*****

"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.

Born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Van de Wetering moved to Maine in 1975 and enjoyed a passion for Zen Buddhism, motorcycles and jazz, among other things, the Bangor Daily News reported. He died on July 4 of complications from cancer, said Nikki Smith, his longtime literary agent.

Van de Wetering lived in a number of countries including Japan, where he joined a Zen monastery, which he wrote about in his first book, "The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery." Later, Van de Wetering created the popular "Grijpstra and de Gier" series of detective novels, set in Amsterdam, that drew from his experience as a police officer.

In 1984, he was awarded the international Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, a French prize for crime fiction, for his book "The Maine Massacre," a Grijpstra and de Gier mystery set in Maine.

Animal's People author Sinha stopped taking food on June 10, marking the beginning of a global fast intended by campaigners to bring US giant Dow Chemical to court in India to face criminal and civil charges relating to the disaster.

Animal's People author Sinha stopped taking food on June 10, marking the beginning of a global fast intended by campaigners to bring US giant Dow Chemical to court in India to face criminal and civil charges relating to the disaster.

In December 1984, Union Carbide's pesticides factory released a cloud of highly toxic gases over the central Indian city of Bhopal that killed 8,000 people immediately, according to Amnesty International, and injured half a million. Dow took over Union Carbide in 2001, inheriting a legacy that has seen at least another 15,000 deaths and a second health epidemic, resulting from severe contamination at the now abandoned site, that affects another 25,000. Sinha, who lives in France, has joined nine Bhopal campaigners fasting in New Delhi, seven of whom have been severely affected by either gas or water contamination.

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.

A locket containing what is believed to be Jane Austen's hair is expected to reach more than £5,000 at auction. The lock of light-brown hair, which the auctioneers admit may never be confirmed as having come from the novelist's head, forms part of an "in memoriam" locket, in which the strands of hair are woven into the shape of a weeping willow. The hair is also used for the lettering on a decorated gravestone on which the name Jane Austen appears.

Dominic Winter of the Dominic Winter Auction House, near Cirencester, said that "we have shown it to various Austen and decorative object experts including Tom Carpenter, curator at the Jane Austen House, Chawton, in Alton, Hampshire, where we compared it with the only other known lock of Austen's hair. "Their lock is discoloured and the evidence from direct comparison was inconclusive. First-hand accounts of Jane Austen's hair colour vary too, from light to darkish brown.

"We have taken the back off the frame and examined all the materials and in our opinion this could have been made at the time of Jane Austen's death in 1817, or slightly later as the backing paper and frame look closer to mid 19th century as Austen's fame rose. "There is no sign that this was made recently or to deceive, the lucky vendor who spotted it some 20 years ago among some bric-a-brac having no idea of its previous provenance."

Hairwork as a craft became prominent in England from the early 1800s and flourished in the Victorian era, with hair preserved in lockets and brooches, the auctioneer said. It is well documented that Cassandra, Jane Austen's sister, cut off several locks of hair as mementoes before Jane's coffin was finally closed, Dominic Winter Auction House said.

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.

Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favoured classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive. "I am in disbelief," Dylan fan and fellow Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz said of Dylan's award. Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a tragic, but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States, won the fiction prize. Diaz, 39, worked for more than a decade on his first novel - "I spent most of the time on dead-ends and doubts," he told The Associated Press on Monday - and at one point included a section about Dylan.

"Bob Dylan was a problem for me," Diaz, who has also published a story collection, "Drown," said with a laugh. "I had one part that was 40 pages long, the entire chapter was organized around Bob Dylan's lyrics over a two year-period (1967-69). By the end of it, I wanted to throttle my like of Bob Dylan."

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.

A fire on Saturday caused about $20,000 in damage to the home of Tom Clancy, a best-selling author of political thrillers, authorities said. Firefighters were called to Clancy's Calvert County, Maryland, home about 12:15 p.m., said Lt. Fred Holzberger of the Prince-Frederick Volunteer Fire Department.

Clancy and his family were home at the time, but no one was injured, Holzberger said. He said the fire started on the deck and reached the home. The blaze was extinguished in about 20 minutes. The fire is under investigation by the Maryland fire marshal's office

I didn't even know there was a film being made. For years! Not only two or three or four or five -- for almost 20 years. I didn't even know Erik was making a film all those years. I thought Erik was an odd little fanboy, superannuated elf if you will, who would come by periodically and push a camera in my face. I consider that part of the job. When I'm at home, I'm a writer. When I'm out on the road, you do what has to be done. You sit for four hours and sign books or answer silly questions or people want to take a photo and you do it. It's just part of the rigor. When Erik said, about two years ago, "It's about time you know what we're doing here: We're doing this movie," I still couldn't grasp it. And I'm not a slow pony! I get things pretty quickly. I thought, maybe this guy is going to sell it to the Sundance Channel, or it'll be on the History Channel or something.

I don't care much one way or another about it. I'm about as celebrated or as famous as I care to be, but what the hell? Can't do any harm, he seems a nice chap. When I went to look at the first cut, it was as if -- the trope that is most specific, I think, is the scene in "Tom Sawyer" where everybody thinks he and Huck are drowned and he comes back and he goes to the church where they're having the funeral service for him and he's up in the loft listening to all the wonderful things people are saying about him. It's an out-of-body experience. Last night, for instance, in the theater, I sat there and I looked at the movie with no vested interest. I don't look and say, "Gee I had a pimple that day," or "Gee, I wish somebody hadn't said that." I look at it as a movie about this funny, weird old guy. And I think, "That's a funny, weird old guy. I'd love to know him. He's really funny."

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.

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.

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.

Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Shepard's third short story collection, encompasses eleven narratives, each set in a different time and place, including: the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, an outpost in Britannia in the late Roman empire, a Nazi expedition in Tibet, high-school-football-mad contemporary Texas, an 1840 expedition to the center of Australia, ancient Greece at the battle of Marathon, and Paris during the reign of terror that followed the French Revolution. Previous collections have featured similarly diverse settings and characters, meticulously researched and convincingly portrayed.

Three years ago James Patterson, the creator of the blockbuster best-selling Alex Cross and "Women's Murder Club" series, began "Maximum Ride," a series for young adults about a group of genetically mutated kids who are part human, part bird. The idea, he said, was to get children to love reading - or at least to love reading his kind of books. Two of the books in Mr. Patterson's "Maximum Ride" series.

Of the three installments to date, there are about 4.8 million copies in print, according to the publisher, Little, Brown & Company. Despite the kind of numbers that would make most authors beam, Mr. Patterson - who has an estimated 150 million copies of his books in print worldwide, and whose adult novels typically outsell his young-adult titles by two or three to one -- wants to sell more. A lot more. Now, with a new volume, Maximum Ride: The Final Warning, going on sale next month, Mr. Patterson figures the best way to get young readers may be through their mothers.

"The reality is that women buy most books," he said in a telephone interview. "The reality is that it's easier, and a really good habit, to start to get parents when they walk into a bookstore to say, 'You know, I should buy a book for my kid as well.'"

As a result, Little, Brown has asked booksellers to commit to keeping the new Maximum Ride book - along with The Dangerous Days of Daniel X, the first title in a new young-adult series, due out in July -- at the front of their stores as long as Mr. Patterson's adult titles usually stay there, in the hope of luring more adult buyers.

"I've seen cops walk through blood. I've seen them leave their own fingerprints on a window," Cornwell said in an interview Friday. "I've seen bloody clothing put in a plastic bag, instead of a paper bag, so it decomposes."

Her funding will help start the Crime Scene Academy at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, set to open this fall with training in DNA typing, fingerprint enhancement techniques, ballistics and forensic psychology.

The 51-year-old author has written more than a dozen books featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. Her latest is Book of the Dead.

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."

Nearly 150 people had gathered outside the cemetery of Westminster Presbyterian Church, but the man known as the "Poe toaster" was, as usual, able to avoid being spotted by the crowd, said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum. The tribute takes place every Jan. 19 - the anniversary of Poe's birth. The visitor did not leave a note, Jerome said, electing not to respond to questions raised in the past year about the history and authenticity of the tribute.

*****

Jerome invites a handful of Poe enthusiasts to join him inside the church every year but withholds details of the tribute in an effort to help the toaster maintain his anonymity. He said the visitor no longer wears the wide-brimmed hat and scarf he donned in the past. In 1993, the visitor left a note reading, "The torch will be passed." A later note said the man, who apparently died in 1998, had handed the tradition on to his two sons.

This year's visitor was the same man who has come to the grave site many times in the past, Jerome said. "We recognize him from his build, the way he walks," he said. "It would be very easy for us, visually, to see if this were a different person."

Singer George Michael has signed a multimillion-pound deal to pen a "no-holds-barred" autobiography, it has been announced. HarperCollins said former Wham! star Michael, 44, would write the "access-all-areas" autobiography "entirely himself". Publishers said the deal is "one of the biggest ever concluded in UK publishing", but would not divulge figures.

The book, dubbed "one of the hottest remaining untold celebrity memoirs", will cover the pop star's personal and professional life and will hit the shelves in autumn next year. Michael's manager Andy Stephens said: "George has promised HarperCollins a no-holds-barred biography, and it's certain to be just that. "People aren't stupid, they're beginning to notice that the truth is more interesting than the stories the press come up with." Belinda Budge, managing director and publisher of Harper NonFiction UK, said: "This is an incredibly exciting publishing event.

*****

"Most importantly, this really will be a truly authentic book - and an exceptional one, as he's going to be writing it entirely himself."

"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."

Stepping into the front room of the flat Rowling said: "This is really the room where I finished Philosopher's Stone, here. This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat." She explained: "I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I'd made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, Well, I want to write,' and I wrote the book and, What is the worst that can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal. It's really back to the wall time here'."

As she walked around her old home she was amazed to find copies of the Harry Potter books in what had been her bedroom, but is now occupied by new residents. "Oh look, Harry Potter books! Now that is really freaky," she said. Reflecting on her massive fame and fortune Rowling was visibly choked to be back at the place where her journey began, and said she couldn't quite believe how far her life had come in the past 10 years.

"For years now I've felt that if it all disappeared, and some days I do feel like is it real?', then this is where I'd come back to, this would be my baseline, I'd be back in Leith. "And if I'd known that 10 years on I'd come back with a film crew and there'd be my published books on someone else's bookcase in this room it's really incredible to me."

Rowling talked about how she wished she could have known her decision to write the Harry Potter books was going to have such a "fairytale resolution" during the toughest times at the beginning. "Because it's such a well-worn part of my story now, it's a big yawn to hear how I wrote it, as though it was all some kind of publicity stunt for a year, but it was my life and it was very hard and I didn't know that there was going to be this fairytale resolution, and coming back here is just full of ghosts."

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."

*****

"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.

King: I'm afraid of everything. It shows in my work. Elevators. Cars. One of the things ... the thing that started the new book was basically a combination of an accident that I had and a truck that was backing up, and the beeper was broken and somebody said, "Look out!" And a whole big long novel came out of that. But I'm with Frank on this, and that's one of the reasons why I love this movie, because it was a little bit like having somebody scratch a place on the middle of my back that I couldn't reach myself.

I mean, every night when I go to bed and nobody's popped a rogue nuke somewhere in the world, I feel this sort of combination of "I don't believe we escaped for another day," and gratitude because we did escape for another day. Because there's so much of that stuff out there. And I've written a lot of different things about that, from The Stand to The Mist, where you say a lot of people out there, they're afraid, they're angry, because fear and anger go hand in hand. They're the original-sin version of the Bobbsey Twins, you know, fear and anger.

And when they do there's always somebody to say, "Well, we had the answer, we had the only answer," because whatever the religion might happen to be, they're the ones who say, "We have the only answer, so let's get down on our knees and pray about it," and then on your way out there's guns in the vestry.