Book News, In Brief

The lemmings have laptops. From Pantagraph.com: "The Oprah touch doesn’t just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman’s Women & Money were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey’s television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her web site for a period of 33 hours."

Just when it looked like Hollywood was learning to treat its writers with respect, Deborah Gregory, author of the Cheetah Girls book series, has come forward claiming that Disney is denying her profits from the hit TV show that her work inspired. When Gregory signed her contract with the three fingered mouse in 2001, she was promised 4 percent of the net profits. But after 8 years, 3 movies, 3 cds and 3 world tours, Gregory has still only received $125,000 (or roughly the cost of a week's stay at Walt Disney World).

Boston Comic Con has announced some of its lineup for the 2008 festivities, and there's something for everyone...provided that "everyone" only includes the very young and the very old, anyway. Twenty-somethings may not be so stoked. Let's see, for the grey hairs and the serious fanboys, there's Carmine Infantino, co-creator of the Silver Age Flash. For the DDR dancing kidlings and pervy pedophiles, there's Cookie Cutter Girl, the self-described pop singing superhero. For everybody else, there's the faint glimmer of hope that other names will be added by the time B-Comicon puts out its second press release.