Book News, In Brief

Airbrush artists fear unemployment as fake breasts drop on Wall Street.
Take it away, Yahoo: Adult entertainment publisher Playboy Enterprises Inc posted a quarterly loss on Tuesday because of weaker publishing and domestic television revenue and forecast more trouble during the year, pushing its shares down 8 percent. The worse-than-expected results illustrate the trouble that Playboy and other publishers and television companies face as more people get their entertainment online, and often for free.

Rowling loves lawsuits. Not content with slapping gag orders on the would-be lexicon writers of the world, everyone's favorite struggling-mom-turned-billionaire has aimed her litigious broomstick at the already put upon paparazzi.
The lowdown, via FT.com: Newspapers face tight restrictions on publishing photographs of celebrities’ children after a privacy law ruling involving JK Rowling, the author of the best-selling Harry Potter series. The Court of Appeal said that pictures of Ms Rowling’s son, David, taken with a long-range camera while the family was out walking in Edinburgh might have infringed his human rights...The decision brings the UK closer into line with the European Court of Human Rights, which took an expansive view of privacy rights in a 2004 decision involving Princess Caroline of Monaco. In that case, the court appeared to bar media outlets from publishing pictures of celebrities and their children engaging in everyday family activities.
(Editor's note: She does look foxy in that picture, doesn't she?)

The airport is either the worst place or the best place to pick out a book. You either have three minutes, or you have five hours because your flight just got delayed.
With this in mind, Cleveland.com investigates the "thought process" that goes into designing the book covers for "airport books."
"When it comes to designing our product packaging, much of the decisionmaking is based on instinct or gut feeling, not on proven consumer testing or scientific method," says David Gray, founder of Gray & Co., the Cleveland publishing house. Imagery, font styles, type size and color palette conspire to telegraph whether the stuff inside is concerned with code-crackers and shoe phones, spirits and trapdoors or rich widows and pool boys.
Chip Kidd must be hemorrhaging.

Last year, Microsoft reaffirmed its support for DAISY, the "talking book" standard developed for the visually impaired. Now that the program has been unleashed as shareware, Microsoft is hoping that DAISY becomes the new go-to on-the-go way to read hear your emails. And from there? Well, it doesn't take a TED member to see this technology being used to read hear magazines, newspapers, and (gasp!) books in the near future. For more details on the tech specs, and the link to the free DAISY download, click here.