Book News, In Brief

Everybody knows that having a prominent politician name drop your book will give sales a boost. But what happens when an aw-shucks Alaskan VP candidate attempts to ban your book? The online auction asking price skyrockets to $500+!

Hmn...I wonder what Palin's gonna think of Bible Illuminated: The Book. It's a Swedish repackaging of the so-called 'Good Book' which pairs "intense photo essays" -- including shots Martin Luther King Jr. and Angelina Jolie -- with passages from the New Testament. In Sweden, where Bible sales average 60K per year, Bible Illuminated has already sold 30K. A US release is due later this month.

The folks on the Nobel literature jury suspect that the name of this year's pick -- Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio -- was leaked early. Why? The surprising number of online bettors who picked Le Clezio to win. For those of you us who have never heard of J.M.G.L.C., click here for his Wikipedia entry. For those of us you who didn't know you could bet on the Nobel prizewinners, click here.

Two brothers created two online bookstores. One bookstore was a "wide site," featuring links that kept browsers close to the homepage. The other bookstore was a "deep site," which allowed browsers to navigate through countless links, bringing them further and further away from the homepage. The point of this? To find out if the ol' 'hunter/gatherer' stereotypes about men and women proved true on the internet. To read the results, both men and women may click here.