There’s a neat topic posted over on Osprey Design’s Foreword blog about using PhotoShop to doctor photos of people. The instance under review is the Katie Couric image that ran in a CBS magazine.

Starting this morning, Google Books is offering downloads of “entire works”, for free. For the past two years Google has been working with university liabraries from California, Michigan, England and a few in between. They have digitized anything and everything. Today, Google posted all of their copies of “public domain” books.

The folks over at the Penguin blog are dropping hints that Viking may start up a new novel … in serial series style. That’d be cool if they can deliver a compelling story to keep you coming back. It’ll be interesting to see what they do and who they get to do it!

Publishers Weekly is reporting a new Penguin’s new campaign to directly sell its titles to customers. According to the article you can buy all their titles at 25% off from their website until Labor Day. But the Penguin site doesn’t reflect this sale yet, that I can find. I wonder how booksellers feel about being [...]

I just read in the Guardian Unlimited that Bill Bryson’s new book The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid (published by Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House) will hit store shelves on September 12th, but Amazon still has it listed as October 17th. The paperback is slated for release in May 2007.

to check out the Book TV schedule for the weekend. And if you have the means, mark your calendar for September 30th in Washington DC. That’s the day of the National Book Festival. So far 70+ authors have committed to appear. That list is here, but no schedule yet, of which ones will be signing. [...]

The Quills list has been released. This book award show is televised and sponsored/supported by all the major media conglomerates. Basically everybody gets to vote on their favorite books and the books with the most votes wins. You can vote for your faves here. The polls close on September 30th. The site also shows videos [...]

Like many in Birmingham I went to the Joshilyn Jackson signing Between, Georgia, at the Alabama Booksmith, back in July. This was about three weeks before Jackson was ARRESTED on August 10th!!! Was Jackson a criminal mastermind? Was Jackson really a raving madperson posing as a sunday school teaching soccer mom that writes books on [...]

There’s a new online tool for tracking down authors similar to those near and dear to your heart. Just type in your fave scribe into the The Literature Map and it will form a breathing author cloud around that person. By measuring proximity, you can judge who this program things you’ll enjoy most. Thanks to [...]

Apparently, some big name authors are tossing in soundtracks with their books now?!?!? Somehow I’ve missed this trend, but GalleyCat pulls it all together from WSJ articles and blogs. Folks like James Patterson, Michael Connelly,Lemony Snicket and Bret Easton Ellis are tossing in the tunes with their books. Most of the cd’s are just collections [...]