Publishers and agents representing the authors J. K. Rowling and Ken Follett were battling last night to get free copies of their novels removed from a Californian website that claims to be the most popular literary site in the world.

Scribd.com attracts 55 million visitors a month...(read on)

It's been incubating for 25 years but Stephen King is finally ready to show the world the 1,000-plus page epic he first attempted writing in the 1980s. Under the Dome, in which an invisible force field seals off a Maine town from the world, is due to be published this November, his publishers have said.

HARDCOVER FICTION
Top 5 at a Glance
1. TRUE DETECTIVES, by Jonathan Kellerman
2. HANDLE WITH CARE, by Jodi Picoult
3. OUTCAST, by Aaron Allston
4. THE ASSOCIATE, by John Grisham
5. THE HOST, by Stephenie Meyer

Top 5 at a Glance
1. LIBERTY AND TYRANNY, by Mark R. Levin
2. OUTLIERS, by Malcolm Gladwell
3. HOUSE OF CARDS, by William D. Cohan
4. A LION CALLED CHRISTIAN, by Anthony Bourke and John Rendall
5. THE YANKEE YEARS, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci

Two new works from Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, who died last year, have been discovered on the writer's computer and are to be released over the next year-and-a-half, his publisher HarperCollins has said.

He outsells JK Rowling, John Grisham and Dan Brown put together. He's topped the New York Times bestseller list 35 times, and has so many books coming out in the next few months he's lost count. So how does he do it? James Patterson reveals his secret to Gaby Wood

"Online retailer blames reduced profiles of Winterson, Hollinghurst, Vidal and others on glitch in new family-friendly charts"

An Excerpt:The internet retailer Amazon has found itself at the centre of a censorship row after it decided to remove a number of so-called adult books from its online charts.

Over the weekend, thousands of books have lost their sales rank – the number that Amazon uses to show how well one title sells compared with another – as the company apparently seeks to make its bestseller lists more family friendly.

But thousands of users have voiced concern after the seemingly random application of the new rules not only affected a number of high-profile authors, including Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson, but also led to thousands of gay and lesbian titles being stripped of their sales rank, regardless of their sexual content.

Stephen King, well-known author, is reported by the UK Guardian website( URL) to have completed a novel 25 years in the making.
Excerpt from the article:
It's been incubating for 25 years but Stephen King is finally ready to show the world the 1,000-plus page epic he first attempted writing in the 1980s. Under the Dome, in which an invisible force field seals off a Maine town from the world, is due to be published this November, his publishers have said.

Stephen King is an acclaimed author known around the world for his talanted, and suspenseful, novels which have excited readers for years.

Guardian book club: Sebastian Barry
John Mullan talks to the author about his Costa prize-winning novel The Secret Scripture

Ms. Krug led the campaign by libraries against efforts to ban books, then fought laws and regulations to limit children's access to the Internet.

Ebooks battle for next chapter
The clear message from this week's London Book Fair was that UK publishing and retailing are finally ready to embrace the ebook. But don't dump your bookshelves yet. Before the ebook can really challenge its paper equivalent, the industry has to avert a format war a whole lot more complicated than VHS v Betamax.

"A format war could hold back the development of the ebook market," says Simon Juden, chief executive of the Publishers Association. That's bad news for the book industry, and frustrating for readers waiting to join the ebook revolution.

Top 5 at a Glance
1. FIRST FAMILY, by David Baldacci
2. TEA TIME FOR THE TRADITIONALLY BUILT, by Alexander McCall Smith
3. LOITERING WITH INTENT, by Stuart Woods
4. JUST TAKE MY HEART, by Mary Higgins Clark
5. THE PERFECT POISON, by Amanda Quick

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

Top 5 at a Glance
1. LIBERTY AND TYRANNY, by Mark R. Levin
2. OUTLIERS, by Malcolm Gladwell
3. COLUMBINE, by Dave Cullen
4. ALWAYS LOOKING UP, by Michael J. Fox
5. THE GIRLS FROM AMES, by Jeffrey Zaslow

PAPERBACK TRADE FICTION

Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE SHACK, by William P. Young
2. 7TH HEAVEN, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
3. CITY OF THIEVES, by David Benioff
4. UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, by Jhumpa Lahiri
5. ANGELS AND DEMONS, by Dan Brown

Who needs reference books in the age of the internet? Nothing compares to whiling away the hours between hard covers, argues Jeremy Paxman, who has trawled second-hand bookshops to build up his collection

NEW YORK – The Obama book bump has struck again.

President Obama told The New York Times during a recent interview that he has been reading Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland," a highly praised novel about cricket, marriage and living in a post 9/11 world.

The device, called the Kindle DX (for deluxe), has a screen two and a half times the size of those on the two older versions of the Kindle, which were aimed primarily at displaying book pages. The price tag is larger, too: the DX costs $489, or $130 more than the previous model, the Kindle 2. It will go on sale this summer.

The writer Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Britain's poet laureate on Friday, becoming the first woman to take a 341-year-old job that has been held by, among others, Dryden, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Cecil Day-Lewis and Ted Hughes.

5. THE PERFECT POISON, by Amanda Quick

I seriously thought that said "The Perfect Polson" and my first thought was, "I don't remember doing an interview."