"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books. The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit to burn them. Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply - estimated at 20,000 books - is exhausted.

"After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we've slogged through and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction," he said. "And it's a good excuse for fun." Wayne said he has seen fewer customers in recent years as people more often get their information from television or the Internet. He pointed to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, that found that less than half of adult respondents reported reading for pleasure, down from almost 57 percent in 1982.

*****

Dozens of customers took advantage of the Sunday's book-burning, searching through those waiting to go into the fire for last-minute bargains. Mike Bechtel paid $10 for a stack of books, including an antique collection of children's literature, which he said he'd save for his 4-year-old son. "I think given the fact it is a protest of people not reading books, it's the best way to do it," Bechtel said. "(Wayne has) made the point that not reading a book is as good as burning it."

Yesterday, Rosie's chief writer, Janette Barber, was allegedly escorted from the building after she was caught drawing moustaches on photographs of Hasselbeck that hang in the "View" studios. The Post's Adam Buckman reports ABC confirmed in a statement only that "photographs at 'The View's' offices were defaced. Rosie O'Donnell was not in the building. ABC Legal and Human Resources are investigating the matter." Barber is an old friend of O'Donnell who worked with her years ago on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show."

There were also rumors O'Donnell was so angry after her argument with Hasselbeck that she trashed her dressing room, although ABC denied the tantrum. Meanwhile, "The View" went on yesterday without O'Donnell, who was taking a previously planned day off to celebrate partner Kelli Carpenter's 40th birthday.

Hasselbeck - who had tangled with O'Donnell before about President Bush's handling of the Iraq war - was on the show with Joy Behar, Barbara Walters and guest host Kathy Griffin. The four discussed the blowup only briefly before switching topics. As for O'Donnell, she's been posting comments on her personal Web site, rosie.com, fueling speculation she might not return to "The View" ever again. Her scheduled last day is Wednesday, June 20. When one fan wrote, "Work isn't worth that battle," Rosie replied, "Agreed." Another wrote, "Please walk away. It's not worth it." Rosie replied, "Well, you know when it's time to go."

Simon & Schuster is irked that we went public with our information about their unannounced new contract language. They've sent a release (you can read it below) accusing us of "perpetrat[ing] serious misinformation."

That's a heavy charge, so we went back and double-checked. We stand by every word of our statement.

Simon & Schuster's release pretends that the argument concerns "print on demand." That isn't the issue. We like print on demand: we encourage publishers to sell books in every permissible way. You wouldn't know it from reading its release, but Simon & Schuster already has the rights - as they have for years in their standard contract - to take advantage of print on demand and e-book technologies.

The issue is what happens when a book goes out of print, when the publisher is no longer selling it in meaningful numbers. Traditionally, rights then revert at the request of the author, who often is able to give the book a new life elsewhere. Simon & Schuster is trying to change the rules of the industry so that they never have to admit that a book is out of print.

We meant what we said in our press release and our alert to members:

1. Simon & Schuster's new contract would indeed allow it to retain exclusive rights to a book even if it were no longer in print. Simon & Schuster's contract says, "The Work shall not be deemed out of print as long as it is available in any U.S. trade edition, including electronic editions." Having a book available for sale in some database - without the obligation to sell a single copy - is not keeping a book "in print" as common sense and the industry have defined that term.

2. Simon & Schuster would, under its new contract, be empowered to exclusively control your rights even if your books aren't available for sale through traditional bookstores. E-book availability (read any good e-books lately?) would be enough to fulfill Simon & Schuster's contractual commitments under its interpretation of "in print." Roy Blount is plainly right, this contract would allow Simon & Schuster to squirrel away rights.

3. Simon & Schuster's press release avowals about its promotional efforts as it pursues "incremental income" for backlist titles are not legally binding. Simon & Schuster goes on at some length about efforts to market backlist titles including "regularly review[ing] inventory opportunities with all our accounts" and engaging in the "distribution of online assets (cover, bios, synopses, chapters) and data feeds about basic information" on backlist titles to retailers. Whatever the merit of these efforts, Simon & Schuster carefully avoids committing to them on behalf of authors with books relegated to the backlist.

4. Simon & Schuster's efforts to alter the true core deal of a trade book contract - that a publisher controls the right to sell an author's book only so long as the publisher effectively exploits that right - demanded exposure. Agents reported to us that Simon & Schuster had slipped the change into its contracts without alerting agents to the alteration, which was quite subtle and easily missed. Agents also reported that when they discovered the change and questioned the publisher about it, Simon & Schuster played hardball, saying the clause was non-negotiable and wouldn't be discussed. In its release, Simon & Schuster seems miffed that we didn't discuss their new contractual language with them before exposing it to sunlight. Engaging in discussions with a conglomerate playing hardball while authors may have been unwittingly signing rights away would, in our view, have been irresponsible.

About 1,700 lucky fans in Britain and Ireland will win a chance to have Rowling sign a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The event will take place at the Natural History Museum on July 21, the day the book is released.

The first 500 randomly selected winners will also be invited to attend the midnight reading. Timed tickets will be issued for the subsequent book signing, which is expected to last until dawn. All the winners will receive a free copy of the book.

Seven U.S. residents can enter to win round-trip tickets to London and hotel accommodations to participate in the reading. Entries to the free contest are available online at the Web sites of publishing houses Scholastic Inc. and Bloomsbury, who are sponsoring the event.

Cornwell wants the court to enforce an injunction issued in 2000 against Leslie R. Sachs and seeks a broader ban to prevent Sachs from further writing negatively about Cornwell on Web sites or allowing such statements to remain on those sites. She also seeks unspecified financial compensation for defamatory postings since Aug. 14, 2000.

In an e-mail response to Cornwell's attorneys, Sachs called the lawsuit "hilarious." Sachs, whose last known U.S. residence is listed in court documents as Woodbridge, Va., called himself a "political refugee" who moved to Europe in 2004 to escape Cornwell's legal actions. A hearing in the case is scheduled for May 22 in U.S. District Court in Richmond. The injunction in 2000 stemmed from Sachs' book, "The Virginia Ghost Murders," a mystery published in 1998 about a modern-day sleuth who becomes involved in solving a Civil War-era murder. Claiming that Cornwell was about to publish a novel ripping off the plotline from his book, Sachs placed on the cover of his book: "The MUST-READ gothic mystery that preceded PATRICIA CORNWELL'S newest best-seller!"

Cornwell's complaint, filed in late April, claims that Sachs refused several requests to remove the Cornwell reference on his book and to stop making such statements about Cornwell, a former Richmond resident who now lives in Massachusetts. Sachs also published claims on two Web sites that the plot of Cornwell's 2000 book, "The Last Precinct," mimics that of his book, and put stickers on about 350 copies of "The Virginia Ghost Murders" claiming that Cornwell threatened to destroy his book. "The Last Precinct" involves Virginia's fictional medical examiner Kay Scarpetta being tapped to solve the violent slaying of one of America's first settlers at Jamestown in the 1600s.

The Authors Guild has recently perpetrated serious misinformation regarding Simon & Schuster, our author contracts and our commitment to making our authors' books available for sale. Unfortunately, these distortions were released by the Authors Guild without their having undertaken any effort to have a dialogue with Simon & Schuster on this topic.

In recent years, Simon & Schuster has accepted, at the request of some agencies, contract language that specifies a minimum level of activity for print on demand titles. Our experience with the current high quality and accessibility of print on demand titles indicates to us that such minimums are no longer necessary. Our position on reversions for active titles remains unchanged. As always, we are willing to have an open and forthright dialogue on this or any other topic.

When considering this issue, we ask you to please keep in mind these important points:

Through print on demand technology, publishers now have the ability, for the first time in history, to actually fulfill the promise which is at the core of their contracts with authors - to keep the author's book available for sale over the term of the license.

We view this progress as a great opportunity to maximize the sales potential for slow moving titles, and some of the best news for authors and publishers in a long time. The potential benefit for all concerned in incremental income for the publishing partnership far outweighs any imaginary negatives purported by the Authors Guild.

We and others are investing heavily in digitization so that authors and publishers can reap the maximum benefit of publication over the long term. New technologies including print on demand will extend the life of a book far beyond what has been possible in the past.

Contrary to the Authors Guild assertion, using technologies like print on demand is not about "squirreling away" rights, nor does it mean that "no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores." Print on demand is simply a means of manufacturing a book, making it widely available to retailers and consumers.

Kelly Clarkson was staggered when a sexist music executive let her know he wasn't a fan of women writing songs. The singer, who recently won an ASCAP award for penning the Song of The Year "Because of You," reveals some executives still refuse to take her seriously as a songwriter.

And one recent conference call made her realize just how hard it is to break through and become respected.

She tells Entertainment Weekly magazine, "Everybody doesn't like me writing all the time, no matter how many number ones you write. It's clearly like yelling at a brick wall. It's because I'm a woman... a young woman. I literally heard somebody say it. They didn't know I was on the phone... I hung up. I was like, 'I can't even address that... That was the most ignorant thing I've ever heard."

The Authors Guild is warning members about a new rights provision in Simon & Schuster contracts and urging them to consider not signing with the publisher.

In an an alert sent to its membership today, executive director Paul Aiken writes that S&S's new contract language gives the publisher the ability to retain rights to a book for the entire length of copyright, even if the book is not in print but remains in S&S's electronic database. Under its old contracts, rights to a book would revert back to the author if sales reached an agreed upon low level or the book was declared out of print. "This is an electronic warehousing of rights," Aiken said.

According to the Guild, under the new contract S&S considers a book to be in print, and under its control, so long as it's available in any form, even if no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores. With the new contract language, the Guild asserts, the publisher would be able to stop printing a book and prevent the author from publishing it with any other house. Aiken said the change was first brought to the Guild's attention about a week ago and discussions with authors and agents have confirmed that the new provision is now part of the standard S&S contract.

TV networks, which are in the midst of planning fall schedules, also might pack their lineups with more reality shows and other unscripted fare as protection against a possible strike. "It's simply sound business," said J. Nicholas Counter, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the studios.

"Based upon the public statements of the Writers Guild, it's quite clear these are going to be very contentious negotiations," he said. "Their statements are bellicose, so we've got to prepare for the worst." Among the shows accelerating production is NBC's "Las Vegas," which started three months earlier than usual with the aim of finishing 18 to 24 episodes before the fall. Normally, the show would have only about seven or eight episodes filmed. "In essence, it makes us strike proof," said Gary Scott Thompson, the show's writer and executive producer and a veteran of the last writer's strike in 1988. Another NBC show, "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" began shooting two months early.

The three-year pact between studios and the Writers Guild of America expires Oct. 31 and talks are scheduled to begin in July. That gives both sides little time to resolve complex issues involving how much TV and film writers should be paid when their work is distributed on new media platforms, including the Internet, cell phones, digital media players and other devices. The writers argue the payments -- modeled after the structures used for DVD rights -- are too low.

Older battles also remain to be resolved, including the revision of a decades-old formula for compensating writers for work that appears on DVD. "There's no question in my mind this is not simply about emerging technology, but the perception that the guilds pretty much got screwed in previous negotiations in what were then emerging technologies," TV writer and producer Steven Bochco said.

IT'S time for a truce. When members of the National Book Critics Circle recently picketed the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — protesting the elimination of its book review editor — a war of words broke out between book reviewers and literary bloggers.

The quarrel, which got surprisingly nasty, spilled into newspapers, magazines and blogs, amid concerns over recent cutbacks at other big-city newspaper book reviews, including the Los Angeles Times. The boom in books-related blogging, it seemed, was a slap in the face to more seasoned literary voices as they watched their own outlets shrink.

A couple of weeks ago (April 28th, if you want to go and search the archive) the Potter fansite The Leaky Cauldron posted an editorial on potential spoilers for "Deathly Hallows". It made me laugh, but I was also incredibly moved and grateful.

We're a little under three months away, now, and the first distant rumblings of the weirdness that usually precedes a Harry Potter publication can be heard on the horizon. The Leaky Cauldron's early mission statement on spoilers (ie, don't, and we're not putting them up if you do) is deeply appreciated by yours truly.

I add my own plea to Melissa's for one reason, and one only: I want the readers who have, in many instances, grown up with Harry, to embark on the last adventure they will share with him without knowing where they are they going.

Some, perhaps, will read this and take the view that all publicity is good publicity, that spoilers are part of hype, and that I am trying to protect sales rather than my readership. However, spoilers won't stop people buying the book, they never have - all it will do is diminish their pleasure in the book.

There will always be sad individuals who get their kicks from ruining other people's fun, but while sites like Leaky take such an active stance against them, we may yet win. Even if the biggest secret gets out - even if somebody discovers the Giant Squid is actually the world's largest Animagus, which rises from the lake at the eleventh hour, transforms into Godric Gryffindor and... well, I wouldn't like to spoil it.

Most in the industry seem to see consumer taste as a mystery that is inevitable and even appealing, akin to the uncontrollable highs and lows of falling in love or gambling. Publishing employees tend to be liberal arts graduates who enter the field with a starting salary around $30,000. Compensation is not tied to sales performance. "The people who go into it don't do it for the money, which might explain why it's such a bad business," Mr. Strachan said.

Eric Simonoff, a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, said that whenever he discusses the book industry with people in other industries, "they're stunned because it's so unpredictable, because the profit margins are so small, the cycles are so incredibly long, and because of the almost total lack of market research."

Publishers do engage in limited numbers crunching. In estimating value, editors rely heavily on an author's previous sales or on sales of similar titles. Based on those figures and some analysis - about the popularity of the genre, the likely audience, the possible newsworthiness of the topic of the economy - they work up profit and loss projections.

*****

"It's the way this business has run since 1640," he says. That is when 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were published in the colonies. "It was a gamble, and they guessed right because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot," Professor Greco said. There is a "business model" that supports this risk-taking. As Mr. Strachan puts it, "Lightning does strike."

And so it must. To make money, the industry depends on perennial sellers and on best sellers. It's not so much the almost sure-fire best sellers by the well-known authors, because those cost so much to acquire and market, but the surprise best sellers. Those include books like Prep, The Nanny Diaries (bought for $25,000, it sold more than four million copies), Marley and Me (bought for $200,000, sold 2.5 million copies) and The Secret (bought for less than $250,000, sold 5.25 million copies in less than six months).

"They're the ones we all hope and pray happen to us one day," says Judith Curr, the publisher of Atria Books, which printed The Secret, a self-help book that explains "the law of attraction."

"Stray Shopping Carts" received a third of the more than 5,500 votes cast by members of the public on the website of trade magazine The Bookseller. "It's a sort of strange honour to have," Montague said. "But I welcome the publicity and it's nice that people are finding out my book exists."

*****

Runner-up for the prize was "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan," by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom).

The other finalists were Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry: an Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans, by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters); Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium (Kluwer); and Better Never To Have Been: the Harm of Coming Into Existence, by David Benatar (Clarendon Press).

Past winners of the 29-year-old prize include People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It and How To Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art.

At the chain stores, Barnes & Noble and Border's, and at Amazon.com, Harry Potter 7 is the largest pre-ordered book in history. Ever since Goblet of Fire, fourth in the series, was launched at midnight July 8, 2000, booksellers have orchestrated increasingly elaborate book parties.

For Cammie Mannino of Halfway Down the Stairs Children's Book Shop in Rochester, Mich., Potter 7 is a mixed blessing: "Getting children to read is the most divine thing you can come up with. Then there's me as a bookseller — phew, here we go again. It's both of those."

Danielle Marshall of Powell's, an independent bookstore in Portland, Ore., says: "I can't tell whether I'm relieved or devastated, and that's on a personal and a sales level." There are "any number of publishers who are ready and waiting to fill the void left by Harry Potter," says Marshall. "If I had a nickel for every book that has been marketed to me as 'this will fill the bill,' I would be drinking in St. Tropez."

Of course, this isn't really the end of Harry Potter. Says Barnes & Noble's Riggio: "We don't look at this as saying goodbye. As each new generation comes of age, it will discover these books. And the great thing about that is, all seven books will be in front of them."

The "2007 Hollywood Writers Report -- Whose Stories Are We Telling?" was written by Darnell Hunt, director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and professor of sociology at UCLA. Hunt was the author involved in a similar WGAW-commissioned report in 2005 and also participated in a study of TV employment released by SAG in 2000.

Based on analysis of minority- and gender-based data, the latest WGA report encompasses employment and earning trends through 2005. Minority writers made scant progress in any sector in the study period.

"More than 30% of the American population is non-white, yet writers of color continue to account for less than 10% of employed television writers," Hunt noted in an executive summary of the report. "These numbers will likely get worse before they get better because of the recent merger of UPN and the WB into the new CW Network, which resulted in the cancellation of several minority-themed situation comedies that employed a disproportionate share of minority television writers.

"The situation is grimmer in film," he added, " where the minority share of employment has been stuck at 6% for years." The report also documented an earnings disparity for minority writers in television that widened by more than $6,000 between 2004 and 2005. The overall median earnings for minority TV writers in 2005 was $78,107, compared to $97,956 for white writers.

Unlike most authors, Ms. Fogarty owns a mixing board for recording her podcasts, which allowed her to gin up a quickie audio version of the book she plans to write. The effort was spearheaded by Mary Beth Roche, publisher of Audio Renaissance, the audiobook division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, which also publishes Henry Holt.

About 100,000 people a week download her free podcasts, which consist of five minutes of grammar tips, from grammar.qdnow.com and iTunes. She produces them on about $600 worth of equipment in her home in Gilbert, Ariz., she said. (When the phone or doorbell rings, or the central air-conditioner kicks on, she stops and re-records.)

"I was working on the book on the airplane on the way home" from Chicago after recording the Oprah segment, Ms. Fogarty said. That was March 21, a Wednesday. By that Friday, she had finished the recording, and it was sent electronically to Audible.com, which provides audiobooks through Apple’s iTunes and on its own Web site.

On March 26, the day the show was broadcast, iTunes' home page highlighted "Grammar Girl's Quick & Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing," an hourlong audiobook that could be downloaded for $4.95. By the end of that week, Ms. Fogarty's presentation had bumped The Secret, the advice book that espouses positive thinking which also had been promoted by Ms. Winfrey, from the top spot.

George Lucas, who is producing the upcoming fourth Indiana Jones film, confirmed to the Reuters news service that the story will feature Sean Connery's character of Henry Jones, but that the Scottish actor had yet to sign on. In a brief interview at the San Francisco International Film Society on May 3, Lucas said: "We have a script with him in it. If he doesn't do it, we'll do a quick rewrite."

Connery played Indy's dad in the third and last Indy film, 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, even though Connery, at 76, is in reality only 12 years older than star Harrison Ford. The San Francisco Film Society honored Star Wars creator Lucas with an award on May 3 to mark the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Reuters reported. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Star Wars.

His The Book of Chameleons, translated by Daniel Hahn, was awarded the £10,000 prize for its "witty originality and profound humanity". The book, which is set in contemporary Angola, tackles the subject of memory, and the shifting nature of truth, through the medium of an unusual narrator - a lizard. The translation, which was praised by the judges as "captivating", retains the poetic cadences of the Portuguese original.

Boyd Tonkin, the literary editor of the Independent, and one of the judges, described the book as "a delightful, moving and revealing novel about modern Africa, about memory, grief and the endurance of hope." José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola and now splits his time between Lisbon and Luanda, is the author of six novels as well as a couple of volumes of investigative reporting. The first African to win the prize, he beat a strong field; the shortlist included The Story of Blanche and Marie by Per Olov Enquist, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream by Javier Marías and Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad.

The annual award, which was revived in 2001 after running from 1990-95, celebrates English translations. The £10,000 prize money is shared between authors and their translators. Previous winners include WG Sebald, Orhan Paumuk and the translator Anne Born.

The guild's failure to distribute such a big stockpile of cash has raised hackles in Hollywood, turning what might have been an arcane accounting matter into an embarrassing and potentially costly dispute for the union, which is just about to enter crucial contract negotiations with producers.

"They have an account with a bunch of money in it that belongs to their members - and not them - and they've made no attempt to distribute it," said Jon Brown, a partner in Ensemble Entertainment, a literary management firm, who represents the estates of several writers.

Guild officials, who say they dispense millions in so-called foreign levies each year to authors who wouldn't otherwise be able to collect them, dismiss as "ridiculous" allegations that they are deliberately withholding the money. The officials do acknowledge some problems with foreign levies, though not in how they're distributed. The guild is turning over to prosecutors this week the results of an internal investigation that found that about $17,000 was missing from a foreign levies account.

When it comes to dispensing the foreign levies, guild officials say, it can be tricky to identify the people entitled to the money that comes in from overseas. Sometimes the entities that send the money to the guild don't provide enough information, the union says. Show titles often are listed in a foreign language, or the translation doesn't match the English title. "Do we wish we didn't have $20 million on hand? Sure. We wish it were a lot easier to distribute," said Tony Segall, general counsel for the Writers Guild of America, West. "We've done nothing but work at getting this money out."

Plaintiffs in a lawsuit disagree. Filed in state court in Los Angeles in 2005, the suit alleges that the union is improperly holding on to money that belongs to writers and heirs who aren't union members. The suit says that the money is owed to at least 1,000 individuals or estates. A similar complaint was filed against the Directors Guild of America.