The former lawyer, whose best sellers include "The Firm" and "A Time To Kill", had previously held off selling his books electronically, expressing concern that e-books would wipe out traditional book stores and make it harder for new writers to succeed.

But beginning Tuesday, all Grisham's fiction and non-fiction books will be available through e-book retailers, publisher Random House said.

While he predicted there will be fewer bookstores in the future, he said bookstores will never go away, agreeing with "interviewer" David Young of Hachette Book Group that bookstores are where bestsellers are made, particularly for books that are put in the front of the store.

Topics falling into the Life & Style line will range widely, including everything from cooking to beauty & fashion to home design to fitness and parenting. Currently slated titles include Food Network star Claire Robinson's 5 Ingredient Fix and Good Morning America pet care expert Dr. Marty Becker's Your Dog: The Owner's Manual.

In early November, Borders (BGP) announced that it would close 200 of its 330 Waldenbooks stores by early January, cutting 1,500 jobs in the process. But with the new year approaching fast, the bookstore chain is changing its tune ever so slightly, and now plans to spare about 20 stores originally slated for the chopping block.

In Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, Palmer Park Mall manager Beth Samuelson told The Express-Times that store employees removed closing signs last week, and on Monday, corporate offices verified the decision to keep the store open. "It was a total surprise. All the signs saying: 'Store closing: Everything must go' all came down."

Christie's, which is auctioning a stained and frayed copy in New York, said the book could set a record price for American literature. Poe wrote the poems, inspired by the work of Byron, as he tried to launch his literary career after moving from his childhood home in Virginia to Boston, the city of his birth. He had at the time been trying to distance himself from his foster father, John Allan, in Richmond, Virginia, with whom he had a difficult relationship.

The book was published in complete obscurity, paid for entirely by the author and printed by a man who normally produced flyers and labels. When he later re-published the poems under his own name, Poe apologised for their quality and said they had never been intended for publication. A copy of the original book did not surface until more than 25 years after it was published, prompting some poetry experts at the time to claim it had never existed.

Sales of this year's top 10 non-fiction books in October were down 52% year on year, while sales of hardback fiction titles have soared by 90%. Figures for the most recent week to 31st October showed non-fiction continuing to underperform. Only Guinness World Records and Delia Smith's Delia's Happy Christmas (Ebury) sold more than 10,000 copies last week. Last year 10 hardback non-fiction titles passed this threshold during the same period.

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Cookery titles have in the past been a Christmas staple, with celebrity chefs whipping up high sales. However, sales of Jamie's America (Michael Joseph) have been well behind Jamie's Ministry of Food (Michael Joseph) from last year. Sally Hughes of Books for Cooks said: "Jamie did well when he was on TV but has fallen off quickly. River Cafe is not moving as well as we thought it might—it is selling but it seems a bit slow." However, retailers hailed the success of Guinness World Records, which knocked Dan Brown off this week’s top spot with sales of 31,812.

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In spite of non-fiction's woes, sales of fiction are thriving in early autumn. Hardback fiction was up almost double (90.2%) in October year on year. Books by Dan Brown, Martina Cole and Terry Pratchett have been enjoying healthy sales figures despite the recession. Rachel Russell, business unit director for books at W H Smith, said: "Fiction is doing very well and seems to be muscling into the non-­fiction market. I expect gifting to come later in non-fiction because Christmas falls on a Friday."

"The absence made me nearly speechless." said poet and creative writing professor Cate Marvin, co-founder of new US literary organisation Women in Letters and Literary Arts (WILLA). WILLA has gathered more than 5,500 members since it launched in August with the aim of bringing "increased attention to women's literary accomplishments and [questioning] the American literary establishment's historical slow-footedness in recognising and rewarding women writers' achievements".

The group pointed to new books published this year by Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh and Alicia Ostriker. "It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture," said Marvin.

Announcing the list, novelist and journalist Louisa Ermelino said that PW "wanted [it] to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration". "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the 'big' books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet," she said, adding that "it disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male".

Poet Erin Belieu, WILLA's other co-founder and director of the creative writing programme at Florida State University, said that "when PW's editors tell us they're not worried about 'political correctness', that's code for 'your concerns as a feminist aren't legitimate'". "They know they're being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that," said Belieu. "I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people -- writers and readers -- who don't feel good about it at all."

"It's an ensemble comedy with a female lead set in the publishing world, but it's really about the characters and their relationships," Lerner said. "Books" was based on an idea Lerner had been developing in the back of her mind for years. It is inspired by the time she spent as a temp in the publishing world at the beginning of her career and by the experiences of her sister Betsy, who worked as a book editor for 15 years before becoming a literary agent.

"I like the frustrations, the collaborative process," Lerner said of publishing. "Publishing is a lot like sitcoms. Although both are supposedly dying, that only makes people more passionate about creating the next great novel or show." Lerner said she knew she had to write the project on spec because "there were too many elements that weren't very development-friendly."

TUAW has learned that Apple has begun rejecting all e-book submissions because "this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing upon third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store." At first glance, this policy seems in line with Apple's approach to applications that promise charitable contributions. Apple cannot police the developers and will not allow possibly fraudulent postings on their store. Apple does not want to be in the position of vetting rights claims.

At the same time, Apple has been rejecting applications from content providers who do in fact own the rights to their materials and can prove those rights. A colleague who spoke on the condition of anonymity related that a project he developed for a national content syndicate was rejected without recourse. He still got paid for his work but the application languishes without an outlet.

Apple isn't stopping with content source providers. They're also targeting those who provide media browsing tools. Another developer who built an e-book reader received a recent rejection along the same lines. The application might be used to read copyright infringing books, so Apple will not let it in App Store. In an e-mail, he wrote, "Leaving aside the presumption of innocence, [what] about iTunes and iPod; shouldn't they be banned too? After all many users indeed are using them to listen to the music that is not always legally obtained."

That was big news in Berwick, an old manufacturing city of 10,000 residents about 150 kilometres northwest of Philadelphia, where Franklin, using the pseudonym Richard Saunders, printed thousands of copies of his almanac between 1733 and 1760, dispensing advice and aphorisms along with "lunations, eclipses, judgment of the weather" and other data relevant to the 40-degree latitude "from Newfoundland to South Carolina."

The celebration for historical society members began on the trip back home from New York. "We're on the second bottle of champagne," historical society president Thomas McLaughlin said when reached on his cellphone aboard the bus taking 14 society members back to Berwick. McLaughlin said that when the society inquired of experts about the almanac's value, the first estimate was $7,000 to $10,000, but it rose sharply after the Library Company of Philadelphia, which Franklin founded, determined the book not only was real but also was one of only three 1733 copies known to exist.

The experts said it was authentic based on the original binding, the ink and the printing, but even then the presale estimate was only $100,000 to $150,000. Selby Kiffer, an authority on historical American documents who examined the almanac for Sotheby's, said it "had that right look." "It's like finding a fossil in its matrix," Kiffer said. "It's a cliche to say something is once in a lifetime until you have an opportunity like this."

SIBA has developed the Okra Picks program in response to feedback from its bookseller members who wanted the opportunity to promote current and upcoming southern titles.

The SIBA Book Awards are designed to give longer legs to books that have already been published. SIBA’s Indie Stores and SIBA want to recognize those authors and thank them for the books that have added to the bottom line and to see those titles continue to grow in popularity and readership.

The Okra Picks are a whole new crop just hitting bookshelves that SIBA stores know their customers are going to love. The first dozen Okra Picks will be for the fall and will be displayed at the SIBA Trade Show in Greenville, SC, for the first time.

I spoke with Wanda Jewell, executive director of SIBA, and asked her how she'd cooked up this plan.

"I've had the title in mind for a long time," she said, "trying to figure out how I could use it." In fact, she's been cultivating Okra Picks since she first heard of Oprah's Book Club. "With a good name and good tag line, you can go far."

How does a book get on this new list?

Despite his success, Eddings was known for his humble nature. "His huge worldwide success and fame did not change Dave at all," said his long-term publisher at HarperCollins, Jane Johnson, herself a fantasy author. "He was unfailingly self-effacing on the subject of his success, once saying: 'I'm never going to be in danger of getting a Nobel prize for literature, I'm a storyteller, not a prophet. I'm just interested in a good story'."

Eddings was always delighted, he said, to hear that he'd turned non-readers into readers. "I look upon this as perhaps my purpose in life," he said in 1997. "I am here to teach a generation or two how to read. After they've finished with me and I don't challenge them any more, they can move on to somebody important like Homer or Milton."

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Johnson said he would be missed "tremendously" at HarperCollins, which published his last title, The Elder Gods, in 2006. "He was a towering force of modern commercial fiction, a master of the epic, and a delight to work with," she said. "The Voyager team and I were immensely sad to hear the news."

A new approach developed by Philips now offers fresh hope for color e-paper displays that are so bright and clear that even traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) will pale in comparison. According to Kars-Michiel Lenssen, who headed the work at Philips Research, based in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, the new approach has the potential to create color images that are three times brighter than displays that use color filters, including LCDs. "This is the closest an electronic-paper technology ever got to printed paper," he says.

Color displays normally require four subpixels--red, green, blue, and white--to create each full-color pixel. "That costs you in terms of resolution," says Pieter van Lieshout, head of product research and development for Polymer Vision, which was spun off from Philips Electronics three years ago to develop flexible electronic-paper displays.

The other consequence of using a color filter is that it reduces the brightness of a display, says Sri Peruvemba, vice president of marketing at E-Ink, in Cambridge, MA, which was spun out of research at MIT in 1997. For example, making the entire screen red using subpixels means that only a quarter of the screen will actually be red. In contrast, Philips Research's approach involves turning the traditional electronic-paper pixel quite literally on its side, in order to tune it to different shades of the spectrum.

The cheaper format is a smarter business model during tough economic times, according to those who sell books or publish them. Trade paperbacks (which are larger and more expensive than mass-market paperbacks) are typically about $14; hardcovers run about $25.

For years, booksellers and publishers have been fighting to retain their fraction of every entertainment dollar, especially those of younger consumers. "If we want to appeal to a twentysomething audience, we have to do it at an affordable price," says Carrie Kania of HarperPerennial, which will publish a record 100 or so paperback originals this year. "And a trade paperback is the price of a new CD." And the format is no longer considered second-best. Booksellers are happy to recommend books they like, in all formats, to their customers. Book critics are more open to reviewing them.

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Paperbacks are a way to get customers to take a chance on something new, says Bob Wietrak of Barnes & Noble. "Consumers are willing to pay the hardcover price for an author they know and love," Wietrak says. "Trade paperbacks are an invitation to 'try me.'"