The Catholic Orangemen of Togo was originally lined up to be published last August. However, following the threat of legal action from Schillings lawyers acting for Aegis founder Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer, who is named in the book, Murray's publisher Mainstream decided to drop it. "We couldn't reach an agreement with Craig about content," said Mainstream publisher Bill Campbell, who described Murray as "never one for being shy". "It was very amicable. We all decided that we would walk away ... and he would publish himself."

Murray has made the 226-page book available for free on his website and other sites across the internet, as well as self-publishing a number of hard copies which he is selling for £17.99. He says that 15,000 people downloaded the book in the first day. "There's been a lot of interest," said Murray, who is now rector of the University of Dundee after he was sacked from his position in Uzbekistan after criticising the country's human rights record. "Murder in Samarkand sold about 23,000, which is not bad for non-fiction - this is just from my site which downloaded 15,000 on day one. The whole point is that I'm trying to smash the libel laws."

It's well established that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn't read a book in the previous year -- a state of affairs that has prompted much soul-searching by anyone with an affection for (or business interest in) turning pages. But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there's a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers' conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and "workshop" their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly "for personal fulfillment."

In short, everyone has a story -- and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it.

"As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self," said Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican critic and the author of So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, a meditation on literary life in an over-booked world. Today, he added, "Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert."

The other four titles in the running for the £1,000 prize are Ed Husain's account of his involvement in radical fundamentalism in The Islamist; Miranda Seymour's memoir of her father's tyrannical eccentricity, In My Father's House; Dannie Abse's memoir of his 50-year marriage written in the wake of his wife's death, The Presence; and John Lanchester's investigation of family secrets, Family Romance.

The annual award, which has been running since 1982, was established in memory of JR Ackerley, journalist and author himself of a famously candid autobiography, My Father and Myself.

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[Chairman Peter] Parker said of the shortlist: "One of the strengths of this list is that there is no common thread between the books, apart from the fact that they are all well-written, and marked by a kind of fearless, even ruthless honesty".