On Thursday, a Chicago-based law firm filed a suit in federal court in Seattle against Amazon on behalf of Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old Michigan high school senior. The suit, which seeks class-action status, claims that when the company wirelessly deleted a copy of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" from Gawronski's Kindle earlier this month, it also deleted the notes he had taken on the device for his homework.

The suit, which cites another plaintiff who also lost his copy of the Orwell classic, seeks to prevent Amazon from again deleting books from Kindles. It also seeks monetary relief for people like Gawronski who lost work from the incident.

Amazon declined comment on the suit. The company, which refunded the purchase price of Orwell books to people whose copies it deleted, has already said it would not do it again. Last week, the company's CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for the incident, calling it "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles."

Of course, the tracking service only accounts for about 75 percent of book sales, by its own admission, so you can add another 81 units to that total. Still, it's probably somewhat fewer copies than Simon & Schuster's Atria division was hoping to sell when it acquired the total in what I'm told was a $250,000 deal. Especially when you consider all the free promotion the book got on Gawker.com, to what was presumably its target audience.

Publishers Weekly: "The best (if sometimes troublesome) selections relate personal experiences: a woman trucker is severely wounded; a tanker fights his way into Fallujah, enthusiastically describing the men he kills; a base commander fires an obstreperous Iraqi employee. More literary efforts are less successful, with several wince-inducing attempts at poetic battlefield imagery. Tributes to fallen comrades often fall into mawkishness. Burden warns that unfettered war blogging may soon disappear under the heavy hand of military censorship, but if our leaders are worried about criticism of their policies, Burden's book will reassure them."

Booklist: "Previously, war letters, diaries, and memoirs were published long after the actual experience of the writers. Burden, a blogger himself, has selected observations of ordinary men and women written and sent in real time as they endure the cauldron of war. Some of the writings are mundane, but there are also chilling descriptions of surviving a mortar attack and attempting to save the life of a severely wounded Iraqi. This collection is an excellent introduction to an emerging form of war reporting."

Vanity Fair: "Can you handle the truth? Matthew Currier "Blackfive" Burden's The Blog of War (Simon & Schuster) is loaded with firsthand reports from the Internet diaries of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Grab it before the Pentagon orders it burned on the ever growing bonfire of lost civil liberties."

Washington Post: "Blogging the story of Schram and hundreds of other unknown soldier-heroes was a good decision, as was piecing together a collection of military blogs from all over the Iraq theater. Though Burden's politics have a decidedly conservative slant (one of his favorite bloggers, a Marine who re-enlisted as a corporal after watching others go off to Iraq and Afghanistan, calls his site 'Red State Rants'), nonpartisan patriotism is the common thread tying together these reflections, love letters and stories of combat. They make for riveting reading."

MuggleCast is doing well. While many podcasts earn almost nothing, Demopoulos said, MuggleCast earns revenue. It makes money through T-shirt sales, after a printing group out of Georgia saw how well the podcast was doing and offered to design T-shirts for the show for free. Now, the hosts get $6 on each $15 shirt sold.

The site also garners about $750 a month from reading advertisements for GoDaddy.com, an Internet domain-name broker. Sims and Schoen also earn $800 a month for maintaining the site.

Visibility is high, too. Last month, the show was No. 3 on the Apple iTunes top-100 list of "Arts" podcasts. And it's enjoying an overall rank of 46th out of tens of thousands on the same site.

Podcast Alley, a directory of podcasts nationwide, ranked it No. 2 on its top-10 list. The show also has been nominated for the Nickelodeon Australia's 2006 Kids' Choice Awards, and is a nominee for the 2006 Podcast Awards People's Choice Award.

Joining Lander and Farabee in this endeavor are Nick Budd and David Martindale. Martindale also serves as lead designer and technician for the new site. All four writers work at Dragon's Lair Comics in Round Rock, Texas.

Comic Pants is anchored by "Wednesday Number Ones", a weekly feature updating every Wednesday morning that will provide commentary on every first issue coming to comic shops that day. In addition, the site will feature regularly updated reviews from all four contributors, Lander's popular Previews forecast column "Down the Line" and more.

Comic Pants is a serious review site with a sense of humor, as indicated by the unusual name, which was suggested by Dave Farabee during a brainstorming session.

Jesus is not God; he was only a man.

Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. They had a daughter Sarah and their bloodline lives on in Europe today.

Mary Magdalene is to be worshiped as a goddess.

The Bible was put together by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine.

Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was "deified" by Constantine.

The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.

In the original Gospels, Jesus directed Mary Magdalene, not Peter to establish the Church.

There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and guards the secret of Jesus’ bloodline.

The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed.

The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing.

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the sudden disappearance on 28 July of two blogs by leading Tibetan poet Woeser (also known as Oser and, in Chinese, Wei Se). They were shut down by the websites that hosted them - Tibetcul.net, a Tibetan cultural portal, and Daqi.com, a local blog platform - presumably on government orders amid a continuing wave of online censorship in China.

"We are appalled by the closure of Woeser's blogs and we call for them to be reopened," the press freedom organisation said. "As her poetry is banned in China, these blogs were the only way she had left to express herself. Their disappearance shows how the Chinese authorities go out of their way to limit Tibetan culture to folklore for tourists."

Reporters Without Borders added: "Political control of the Chinese Internet is becoming more and more strict. The Chinese search engines recently updated their word filters while chat forums have been closed on government orders. We again appeal to the Chinese authorities to respect freedom of expression, a right guaranteed under their constitution."

Gomes makes one basic point, which is roughly that Anderson has overstated the economic value of the tail. This may well be true. Anderson's response is, roughly, that Gomes has misunderstood the statistics, which also seems to be true. But the plain fact is that there is no definitive division between the head and the tail, there's just one long powerlaw curve (above), and you can try to prove whatever you like by making an arbitrary division and moving it around. How many angels on the head of a pin, again?

Looking for a way to get over her ex-boyfriend (the man she thought she was going to marry -- ouch) and seeking perhaps a wee outlet through which to vent her frustrations, the struggling Seattle writer began pouring her heart out -- pouring it out and then directly into a weblog.

That was back in 2002, and ever since then Agiewich not only has blogged her way through the ups and downs of that particularly pugnacious parting of ways, she also has blogged her way through a variety of dates and the breakups that followed and, more importantly, blogged her way right into a novel. (Yes, a novel. Take that, you unappreciative ex-boyfriend!)

Well . . . I've decided to write a new book. Yep, 300 Incredible Blogs on the Internet.

So . . . if you have an incredible blog or know of one, let me know about it.

There's an extraordinary wealth of knowledge, history and culture contained in the world's books. We're inspired by the idea that with every book we index, we're building a better tool for people to find books and make these discoveries. Some will be personal, like when a reader from South Carolina found a book containing a photo of his great uncle, delighting his housebound father. Others will be more...er, esoteric, like when a blogger decided to use Book Search to find references to the phrase, "Snakes on a Plane." And others, like Luca Mori's, will unexpectedly expand the frontiers of human knowledge.

On that note, we're excited to announce Inside Google Book Search, the official Google Book Search blog. This blog is about discovery -- yours and ours. Here you'll find members of our team sharing thoughts, tips and the occasional announcement about Book Search. We intend for this to be a place not only for Book Search enthusiasts, but also book lovers of every stripe. We'll be highlighting cool books we've found, discoveries you've made, big thoughts about the future of book search and more.

Baghdad Burning, a first-hand account written under the pseudonym Riverbend, is one of 19 books in contention.

Others include Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, a biography of 19th-Century cook and author Mrs Beeton and a study of post-war US-Soviet relations.

The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 14 June.

Professor Robert Winston, chair of the judging panel, said this year's longlist contained "an exceptionally wide variety of genres".

Three years later and the nightmares of bombings and of shock and awe have evolved into another sort of nightmare. The difference between now and then was that three years ago, we were still worrying about material things- possessions, houses, cars, electricity, water, fuel... It's difficult to define what worries us most now. Even the most cynical war critics couldn't imagine the country being this bad three years after the war... Allah yistur min il rab3a (God protect us from the fourth year).

The conservative organization has spent the last few years trying to escape the best seller's shadow, after the novel portrayed Opus Dei as a murderous sect fixated on power and self-mutilation.

But now the low-profile spiritual community is starting a drive to improve its image ahead of a major film based on the book -- and that campaign begins at the group's front door, where a sign invites fans of the Dan Brown novel to learn about "the real Opus Dei."

"The unfortunate thing is there are going to be tens of millions of people who will read the novel and see the movie and have that be their only exposure to Opus Dei," said Brian Finnerty, a spokesman for the group. "Because the book is marketed as being in some ways factual, it's difficult for people to tell where the lines between fact and fiction are."

It must be said immediately, however, that the reality in Opus Dei is quite different from what one finds in The Da Vinci Code. In fact, I'm a little afraid that, should someone who's seen the movie happen upon a real cilice and discipline they'd just laugh -- like someone who shows up for a duel expecting to see a .44 Magnum only to face a water pistol instead.

In The Da Vinci Code, the cilice is a notched leather belt studded with metal barbs which cut the flesh and cause Silas to bleed profusely.

In reality, the cilice (pronounced "sillis") is a small metal chain with sharp points facing inward. No leather, no belt, no notches. Of course, it's uncomfortable (this is penance, after all), but it shouldn't cut the flesh or cause bleeding. The version used by members of Opus Dei is worn around the thigh, and the custom within Opus Dei is to wear it two hours a day -- except on Sundays, feast days, and certain times of the year.

The first solo PostSecret exhibit ended two weeks ago; 15,000 people attended the show, 1,100 books were sold and The Washington Post called it, "one of the five best art exhibitions in Washington in 2005". But the best part for me was hearing from many of the brave people who have shared their secrets and listening to the stories from those who have found solace and compassion in them.

There are some secrets that we think we're keeping, but those secrets are actually keeping us," he says. "I think one way to face those secrets is to write them on a postcard and then physically let it go into a mailbox."

The entries were part of a new program called Amazon Connect, begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans - and to sell more books - with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company's online bookstore site. So far, Amazon has recruited a group of about a dozen authors, including novelists, writers of child care manuals and experts on subjects as diverse as real estate investing, science, fishing and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead.

"The program gives people who are interested in a particular author a way to get new insights into them, and gives the authors a way to develop more of a one-on-one relationship with readers," said Jani Strand, a spokeswoman for Amazon. The authors write on "anything they'd like their readers to know about them," Ms. Strand said, including what inspired their books and details about their experiences. Authors are free to update their blogs as often or as little as they like, and a linked profile page has information about other books, reading recommendations, personal information and, in some cases, e-mail addresses.

Ms. Wolitzer, in an interview, said she welcomed the blog as an opportunity to address readers more often than she usually might - that is, every two or three years, when a new book comes out. "Anything that can get fiction on people's radar is good," she said.

Carolyn K. Reidy, president of the adult publishing group at Simon & Schuster, which has already signed up at least 10 authors for Amazon Connect, said that when Amazon approached her company this year with the idea of author blogs, she quickly embraced it.

"It enables the author to have a conversation with readers on an ongoing basis, easily and in an ongoing place," she said. "We hope that somebody who reads one of an author's books will go back and discover one of the rest."

The business of being an author has changed considerably over the last ten years. No longer is it sufficient to write a brilliant manuscript and manage to get it published. Authors now need to be excellent promoters of their own work. And for the intrinsically shy, that can be problematic. But an Internet trend has the potential to revolutionize author marketing, even for those who despise public speaking: blogging.

From April 2000 to July 2002 I was a director of product marketing at Apple, responsible for Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, iDVD and few others.

How I went from merely being a fan of Apple's products, living far away from Cupertino, to actually working for the company and for Steve Jobs himself is the what this book will be about.

So more recently, I've gone back to posting blog entries, life tidbits and the like. I'm also trying to focus a lot on books that I've read or am reading and mommy stuff. I don't feel comfortable blogging about how my current manuscript is going or how I'm developing a plot or a character; that simply doesn't work for me. Mundane life stuff? Sure. That I can handle! I'm still not sure if I'm contributing, but considering the length and breadth of cyberspace, I don't suppose it matters so much. Plus, I do like the feedback I get from folks who visit the blog. That's always lots of fun. (I also realized that I'd like to have a blog without the related work, and I created one at www.SlayYourDemons.com dedicated to guest bloggers coming in to gripe about their personal demons. That one's a lot of fun, too! And I participate in a group blog called Out of the Blogosphere. Also fun because there's no pressure to be the sole focus of the blogging attention!)