Staking a claim for "the book as object," Scribner and Stephen King plan to "sell 1,500 copies of a signed, limited edition of his upcoming Under the Dome to his most fervent collectors at $200 a pop," according to the Wall Street Journal, which added that "the book will be available shortly for pre-ordering from Simon & Schuster's website, as well as a site operated by Mr. King." The novel will be released in November.

"We’re doing this to generate additional revenue," said Scribner publisher Susan Moldow. "We used to have a regular business of signed first edition mysteries, but we stopped because there wasn't an additional mark-up. . . . This is fighting back against the disappearance of the book as an object."

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Wilbert and Marilyn Hasbrouck, owners of Prairie Avenue Bookshop, Chicago, Ill., "will likely close the bookshop, an institution in Chicago's architecture community, on September 1--unless, that is, a buyer can be found," the Tribune's Cityscapes blog reported.

"We're losing a national resource," said Chicago architect John Eifler. "It's very sad."

The Hasbroucks have been looking for a buyer for about a year, but are handicapped by the fact that any new owner "would have to assume responsibility for two lines of credit that total at least $650,000," according to the Tribune.

In her column for Chicago Now, Amy Guth observed that she "sat daydreaming at my desk for a moment after reading that, both about what my life would look like as a bookstore owner (I am both book- and tech-inspired, I already have a cat fond of plopping down on stacks of books, and I do already rock the geek-chic glasses), and how to go about putting out the call to help save the bookstore. Because, let's be clear: we need to really make every effort to save bookstores; it pains me to see them thinning out."

Although not in a position to rescue Prairie Avenue Bookshop, Guth concluded: "Whatever the reason, the more important question is: what are we doing about it? What are we doing to support Chicago independent bookstores like Prairie Avenue Books? Because even if an eleventh-hour techie-booky sugarperson surfaces to save Prairie Avenue, a bookstore owner can only do so much; Ultimately, a community decides whether local independent bookstores close or thrive."

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On Twitter, @Powells suggested we "check out Powell's Book News blogger Chris Bolton's new web-series Wage Slaves."

The Oregonian provided some background information, and noted: "When he's not working as a wage slave at Powell's Books--a job he enjoys--Chris is writing Season Two. 'I have a five-season plan.' He pauses. 'But we know how I feel about plans, so I'm not married to it.'"

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Another corporation is testing the e-book reading device waters. The Wall Street Journal reported that Samsung is "rolling out a small-screen reader that it will initially sell in its home country of South Korea with content provided by a local bookstore chain. Samsung's SNE-50K e-book, which will be priced at 339,000 won or about $270, has a five-inch touch-screen that also allows users to write and store memos." The Journal added that the reader has 512 megabytes of memory storage and weighs 6.5 ounces, but the initial version "doesn't support wireless downloads or connections to the Internet."

The Korea Times observed that Samsung's nascent partnership with Kyobo Bookstore--the country's largest book retailer "will convert about 1,000 books into an online format monthly to provide content for Samsung's e-book device"--means the "companies see great potential for the e-book market here as the country has one of the most advanced third-generation (3G) mobile networks in the world."

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The release dates for a trio of Bernie Madoff books have been moved up. The Wall Street Journal reported that Erin Arvedlund's Too Good to Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff (Portolio) shifted to August 11 from September 8; Andrew Kirtzman's Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff (Harper) will also be released August 11 rather than in October; and Jerry Oppenheimer's Madoff With the Money (Wiley) moves to August 12 from September 15.

"Nobody wants to be second, third or fourth," said Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Portfolio. "You are either first or you get lost in the pack, or you have to come after all the other titles and have a different take."

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Dedicated P. G. Wodehouse fans from across Europe gathered at Calders bookshop in London last weekend to read "four satirical playlets . . . seen by the public for the first time in 100 years . . . with the man who found them, literary historian Paul Spiring," according to the Guardian.

"Lovers of literature, be they scholars or simply voracious readers, are always delighted when early or little known works are collected and republished," said Hilary Bruce, chairman of the Wodehouse Society. "Scholars welcome comparison between early and later works. Wodehouse was just 22 when the first of these satires was published, and that makes them interesting to us now."

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The Health section of today's New York Times addresses the question of "teenage drinking" in the film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: "Does Hogwarts have a drinking problem? As Harry Potter fans crowd movie theaters to catch the latest installment in the blockbuster series, parents may be surprised by the starring role given to alcohol. In scene after scene, the young wizards and their adult professors are seen sipping, gulping and pouring various forms of alcohol to calm their nerves, fortify their courage or comfort their sorrows."

Today on Fox News's Fox and Friends and Glenn Beck Show: Michelle Malkin, author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (Regnery, $27.95, 9781596981096/1596981091). She appears on the Today Show tomorrow morning.

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Today on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Winston Groom, author of Vicksburg, 1863 (Knopf, $30, 9780307264251/0307264254).

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Tomorrow on the Diane Rehm Show: Alex O'Meara, author of Chasing Medical Miracles: The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials (Walker, $25, 9780802716965/0802716962).

Fan reaction to a sneak peak at The Twilight Saga: New Moon--adapted from Stephenie Meyer's bestselling vampire series--during last weekend's Comic-Con in San Diego was, if not bloodcurdling, certainly enthusiastic.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the "teen vampire sequel didn't disappoint the cultish crowd, many of whose members camped out overnight for a scream-filled (not for scares, but for star Robert Pattinson) presentation in Hall H. Director Chris Weitz said the fan base is excited no matter the setting, including during production of the Nov. 20 Twilight follow-up."

Entertainment Weekly featured "a video a fan took of the crowd's sneak peek" at movie.

Director Chris Weitz was asked about the posting of fan reactions to the trailer on Youtube. Variety reported that he said "he's considering a 'reaction video to the fan reaction video.'"

Spirit Pictures has acquired the rights to Kong: King of Skull Island (Dark Horse, $19.95, 9781595820211/1595820213), a prequel by Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland. Variety reported that the "book was published at the same time Peter Jackson was producing his remake of King Kong. Rights to make the movie were brokered with the Merian C. Cooper family, who own the Kong property. Cooper co-directed the original Kong, released in 1933."

"We're very concerned with honoring Merian C. Cooper's legacy in Hollywood. We want to make sure that whatever we deliver will honor his memory," said Spirit's Steve Iles.

Rita Angus: An Artist's Life by Jill Trevelyan, published by Te Papa Press, has won the 2009 Nielsen BookData NZ Bookseller's Choice Award, which is the title booksellers voted as the book they most enjoyed selling during the year.

Organizers described Rita Angus: An Artist's Life as "the first biography of this well-loved and significant New Zealand artist . . . a pioneer of modern painting during the 1930s and 1940s who went on to become one of New Zealand's leading 20th century artists." The book has more than 150 artworks and photographs.

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Mark Billingham's Death Message, featuring "London copper DI Tom Thorne," won the £3,000 Theakstons Old Peculier crime novel of the year award at the Harrogate crime writing festival, the Guardian reported. More than 5,000 votes for the prize were cast by readers.

"It was a stupidly good line-up--pretty much the A-Z of crime writing," he said. "It was incredible to win--usually when you're on a shortlist, even if you've told yourself you've no chance, right at the end you'll think well, there's only five of us, it can happen. But when, as was the case here, it's a big shortlist of 14 people, especially of that kind of quality--Ian Rankin, John Harvey, Val McDermid, Lee Child--you don't even think about it."

"It's the difference between getting a review from a critic and a review from a reader," said Billingham. "It's lovely to get a fantastic review in the Guardian or the Observer but it means a heck of a lot to get this prize voted for by readers."

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The 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize longlist has been released. The panel of judges--Pankaj Mishra, Colm Toibin and Gish Jen--will present a shortlist in October, and the winner will be honored at an awards ceremony in Hong Kong November 16.

No matter what kind of change sweeps through the book world, many people still want to become published authors. The optimism of the wannabe writers was once again evident at this year's Mystery Writers Conference held the weekend before last at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif.

Aside from intensive workshops on everything from the practice of the craft to plotting and character, the conference featured several lively author events. At Saturday night's "Young Turks" event, for example, Josh Bazell, author of Beat the Reaper (Little, Brown), Jason Kersten, author of The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter (Gotham), and Tim Maleeny, author of Jump (Poisoned Pen), dispensed with making formal statements and dove right into asking audience questions.

When asked how he managed to be a medical intern while working on Beat the Reaper, Bazell joked that unlike the interns on Grey's Anatomy, he had no life and the interns he knew had way less sex than those on the show. "It also helps if you see your day job as a vacation from writing" he added.

After having two children, Maleeny has to steal time to fit in his writing. "I know a lot of writers who write at the same time every day and the same amount every day," he said, "and I hate them all." He called his usual fatherhood approach "binge writing," although he is happy for whatever time he can write while his children are sleeping or he is traveling.

Maleeny was one of six faculty members who were conference attendees and unpublished writers in the past. They are among dozens of Book Passage Mystery Conference grads to have gone on to become authors--and often return as faculty members. Maleeny said that the sense of community he found at the event helped boost his confidence about becoming published.

Each of the "Young Turks"--who admitted they didn't feel so young--had a getting-published story. Maleeny and Bazell got their agents the hard way, they said, by submitting lots of queries. Kersten, who writes nonfiction magazine articles, said an agent approached him about his first book, Journal of the Dead: A Story of Friendship and Murder in the New Mexico Desert (Harper), after his article on the subject ran in Maxim.

"The most essential thing is that the book is as good as you can make it before you send it out," advised Bazell, who admitted that he didn't try to sell his first two novels. He had wanted to publish a novel for 30 years, and even with the ups and downs of getting there, writing novels was the best job, he said.

"My wife says I am a hell of a lot easier to live with when I write books," said Maleeny. Now three books into his Cape Weathers series and with his first stand-alone effort--Jump--Maleeny credited the Book Passage Conference as an important step in getting published.

At the end of the four-day conference Book Passage co-owner Elaine Petrocelli said that she wonders who from this year's class will return as faculty one day. And so did the 80 or so participants.--Bridget Kinsella

Though written with the same photorealism intensity of What Is the What, Eggers' 2006 bestseller about one of the lost boys of Sudan and similarly derived from hundreds of hours of taped interviews--the same technique that made his previous work such brilliant, believable fiction--this work is not a novel. Zeitoun may read like a novel and feel like a novel, but it isn't. This time Eggers is letting the truth speak for itself.

Hard-working, idealistic Zeitoun is an utterly likeable central character, a Muslim from Syria who's started a prosperous painting company in New Orleans, where he lives with his partner and wife, Kathy, and their four kids. The Zeitouns have clients and properties all over town, and because their company logo consists of a paintbrush spreading a rainbow of color, they have a disproportionate number of gay clients. While Kathy and the kids are trapped in traffic trying to flee from Hurricane Katrina with thousands of others, Zeitoun has decided to stay in New Orleans, to protect his properties, to guard, to repair, to be useful to Allah. Now their phones are dead. Zeitoun has vanished.

The nightmare of being separated by Hurricane Katrina is just the beginning of this family's ordeal, as the brutality of nature gives way before human ignorance. Zeitoun and three other survivors are accused of being al Qaeda, stripped of their rights and thrown into a small cell in a makeshift FEMA prison that mysteriously began construction the day after Katrina hit, while people were still waving in terror from their rooftops, begging for rescue. Given meals of pork and ham that they can't eat and warned to never, ever touch the cell's cyclone-fence walls, Zeitoun is subjected to yet another Bush legacy: incarceration without proof or trial or even phone call. If this were only a novel, you could dismiss it as being morally alert, well-meaning and good-hearted, but deliriously far-fetched and over-the-top. If only, if only.

Eggers' exposure of the vastly exaggerated, often completely invented, FEMA accounts of looting and terrorism--among the arrested are a man in his company uniform dragged from a company truck, a woman inside her home re-arranging furniture--results in a simmering rage that consumes the second half of the book. Instead of being about the damage wrought by Katrina, an uncontrollable force of nature, this work turns out to be about the damage wrought by American anti-Muslim prejudice and by the hasty, careless, greedy human beings in the rescue business.--Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: A horrific story of anti-Muslim prejudice and damage wrought not by a hurricane but by our government and by greed.