Celebrity scandal author and Scientology-infiltrator Ian Halperin is either on to the story of a lifetime or trying to shoot the moon, libel wise.

Perez Hilton, dark pink lady of the semen-stained celebrity gossip racket, has written a book! Sort of! Mostly some dude shaped his silly stories into a readable narrative. Or so Perez tells Jesse Oxfeld.

A contract has already been cut with former Time and Fortune writer Richard Behar for a book on ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, arrested one week ago today. Joe Nocera, ear your heart out!

Having pissed off Oprah, the book industry, and us, former Gawker intern James Frey's working on a book, his own "theoretical third book of the Bible," that will now piss off Christians.

A few weeks ago, MacMillan CEO John Sargent sent out a memo to the publisher's employees saying, basically, "no raises for anyone this year—but Merry Christmas!" Now, they're laying people off as we speak. (But Merry Christmas!) It's 4% of the company, including imprints such as Farrar, Strauss & Giroux and the children's division; the the Publishers Weekly says it's 64 people.

New Yorker editor David Remnick recently wrote a piece for the his magazine called "The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama." The ideas behind that essay will be turned—eventually—into a book about much of the same, Politico reports. (He had a Knopf contract to finish out, anyway.) When Remnick hired Ryan Lizza to cover the Obama campaign for the magazine, he had to talk him out of writing a book. But Lizza ended up getting a book deal about Obama's first year out of it anyway. Now his boss is writing a book that's competitive with his own!

Judith Regan, the crazy, Bernard Kerik-fucking former star publisher fired by News Corp. last year, is now locked in a public feud with self-regarding media argument starter Michael Wolff. They deserve each other.

Yes, there's going to be a book about Facebook's creation, adapted for film by Aaron Sorkin, bestselling author Ben Mezrich confirmed. But it won't have lots of sex and cooked Koala, per a Gawker report.

A "beauty contest," in the publishing world, is when multiple editors within a publisher have to present themselves to an author, who then decides the best one for their project. It's seen as a nerve-wracking, slightly degrading process. Sarah Silverman, of course, just sold her book—rather, her idea of a book of "humorous essays," which are all the rage these days, from Nora Ephron to Sloane Crosley to Tina Fey—for $2.5 million to HarperCollins. As the Observer reports, David Hirshey won out as her editor. Yay! Now he—whoops, she—just has to write the book, which was supposedly pitched without so much as a proposal.

A critical Stalker sent us a secretly-snapped pic of Washington Post Watergate-breaking journalist Carl Bernstein, reading one of "his own damn books on a plane." It's A Woman in Charge: the Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide in 2005, leaving behind his new wife and grown son. Thoughtfully, he left his frozen sperm behind for widow Anita Thompson , as she confessed in Scotland's Sunday Herald.

The Guardian examines the phenomenon of Schadenfoer, also known as hatred of the rich young Brooklyn author Jonathan Safran Foer, he of the twee literary style and his seemingly charmed life.

James Frey's internship has ended, and we're happy to report that he did a decent job and took the work very seriously. Watch as James goes on a beer run for the ad sales team, buys the writers coffee, and reflects on his internship experience. (Yeah, I look weird in this video and I don't want to hear another word about it.) On his way home, he took my package to the post office. [Video by Richard Blakeley]

So we've gotten an aggravating amount of tips about some kind of hell book called Natural Harvest that is comprised entirely of recipes for meals involving semen. Like, human ejaculate. It's nothing short of horrifying. It's been covered in a bunch of other places already, but still everyone wants us to know about it. Except us! We don't want to know anything! So here, in the hopes of shooing you people away, is a brief acknowledgment:

Yes, the Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning author really is here interning for the morning! Earlier, we prompted you to ask him questions. In the comments, I'll moderate by asking him the best ones, and he'll answer. [Photo by Terry Richardson] Read on... BTW, his handle is bigjimdorito in the first few answers, and then James Frey later on.

Remember Judith Regan? She was famous for publishing anything at her Newscorp/HarperCollins imprint, Regan books—as long as it was trashy, salacious, and celeb-autobiography oriented, like O.J. Simpson's If I Did It (which Newscorp killed.) She was like the National Enquirer of book publishers. In 2006, she was fired for saying something about the Jews, and she filed a $100 million lawsuit. It was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but, as the Observer brought to our attention, we now know the figure that NewsCorp paid out to shut her up—$10.75 mil. Damn—that's a lot of lawyering. Update: When called for comment by our intern James Frey, Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, said "no comment."

A while ago, in an attempt to get Ryan Adams as my intern instead of him interning at Blackbook (nice catch, Mohney!), I received a one-line e-mail from somebody calling himself James Frey. "I'll come intern for a day," it read. He thought it would be interesting to intern for people who "hated" him (a strong word!) and was especially eager to do menial tasks. So Vogue gets celebrity intern Sean Avery, Blackbook gets Adams, and we get James Frey. He has written books such as A Million Little Pieces, Bright Shiny Morning, and once he went on Oprah and she yelled at him! He'll be helping me pack my things into boxes for my imminent departure and factchecking, among other things. He's out on a coffee run right now, but after the jump, let's play "Ask the Intern," in which you can ask James about what it's like to intern for Gawker. You can find James' answers over here.

Macmillan, the publishing giant that's been around since 1843 and includes imprints like Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (home to Thomas Friedman), Picador (Naomi Klein) and St. Martin's (South Beach Diet), gave its employees what passes as a Christmas bonus this year: he didn't lay off anyone but did announce a pay freeze for 2009 "for everyone making over $50,000." That's not as bad as getting laid off, however, which is what happened at Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, and maybe Random House. Lovely! Full memo after the jump.

The nine-year-old who self-published, then actually published, a 46-page book about how to talk to girls (he compared us to cars that need lots of oil, and we hope he isn't talking about what we think he is) just sold the movie rights to Fox, who thought it would make a fine movie. Maybe starring Robin Williams as the nine-year-old? Then there's the twelve-year-old, who was mouthing baby food only a few years earlier, who fancies himself a food critic (“Softish jazz music. Seem to enjoy kids but not overly") whose film rights were acquired by SNL's Lorne Michaels. Well, goody for them! Brats. Trend alert: only precocious kids need apply for book-to-movie success for the next few months. And yes, we would be happy to show you an excerpt!

Photographer Steve Schapiro needs a hook to sell his $700 special edition book about the Godfather movie. The behind-the-scenes pictures (including James Caan wired up with explosive squibs, left), 1,000-copy print run and author signatures might not be enough, and lord knows the economy isn't going to help matters. So he struck a deal to excerpt Mario Puzo's 1972 book on the making of the film. This excerpt was, in turn, excerpted in the Daily Mail this weekend, and the part where the late crooner Frank Sinatra screams at Puzo in a restaurant is the talk of the blogs, 35 years after it surfaced in Time. It's a worthy tale.