Politicians are writing more and more books, but they aren't selling, says Politico. Publishing insiders say the market for political books is getting crowded, and that many of them are "the equivalent of a speech on C-SPAN." Recent books by people other than a Clinton or Obama aren't doing so well: "Combined, [Senator Harry] Reid and [Nancy] Pelosi have sold just 6,500 books, according to Nielsen BookScan. As a point of comparison, What Happened—the tell-all memoir by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan - has sold more than 170,000 copies." As a pure exercise in vanity, however, it's vital to have a book if you're a politician: what better way to control your message? You can also leave a record of your policy ideas, unmolested by the pesky press. For those reasons alone, maybe it doesn't matter if they don't sell.

Various people became quite alarmed when New York said the following at the end of a long article on Barack Obama's campaign and race: "In October, Obama's former pastor, [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama's blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate." Oh, EXCELLENT.

Remember the Wall Street Journal op-ed we told you about, in which it was explained how one hysterical American professor of Islamic studies, Denise Spellberg, "warned" Random House that the novel they were about to publish about the life of Muhammad's wife Aisha maybe might incite widespread violence, just like Rushie's Satanic Verses or something! Cowed, Random House decided not to publish due to the "terrorist" non-threat. Professor Spellberg wrote to the WSJ this weekend, explaining that "I didn't kill [Sherry Jones's] Jewel of Medina":That's technically true: Random House's ignorance killed Jewel of Medina. They're ultimately the ones to blame for the backwardness here. But Spellberg certainly didn't help, as publication was ticking along just fine before she chimed in:

There have been dozens of alleged sightings, but have you or anyone you know actually seen either Bigfoot or a an actual person using Amazon's $400 electronic reader? Yet, Citigroup reports that its sales are "better than expected" and predicts that "Amazon will sell up to 380,000 Kindles in 2008, up from a previous forecast of 190,000." Wishful thinking? Crackpot theory? We need non-faked photographic evidence. (Valleywag saw a real live Kindle user once.) [Reuters]

How much of a total assclown and liar is Tucker Max? Even shock jocks Opie and Anthony can't stand him. When he was first pitching his retarded tome, the boys got so fed up with his obvious fabrications about crapping and sexing that they decided to make Tucker the joke of the day. Watch and enjoy as O&A-ably assisted by comedian Jim Norton-pretend that the proto-douchebag's microphone keeps kicking out. Being a self-obsessed child, of course, Tucker never gets wise to the ploy and keeps trying to tell his story over and over. Video after the jump, plus a link to a NSFW clip of Opie destroying Tucker's book and throwing it against the wall in disgust.

Now's the time to pre-order your copy of Vanity Fair word-writer and snazzy dresser Michael Wolff's upcoming biography of News Corp. overlord Rupert Murdoch! The book will be out in February of next year. A publisher has already said "I think the subject and the author were born to be put together." Uh, good? "Written in the irresistible stye that only an award-winning columnist for Vanity Fair can deliver," promises the promo. Indubitably! [pic via NYM]

Desperate to make young boys turn off their PlayStations and DVD players and just READ something — anything! — publishers are apparently turning to a gross new sort of pulp fiction, shamelessly pandering to boys' supposed taste for the gory and disgusting. And it's working! After more than a few breakout hits, publishers ramped up production to 261 boys' books last year, more than double the amount in 2003, according to a front-page Wall Street Journal article. The real fun in the Journal piece, if you aren't around kids much, is just reading through the titles of what boys are reading these days. Like, for example, "Help! What's Eating My Flesh: Runaway Staph and Strep Infections!," which helped push Scholastic's science and history series to 300,000 copies in print.

If anyone needs more proof about how backwards and reactionary the book-publishing industry can be, here it is. Yesterday, an opinion piece in the WSJ discussed the indefinite postponement of Sherry Jones' historical novel about the child bride of Muhammad, The Jewel of Medina. Random House "feared the book would become a new Satanic Verses, the Salman Rushdie novel of 1988 that led to death threats, riots and the murder of the book's Japanese translator." What made them think that? Oh, because one American academic didn't like it. After Islamic studies professor Denise Spellberg spread the word about how allegedly "racy" the book was, a couple Muslim bloggers went wild (without having read the book.) Spellberg also phoned an editor at Random House imprint Knopf, warning her that widespread violence might occur. (Fun fact: Spellberg also has a Knopf book contract!) Apparently, in these fear-mongering times, it's just that easy to kill a book. (Ms. Jones is shopping it around for a new publisher.)

And that doesn't include the cost of fact checking! " In addition to being the driving force behind one of the music industry’s top bands for nearly 40 years, the singer and songwriter has a personal comeback story to tell, having overcome a heroin addiction." [Crain's via Observer]

Once-glamorous novelist Jay McInerney has opened up about Rielle Hunter, the alleged mother to John Edwards' love child and inspiration for a "sexually voracious" character in his 1988 novel, Story Of My Life. Though McInerney made his mark depicting the cocaine-fueled excess of New York in the 1980s, Rielle was still a bit much for him, he told the Post:

Anisha Lakhani, ex-teacher at Manhattan private school Dalton and author of the forthcoming Schooled—about that very world!—might write her next book about socialites, she tells the Observer. After all, the Indian-born Jersey girl has been hanging out with them lately (see exhibit A, this photo with Tinsley Mortimer) at charity dinners and the like. But maybe it's all just research:

Everyone loves New York Times reporter David Carr, who's just published Night of the Gun, an excellent reported memoir about his years of crack addiction and bad behavior. That's why the self-promoting spam e-mail that he sent to everybody he knows this morning is so easy to swallow. Most authors self-promote while falling all over themselves, trying to apologize. Not David! "As you can see from the non-customized hello, I am spamming you out of self-interest."He goes on to say, "I'd apologize for that, except there is an easy way to solve — don't hit 'send.'" So he spams us, shamelessly. Used to being spun, we're dazzled by the lack of pretense. Apologies are insincere—as everyone already knows, addicts are experts at talking their way out of their sins. So, damn it: we'll bookmark Night of the Gun.

Apparently we're now at the stage in the James Frey career trajectory where the once-disgraced writer can stop pretending he's sorry for lying in his memoir and on Oprah, because he's a bestselling author again now, and in case you forgot Norman Mailer once had his back, that's right God damned Norman Mailer. "He is beyond unrepentant," the Times of London writes. That's actually putting it mildly. In an interview with the paper, Frey basically promises to lie some more, punch everyone in the face and finish the bible like the second, ballsier coming of Moses.

What exactly is it about a vampire romance that would cause it to sell 250,000 copies in the first 24 hours? That's what happened with Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, the latest book in her already-popular Twilight Saga. And that was only at Borders, where "preorders were second only to each of the final four Harry Potter titles written by J.K. Rowling," reports the WSJ. So this is what America's been reading while we've been busy being snobs! (And when they aren't gazing at a photograph of a dead animal carcass.)

Hawk-faced elderly man James Brady, the name-dropping veteran of 600 media outlets who has now eased into his retirement job as Forbes' "media columnist" (ha), is primarily skilled at being befuddled about the point of things (though he hasn't lost his name-dropping talent). So faced with an early copy of former crackhead-turned Times columnist David Carr's (well-reviewed) new book-which is not, as Brady hoped, a volume of media name-dropping-Brady panics in print like the senile Uncle Junior in The Sopranos: shoot the bad man and run hide in the closet! See, Brady really wanted this book to be a recitation by Carr of media inside-baseball stuff. "What a glorious read that would be, and what a column or two I could get out of it," he writes. But no-it's full of drug shit!

Jennifer Senior's affectionate profile of former coworker David Carr examines what the Times media reporter left out of his tell-all memoir of crack addiction, drug dealing and physical abuse: Being a big jerk to many of the women he drew into his orbit. Carr's many female friends, Senior said, were shocked to read about him choking his girlfriend, and probably also would have had trouble imagining with some of what got cut:

Author Salman Rushdie is pissed at the former British cop who wrote a tell-all about his time guarding the ladies' man of letters when he was under the threat of a big ol' fatwa from the Ayatollah-haha, he outlived you, jerk!-in 1989. "Rushdie told The Guardian that the book portrayed him as 'mean, nasty, tight-fisted, arrogant and extremely unpleasant.'" Said Rushdie, "In my humble opinion, I am none of those things [...] I am not trying to prevent him from publishing this stupid book, but if they publish it there will be consequences and there will be a libel action."

Brian May, founder of the overwrought, operatic 70s rock band Queen—known for its song "We are the Champions"—finally finished his doctoral thesis in astrophysics. (He got the Ph.D last year; which he began 30 years ago but got busy.) According to Livescience, his thesis "examines the mysterious phenomenon known as Zodiacal light, a misty diffuse cone of light that appears in the western sky after sunset and in the eastern sky before sunrise." Here's the book. Whoa. [LiveScience]

Amazon is buying Abesbooks.com, the used- and rare-books online bookseller.

"There are 8,000 nerve endings in the clitoris and this son of a bitch couldn't find one of them." Sound like an opening sentence to a trashy beach novel that aims to be read by thousands of housewives lolling on the Jersey shore before becoming landfill refuse? That's exactly what it is! But since it has such a killer first line, the people promoting the book (Tan Lines, obviously) made a video of all types of random people reading it. Just that line. It's all downhill from there. This is like the far, far less literary version of the video of random blogger types reading from the Keith Gessen FSU remix book. I bet the Tan Lines people wish Julia Allison had showed up to put some flair into it. Aw! Watch the strange clitoris festival, below: