Peter Olson of Random House fixed his reputation in the publishing industry when he displayed a smirking glee at the number of editors he'd fired. (Never let Lynn Hirschberg of the Times follow you around.) However, the outgoing Random House boss may have combined the worst of all management styles: a callous public persona and decision-making weakness. Intelligencer notes that Olson let Random House units bid each other up for hot books. "For all of his tough talk, the proud and cerebral Olson was never a real enforcer."

Jake Adelstein is an American reporter who spent the last 15 years covering Japanese organized crime for that nation's largest paper. I have to admit I always thought the Japanese yakuza crime syndicates were some overblown fantasy movie creation, but turns out they're actually very real, 80,000 strong, and they want to kill Jake Adelstein. You learn something new every day! Adelstein got along with the cops and the gangsters fine for a while, until he tried to break a scoop about the "John Gotti of Japan" flying to the US for a liver transplant. "Erase the story or be erased," said the gangsters, dramatically. So Adelstein decided to hold off on the story until things blew over. But that plan didn't quite work out:

His patron saints are Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley. He wears Robert Marc spectacles his publicist picked out for him, and last summer, when he rented a Villa next to Jade Jagger's, Nicole Richie called him a "dork loser." He's the "Nerdling" from The Official Filthy Rich Handbook by Christopher Tennant, due out in June. An excerpt, below.

Mike Gilbert, O.J. Simpson's former manager, has a tell-all coming out. According to an AP reporter who got an advance copy of the book, "He said Simpson had smoked pot, took a sleeping pill and was drinking beer when he confided at his Brentwood home weeks after his trial what happened the night of June 12, 1994. Simpson said he went to his ex- wife's condominium, but did not bring a knife with him. Simpson told him Nicole Brown Simpson had one in her hand when she opened the door."

So, have there been any updates in the prolonged daily rollout of salacious details about "Preston," the mystery professional athlete who allegedly had a fling with Terrance Dean, former closeted MTV producer and author of the upcoming book on the gay side of hip hop? Well yes there has been an update! Though we must say, he's really trickling this story out slowly. Today, Preston—who we now know is a pro basketball player—reveals his down-low status, and then takes Terrance home to meet his mom:

Musician and noted blogger Ryan Adams is publishing a book of poetry. "If Jewel can do it..." he writes in his blog that's constantly being taken down.

David Carr is a charming and competent media reporter, commuting to the New York Times from bourgeois Montclair where he lives with wife Jill and three children. But once he was in his own words a fulminating crackhead. Here's a sample from his forthcoming addiction memoir, obtained by Daily Intel: "Both of us were chronically, psychotically high, and I was spending all of my time lifting the blinds and peeking out at a world that I was increasingly scared to venture into."

Kooky libertarian Ron Paul has already lost the Republican presidential nomination to John McCain, but he's technically still in the race and even picked up 16 percent of the no-doubt-minimal Republican voting in Pennsylvania. And Paul apparently still commands an army of internet zealots who spam online comment boards in between World of Warcraft guild quests, because his troops just pushed Paul's new book Revolution to the top of the May 18 Times bestseller list for nonfiction. Vanity Fair took a look at some of their shady tactics, happily confirmed by Paul's publisher Grand Central:

Few people outside Silicon Valley have heard of Roelof Botha. But the former CFO of PayPal is famous here. His two claims to fame: negotiating that company's $1.5 billion sale to eBay, and later, as a partner at Sequoia Capital, investing in YouTube and quickly flipping the startup to Google for $1.65 billion. Is it a coincidence that that figure is 10 percent higher than his PayPal score? Few insiders think so. Botha gets four pages in Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good — more than Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Other figures who appear on the second page of her Web 2.0 book's index: John Battelle, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Facebook board member Jim Breyer, blog blowhard Jason Calacanis, and YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, whom Botha made quite wealthy.

Terrance Dean, the former MTV producer who's about to release his hotly-anticipated-by-us book on the gay secrets of hip hop, has provided a few more details on "Preston," the mystery pro athlete who Dean says he had a fling with at an island resort. So all of you who guessed football players, baseball players, or Mike Tyson: wrong!:

Radar's Chris Tennant's forthcoming book, the Official Filthy Rich Handbook, cheekily offers advice for "the best zip codes" and "majordomos vs. butlers," etc. Well, it's been a few years since the hipster and preppy handbooks came out, and The Hollywood Assistants Handbook just landed on our desk, so it looks like the market is right for handbooks right now! (People like being told what to do.) Tom Wolfe blurbs, rather ostentatiously, that "Tennant seems to know la dolce vita Americana billionara, every sweet morsel of it." Yet he chose a nice Midwestern girl to model the part of "the Heiress" inside the book—none other than Star talking head Julia Allison. She's not filthy rich (she makes only six figures a year), nor is she an heiress. But the book isn't meant for the growing class of newly rich, obviously, but to the aspirational and slack-jawed yokels among us. So in that case, maybe the choice of Allison is entirely appropriate. Click the image to gawk.

"James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning is at #666 on Amazon. I just had to tell someone." [Amazon]

Well now! Terrance Dean, the former MTV producer who's about to release a book about the secret gay secrets of the rap industry, is slowly unveiling some teaser stories on a blog (not to be confused with his own, vague blog). His first story concerns his sexy meeting and sexy rendezvous with a sexy male professional athlete, who proceeds to have sex with him! And is a closeted man! So who might this be:

Peter Olson-widely reported to be stepping down from Random House after a debilitating bout of pneumonia-doesn't get much sympathy in the publishing industry. Here's how the publishing giant's chief executive will be remembered: as a money-minded philistine who's fallen victim to the same financial accountability he tried to instill at Bertelsmann's US book producing factory. But there is one endearing angle to Olson's comeuppance: his departure may have been dictated less by Bertelsmann's Teutonic board members than Olson's formidable wife, Candice.

A Japanese designer has come up with a new way to index bookshelves. Animal profiles jut out of a row of books, as if their flesh equivalents were emerging from the savannah. [H-Concept via Coudal]

We're all for telling it like it is in book reviews, but this Sunday's review of Harry, Revised by Troy Patterson in the New York Times, seems extraordinarily mean-spirited, even unusually so. Among many things, Patterson mentions that the book "does not seem to have been reread, never mind revised," that its author Mark Sarvas writes "about 'old money' in a fashion indicating that he's never met anyone in possession of it," that it contains "a kind of coarse banality that may have found a new exemplar," and (drumroll, please) "that you are reading a review of this novel in these pages is a testament to the author's success as a blogger." A backhanded compliment, that last one! We had to ask author Sarvas: did he, like, do something to piss off Troy Patterson, who is a TV critic for Slate and a film critic for Spin?

Give Me a Book Deal [Tumblr, Related, Related]

James Frey's upcoming novel, Bright Shiny Morning, features interwoven narratives from the city of Los Angeles. One of his characters, a gay Cuban internet-based gossip, is based on—you guessed it, Perez Hilton! Aww. (Although, Frey does write that "between six and eight million people a day come to his website," which seems a little high.) Read the excerpt for trajectory of a young Perez Hilton.

They start early! The Washington Post regrets that one of the kids published in its KidsPost poetry contest actually submitted a poem written by Shel Silverstein. (Last year's winner was also a copycat, reports Regret the Error.) There was more than one indiscretion: agents, click through to see which clever, annoying kids to get in touch with. (They're "branding" themselves as renegades with no respect for the old, bourgeois ideas of art and propriety!)

Amazon.com's $400 electronic-reading device, the Kindle, is back in stock. Whew! They ran out of Kindles for a moment there, but they're "back in stock and ready for immediate shipment," Amazon.com wants us to know.