…has been announced. Visit the Bookseller.com to vote for your favorite.

In the Guardian, Sarah Crown has words from the delightfully named Horace Bent on the prize’s raison d’etre (”Shortlist announced for the year’s oddest book titles“):

“I confess, I have been anxious that as publishing becomes ever more corporate, the trade’s quirky charms are being squeezed out,” he said. “But happily my fears have been proved unfounded: oddity lives on.” He also paid homage to those titles that just failed to make the shortlist, with honourable mentions going to Drawing and Painting the Undead, Stafford Pageant: The Exciting Innovative Years 1901-1952, and Tiles of the Unexpected: A Study of Six Miles of Geometric Tile Patterns on the London Underground. “All sound like they are positively thrilling reads,” said Bent. “I do hope that the authors will try again next year.”

Poor James Patterson. His last book for young adults, Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports, only sold 192,000 copies. He doesn’t feel badly for himself, mind you–he feels badly for all the unfortunate youngsters who somehow didn’t get the opportunity to read his book. From the New York Times (”An Author Looks beyond Age Limits,” by Motoko Rich):

Mr. Patterson said that if he simply wanted to make more money, he would have developed another adult series. "I just am convinced that there aren’t enough books like this - books that kids can pick up and go ‘Wow, that was terrific, I wouldn’t mind reading another book,’ " he said of his "Maximum Ride" series. "The most important thing to me is that more kids read these."

Fortunately, his publisher has a plan:

As a result, Little, Brown has asked booksellers to commit to keeping the new "Maximum Ride" book - along with "The Dangerous Days of Daniel X," the first title in a new young-adult series, due out in July - at the front of their stores as long as Mr. Patterson’s adult titles usually stay there, in the hope of luring more adult buyers.

Here’s what makes me nervous–Little, Brown and Patterson have a point:

According to market research conducted by Codex Group on behalf of Little, Brown, more than 60 percent of the readers of the "Maximum Ride" series are older than 35.

More in a similar vein–except substitute Harvard for Oprah. And periodicals for books. From the New York Times (”At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on the Web,” by Patricia Cohen):

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish - on the Web, at least - free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

The concept–an open-access publishing system that would require authors to “opt out” if they didn’t want their works to be published for free–is, of course, controversial. And, as one prof notes, it’s redundant in a way, because already, thanks to technology, "any professor who wants to put his or her article up online can."

And Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science, proves the value of a Harvard education:

"As far as I know, everyone I’ve ever talked to is supportive of the underlying principle. Still there is a difference between an underlying principle and specific proposal."

It seems like everybody’s offering free downloads this week. Well, not everybody–some folks are selling by the chapter. But, anyway, Oprah’s offering free downloads of Suze Orman’s Las Mujeres y El Dinero (and its English-language translation, Women & Money, too)–but only until tomorrow evening. And you’re not allowed to share it. Frankly, I’m so concerned about my overpowering desire to share that I’m going to nip this one in the bud and not download it.

Like this: “O. J. Simpson’s Former Agent to Publish Book: How I Helped O. J. Get Away with Murder,” by Leon Neyfakh, The New York Observer.

Brought to you by Regnery Publishing.

Free books (”HarperCollins Will Post Free Books on the Web,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times)…

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine.

…and by-the-chapter (”Random House and HC Test Drive Online Access to Their Books,” by Jim Milliot and Rachel Deahl, Publishers Weekly):

In the Random test, Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, published in hardcover in January 2007, is being made available in six chapters and an epilogue - the content bunches are priced individually at $2.99 each - at www.randomhouse.com/madetostick. Consumers who buy a chapter will receive an e-mail with a link for downloading the purchased file, which cannot be shared electronically.

While the first idea isn’t really anything more than Amazon is doing with “Search Inside!,” I’m very excited about the second idea. As soon as they extend it to fiction, I’ll be able to buy John Grisham novels the way I’ve always wanted to–every other chapter.

Hello, New York Times. Nice to have you with us.

“Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular,” by Norimitsu Onishi (January 20, 2008)

“Cell Phones’ Latest Plot Twist,” by Stevenson Swanson (Chicago Tribune, November 12, 2007)

“Ring! Ring! Ring! In Japan, Novelists Find a New Medium,” by Yukari Iwatani Kane (Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2007)

In the Guardian’s theblogbooks, Jean Hannah Edelstein attacks “sizeism” in fiction and suggests that novellas might be the perfect antidote to the reading public’s (supposedly) declining attention span:

And then I had an epiphany: could it be that we should look to classics like Ethan Frome to find the key to saving fiction from the worrisome tides of publishing sturm and drang, the statistics that indicate that people distracted by the trillions of choices provided by digital media are giving up on fiction? Might the way to stop our atrophied attention spans becoming terminally distracted be to simply publish more short books?

I’m in favor of shorter books in the same way that I’m in favor of 100-minute movies and 3-minute pop songs–works of art are usually made better by some judicious cutting. But I suspect that novellas have never caught on for the same reason short stories are dying out: because so many people view reading as being more like homework than a hobby, if they are going to read, they want to feel as though they’ve “accomplished something.”

From the Department of Really, What Did You Expect?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A book publisher that bought an ad on Don Imus’s radio show is suing the shock jock and his former bosses at CBS Radio for more than $4 million, saying Imus insulted the book he was paid to promote.

(”Advertiser sues Don Imus for unscripted comments,” Reuters)

More on the Ishmael Beah controversy in The Australian. Another former child soldier, Kabba Williams, has questioned Beah’s account of events (”Child soldier questions Beah’s tale,” by Peter Wilson):

“That is not true … 1995 was the period when Ishmael got involved in the conflict,” Mr Williams told The Australian in a telephone interview yesterday.

However:

Mr Williams said he was not surprised by what he believed were the inaccuracies in Beah’s account because the traumatic adolescence of the child soldiers meant “a lot of us do not know our own childhoods”.

The publisher, however, may need to take some blame for another, far less forgivable, error:

Beah, according to his own account, spent at least 10 months wandering between villages before reaching the relative safety of the village of Yele in Bonthe district, only to be recruited by the soldiers occupying the town.

A map that has appeared at the front of Beah’s book in its many reprints — more than 650,000 copies are in print and a new soft-back edition is about to be released in Europe — shows that trek as a winding, 1000km route between Mattru Jong and Yele, about 450km to the southwest.

But the map is deeply flawed. In fact, Yele is just 6km southwest of Mattru Jong.