The Guggenheim has become the first museum to issue an electronic exhibition catalogue, for the Maurizio Cattelan show. It's also making out-of-print publications available for online browsing, and an e-book version of the kid’s book I’d Like the Goo-Gen-Heim.

Have bestselling books gotten more expensive? At The Awl, Brent Cox looks at hardcover prices decade by decade, adjusting prices to 2011 dollar values. He finds that since 1951, “you can make a pretty strong argument that the adjusted price of a hardcover book has held constant, neither inflating or deflated, and that this price equals

As of now, all of Michael Chabon’s novels are available as e-books. The author says the deal he struck with digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media is “extremely fair and generous,” but recent remarks suggest Chabon isn’t thrilled about the distribution of e-book royalties: “I agreed to the traditional e-book royalty, which I think is criminally low, because I didn’t really have any legs to stand on. I didn’t want to get left behind in the e-book revolution.”

Drinks were on Jonathan Ames last night in honor of his late HBO series, “Bored to Death”: “I invite all fans of Bored to Death to

Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria has pledged to stop writing in protest against lax online piracy laws and the proliferation of illegal e-books. Etxebarria, who has won a number of prestigious awards—including two that collectively brought her over 800,000 euros in prize money—says she can no longer afford to spend years writing a novel that will only be downloaded.

With book sales falling and e-book sales on the rise, Evan Osnos argues that the role of e-readers “is reminiscent of the way DVDs transformed the movie business in the 1990s, posing a major challenge for theaters while expanding

In honor of Dear Leader's death, The New York Times's Arts Beat blog compiles a North Korea-themed reading list. While most of the books on the list are about the country, one or two were written by Kim Jong-Il himself, including The U.S. Imperialists Started the Korean War.

The Nieman Lab profiles Owni, "first media outlet in France to sell ebooks as part of its core editorial output." The article is part of a Nieman Reports series on the evolving relationship between journalism and the increasingly tech-friendly publishing industry.

At the Paris Review blog, Shalom Auslander laments the

Overseers of the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris have decreed that well-wishers will no longer be allowed to kiss Oscar Wilde’s grave.

Rapper Riff Raff gives a strong endorsement to the new issue of the literary magazine The New York Tyrant.

Ian McEwan remembers his friend, the late Christopher Hitchens: “Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature. Over the three days of my final visit I took a note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian

Author, columnist, and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens is dead at 62 from esophagael cancer. An archive of his Atlantic columns are available to read here, and Ian Parker's 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitch is highly recommended.

A genre within the “Best Books of the Year” genre is taking shape: the “Overlooked Books of the Year.” Two notable examples are “Great Fiction Missed by The New York Times” (from The Daily Beast) and Ruth Franklin’s “Five Books I Wish I Had Written About This Year.”

Ever wonder what the secret formula to the publishing phenomenon of Freakonomics was? Andrew

Never mind blogging—The Observer’s Emily Witt reports on the new way to land a novelty book deal: “Start a Tumblr or Twitter feed with some combination of puppies, fear of protracted adolescence, horrific Americana, text messages from your friends or photos of your parents; add a dose of nostalgia, regret or chagrin, promote it all over the Internet and wait for the literary agents to find you.”

Farhad Manjoo counters Richard Russo’s New York Times op-ed against Amazon’s small-bookstore killing “price-check” app with an especially Slate-like counter-intuitive response: Amazon may be killing

Huffington Post’s new interactive book club won’t be limited just to HuffPost itself, a spokesman tells the Nieman Lab. In addition to soliciting Twitter and Facebook comments, the club will host Flickr and Instagram pages when it launches on January 3.

John Updike’s four-bedroom boyhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania is for sale on eBay. Despite being a “fixer-upper,” the opening bid was $249,000, and there’s a $499,000 ‘Buy It Now’ option.

The Boston Globe's Ideas section recommends holiday gifts for the linguistically inclined.

The Oxford American releases its thirteenth annual music

Amazon says that Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography was the bestselling book of the year in both print and e-book sales.

Thanks to an Etsy seller with a surplus of books and time, it’s now possible to buy “literary action figures” (aka author dolls) this holiday season.

London Mayor Boris Johnson—who once wondered aloud why girls love “big, epically long, boring books”—supports the idea of opening book swaps in the city’s seven hundred tube and train stations, but he isn’t optimistic about meeting the proposed deadline of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in the city.

Amazon is preparing an

Things are heating up in the editor’s mailbox at the New York Review of Books: In response to Rita Dove’s 1,720-word “Letter to the Editor,” a critique of her review of Dove’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, Helen Vendler quips, “I have written the review and I stand by it.” Slate duly revisits a history of dismissive replies. The best? Joan Didion’s reply to a letter critiquing her review of Woody Allen’s Manhattan: “Oh, wow.”

Mayor Bloomberg, speaking on John Gambling’s radio show, says of the curtailing of press freedom at Occupy Wall Street: “We didn’t keep

Tomorow at Cabinet magazine HQ in Brooklyn, editor Brian Dillon will be writing a novel in twenty-four hours. From noon to six, Dillon’s literary experiment will be open to observation from the public, bringing to mind a stunt performed by Georges Simenon in 1927.

Super-critic Kerry Howley is blogging about the primaries for Yahoo! News. In the first installment, she reports on Rick Santorum’s visit to an iconic Iowa City diner. Howley writes, “Well after Santorum departed, the reporters continued their search for non-reporters to interview. Robert ‘Ajax’ Ehl, a young dishwasher [. . .],

Bookforum editor and poet Albert Mobilio joins John Yau and Star Black for a visual arts-inspired reading tonight at 7pm at the Melville House Bookstore in DUMBO, Brooklyn, followed by a discussion with artist Susan Mastrangelo, whose collaboration with Mobilio is currently on display there.

The “maverick” political poet and playwright Christopher Logue has died at age 85 in London. The English literati is already paying tribute: Craig Raine calls Logue “one of the liveliest people I've ever known,” the Times Literary Supplement recalls the poet’s upbraiding of T. S. Eliot in its pages in 1957