The Secret keeps on spreading. Two millions additional copies have been ordered for Rhonda Byrne's self-help phenomenon, yet another beneficiary of Oprah Winfrey, who devoted two shows to the book in early February. Released last fall by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, The Secret now has 3.75 million copies in print and for days has displaced the final Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," from the top of Amazon.com, where "The Secret" is currently out of stock.

"It is a testament to the powerful attraction of The Secret that it has been selling out faster than we can supply it to our customers," Judith Curr, Atria's executive vice president and publisher, said Thursday in a statement. The audio book, a four-CD set, is also selling fast, with 400,000 copies in print, according to Atria, which describes The Secret as containing "wisdom from modern-day teachers -- men and women -- who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness."

Created by Australian producer Byrne, The Secret began as a DVD film, released last March and, thanks to aggressive Internet marketing, became enough of a hit to be spun off into a book, which Byrne finished in less than a month.

Mitch Albom says he'll work with Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films Inc. for a TV movie based on his bestseller "For One More Day." Albom told the Detroit Free Press for a story Tuesday that Winfrey saw the book in manuscript form and expressed early interest. He wrote the teleplay and will serve as an executive producer. Lloyd Kramer will direct.

"For One More Day" tells the story of a former baseball player who plans to end his life but finds redemption when he gets the chance to spend another day with his dead mother. Casting is underway, and filming is expected to begin in July. The two-hour movie is tentatively scheduled to air in December on ABC-TV. The movie will carry the "Oprah Winfrey Presents" title, as did the 1999 TV film adaptation of Albom's "Tuesdays With Morrie."

The order, which was issued earlier this month by the federal court in the Southern District of New York, forces eSnips Ltd. to identify the subscribers who have posted the material, the trust's lawyer said in a telephone interview yesterday. High-quality copies of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The History of Middle-earth and The Silmarillion had been posted on the site, according to British law firm Manches, which is representing the trust.

While eSnips agreed to remove the material, it refused to identify the names of the posters without a court order, Manches's Steven Maier said. Such infringements are "damaging not only to the estate's interest, but also to the integrity of the published works," he said. "It is not something we allow."

Hagit Katzenelson, spokeswoman for eSnips, said the company, which is based jointly Sunnyvale, Calif., and Tel Aviv, has asked the Tolkien estate to give users time to object to the court order. If there are no objections, the company will hand over the information, she said.

In accordance with the U.S.'s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, eSnips removed the offending material as soon as the estate told the company about it, Ms. Katzenelson said in an e-mail. "However we care about the privacy of our users," she said. The website promises users it won't reveal their identities unless legally obliged to do so, she said. Mr. Maier now plans to contact all the eSnips users that posted Tolkien texts on the site to ask them "politely and firmly" to stop.

The book, which is adapted from the Oscar-nominated Best Documentary feature of the same name, is part of an "ultimate Oscar gift bag," said Rodale's senior marketing manager, Brent Gallenberger. Starting today and continuing through Friday, the title will be stuffed into gift bags sent to "the top 10 female movie actresses in Hollywood." One hundred copies will also make it into VIP gift bags on hand for the taking in a "luxury gifting suite" at the Executive Beverly Hills Mansion. According to a Rodale rep, the suite is expected to draw some 500 people over the three days.

Gallenberger, who confirmed Rodale paid an undisclosed fee for inclusion in the Oscar giveaways, said he and his team were able to put together the publicity plug at the last minute by working with the PR firm Madison & Mulholland, which handles select celebrity events. And while no one at Rodale expects any Oscar attendees to walk the red carpet with Gore's book in hand, getting the title to powerful people in Hollywood-a town known for its eco-friendly sensibilities-can't hurt.

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children's books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

On electronic mailing lists like Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians from all over the country, including Missoula, Mont.; upstate New York; Central Pennsylvania; and Portland, Ore., weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting ? or censoring, some argued ? literature for children.

"This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn't have the children in mind," Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. "How very sad." The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well follow suit. Indeed, the topic has dominated the discussion among librarians since the book was shipped to schools.

Pat Scales, a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee, said that declining to stock the book in libraries was nothing short of censorship. "The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole," she said. "That's what censors do ? they pick out words and don't look at the total merit of the book."

Based on Greg Rucka's comic, the story follows Stetko, who is stationed in Anarctica and is brought into a murder investigation. There are only three days until winter hits, when the continent will become dark and she will be trapped with the killer. So, obviously, she has to haul arse to find out the person, before one of the two gets to play Alive. The film will start shooting in Montreal (Huh?) in March, and Wikipedia sources say that they'll also film in Manitoba, which makes much more sense. The flick is headed by Dominic Sena, and sure, he's the man who brought us Gone in Sixty Seconds and Swordfish, but he's also the man behind Rhythm Nation, so maybe the parka-laden people can break into an ultra-serious dance routine at some point in the movie.

Since Ms. Smith's sudden death last week, booksellers and retailers have ordered thousands of copies of the book, sending it into an additional printing of 15,000 copies, a significant number for a publisher like Barricade, which puts out a modest 20 titles a year.

The book, which is priced at $16.95, was originally published in hardcover in 1996, but Barricade, almost eerily prescient, had completed an updated version weeks ago that was scheduled to be issued in trade paperback this spring. Last fall, Carole Stuart, the publisher of Barricade Books, had observed Ms. Smith's recent troubles, notably, the death of her 20-year-old son and the paternity dispute over her newborn daughter. (Ms. Stuart's late husband, the publisher Lyle Stuart, was famous for courting controversy with books like The Anarchist Cookbook, The Turner Diaries and the literary hoax Naked Came the Stranger.)

"I just thought, so much has happened in the 10 years since the first book came out that it would make a good trade paperback," Ms. Stuart said. "Then of course last week she dies. And so we suddenly got really, really attractive to the distributors and to the book buyers." She added hastily: "We didn't kill her or anything."

But she admitted that Barricade Books is relishing its apparent monopoly on books about Ms. Smith. The publisher is rushing paperbacks to its distributor, which will deliver them to stores by tomorrow. Even Wal-Mart has ordered a shipment, a first for Barricade Books, a small publisher that specializes in nonfiction on gangsters, gamblers and celebrities.

The authors, former managers of Ms. Smith back in her struggling Texas days, have sketched a largely sympathetic portrait of her, tracking her beginnings from a chicken-joint waitress to her tabloid-ready marriage in 1994. The newly updated paperback edition ends with Ms. Smith's son?s death last fall; another edition scheduled for March will include a new chapter on Ms. Smith's death, the publisher said. In a telephone interview from Houston, Mr. Redding said Ms. Smith didn't object to the book when it first came out. "Any publicity was good publicity for her," he said.

Crown agreed to pay $1.1 million for the memoir, according to an executive with knowledge of the deal. The book describes some of the traumas Mr. Robison shared with his brother, who wrote in detail about their difficult and unconventional early life in his 2002 bestseller Running with Scissors. That book was recently made into a movie.

Running with Scissors is also the subject of a lawsuit brought by some of the people portrayed in the book, who maintain that much of it wasn't true. Mr. Robinson's memoir also chronicles the author's experience with a mild form of autism, and how his expertise with electronics led to adventures as a sound man for the rock band Kiss and to professional success running a car dealership. "It's a very inspirational story," says an editor who saw the manuscript.

Manhunting rocket jockey Lisa Marie Nowak may have destroyed her reputation, her ties to NASA, and at least one good pair of diapers, but a quick-acting true crime scribe is already banking on a book deal about Nowak's stellar breakdown.

In one of the fastest sales in recent history, Diane Fanning and her agent, Jane Dystel, peddled a proposal to St. Martin's Press (her longtime publisher) yesterday for an undisclosed sum, according to Publisher's Marketplace and GalleyCat. "We started pitching it literally yesterday morning," the author told Radar from her Texas home. "But my agent really did all the hard work."

Fanning's editor, Charles Spicer, declined comment, but the writer's track record with St. Martin's is a long one. She has penned more than six true crime titles for the house, including the recently published Baby Be Mine, which covers the Bobbie Jo Stinnett/Lisa Montgomery case in Louisiana. Under the Knife, the story of psuedo-doctor Dean Faiello and his many victims, will hit stores in April of this year.

"She wasn't for us," the News Corp. chairman said of Regan, who was ousted in December after an uproar over her plans to publish a book by O.J. Simpson and a novel about Mickey Mantle that Murdoch called a "pseudo, pornographic thing." Interviewed at "Media Summit New York," held at McGraw-Hill's headquarters, Murdoch recalled that he signed off on Regan's Simpson project, as long as payment would go only to the ex-jock's kids.

"I said [to Regan], 'If it really reads like a confession, he gets no money,'" Murdoch said. "It's my fault. I should have been closer to it." But Murdoch said he rarely spoke to Regan and lost touch with the project. In November, company executives reached him - at his ranch in Australia - and told him of the public outcry. He said he backed their plan to scuttle the book, noting what he called a "clever working up of public opinion by the families" of victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

"It was a mistake," Murdoch said of the $1.1 million book-and-TV deal, from which Simpson was reportedly paid. But the Simpson fiasco was no reason to fire Regan, Murdoch said, because he had given the green light early on. However, when her plans to publish the Mantle novel came to light, as Murdoch put it, "I thought, oh God, we don't want to go through this again. Just cancel that book."

In December, News Corp. said Regan was fired after she allegedly launched an anti-Semitic tirade at a company lawyer. Her lawyer has since threatened to sue News Corp. for libel and wrongful termination. He could not be reached yesterday. Murdoch said Regan, who was hired in 1994, turned out to be "not a team player, and that's putting it mildly. ... She wasn't for us."

Meg Cabot, who took the publishing world by storm with her phenomenally successful Princess Diaries books, heads off in a dazzling new direction with the launch of three brand-new series. As part of its "Meg Cabot Girl-World Domination" campaign, Scholastic will publish Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls, a smart, funny series for readers ages 8-12 launching in spring 2008. In addition to the Allie Finkle books, two new trilogies for teens, Airhead and Abandon, will be published in 2008 and 2009. Airhead is daring, highly entertaining and a new direction for Meg Cabot, and Abandon is a dramatic modern retelling of the myth of Persephone.

"Meg Cabot rocks," said Lisa Holton, President of Scholastic Children's Books. "Her new series are brilliant, funny, and totally fresh. We can't wait to bring Meg's exciting new work to millions of girls across the country. We will leave no feather boa unturned in our quest for girl-world domination."

"Meg Cabot has an unbelievable ability to channel girls -- readers always relate to her characters even though they're princesses or they can see ghosts," said Abigail McAden, Editorial Director, Point, an imprint of Scholastic. "Now, with Allie Finkle, she's writing for a whole new set of kids, and I'm so excited for younger readers to meet Allie, who is nine and always follows the rules. Mostly. Or she secretly makes up her own. Regardless, Allie gets in a lot of trouble, whether it's by breaking her own rules or somebody else's -- something every kid can relate to. Meg's writing is in a league of its own: it's remarkably accessible, filled with heart, and often just plain hilarious. And her new teen books are no exception: both Airhead and Abandon are fantastically absorbing and sure to be big hits with her teen readers."

Meg Cabot is the author of over forty books for adults and teens, many of which have been bestsellers including five #1 New York Times bestsellers, most notably the Princess Diaries series from HarperCollins, which is currently being published in over 37 countries and was made into two hit movies by Disney. Meg Cabot's books have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. For teens, her books include the Mediator series, the 1-800-Where-R-You? books, All-American Girl, Ready Or Not, Teen Idol, Avalon High, and How to Be Popular, as well as Nicola and the Viscount and Victoria and the Rogue. She also writes books for adults, including The Boy Next Door, Boy Meets Girl, Every Boy's Got One, Size 12 Is Not Fat, and Queen of Babble. Her forthcoming young adult books for HarperCollins include Pants On Fire, Jinx, and a manga sequel to Avalon High. Meg divides her time between Key West, Florida, New York, New York, and her hometown, Bloomington, Indiana.

The Rebus creator has just completed a novella, provisionally entitled Doors Open, about a heist in Edinburgh. The standalone story features a cast of original characters and will be published in 14 parts in the magazine section of the newspaper each Sunday from this March or April.

Rankin follows a growing number of writers tackling the revived serial genre, such as Alexander McCall Smith with the "44 Scotland Street" series in the Scotsman, and Ronan Bennett in the Observer with Zugzwang. Orion has no immediate plans to publish the Rankin novella, but deputy CEO and publisher Malcolm Edwards said that it will appear in book form "at some time."

Previous fiction serializations in the New York Times include Patricia Cornwell's At Risk, Michael Connelly's The Overlook and, most recently, Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road.

Attorneys for Philip Anschutz allege that author Clive Cussler duped the Denver industrialist into paying $10 million for film rights to the adventure novel "Sahara" by flagrantly inflating his book sales to more than 100 million copies. "Cussler and his agent had gotten away with these numbers for years," said Alan Rader, Anschutz's lawyer. "It was a lie and it doomed the movie." The claim is "ridiculous," Cussler said Thursday outside a courtroom at Los Angeles County Superior Court. "They wanted the book. They solicited us."

The allegations surfaced at the start of a civil trial that seeks to settle a dispute over who is responsible for Anschutz's company losing $105 million on "Sahara," the 2005 movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz. The trial, which includes claims of sabotage, fraud, profligate spending and racism, is expected to provide a rare behind-the-scenes look at the world of moviemaking. Lawyers selected a jury Thursday and are scheduled to make opening arguments today.

Among those on the witness list are Anschutz, the secretive 67-year-old multibillionaire; former Paramount Pictures Chairwoman Sherry Lansing; director Breck Eisner, the son of the former Walt Disney Co. chairman; McConaughey, who also served as executive producer; and Cussler, the 75-year-old author. Cussler initially sued Anschutz's Crusader Entertainment in 2004, charging that producers reneged on a contract that gave the author extraordinary approval rights over the screenplay. Anschutz countersued, alleging that Cussler deliberately torpedoed the film through his repeated attempts to write his own scripts, all of which were rejected by the producers. Both sides are seeking millions of dollars in damages.

In court papers, Anschutz's attorneys claim that Cussler "perpetrated a massive fraud" to secure an "unprecedented" contractual agreement in 2000. "The essence of Cussler's fraud was simple: He lied about how many books he had sold to induce Crusader to enter the agreement," the papers state. In addition to their effect on the trial, the allegations may raise broader questions about the authenticity of publishing-industry sales figures. Although they declined to comment on the specifics of the Cussler case, New York publishing experts said Thursday that the industry had a long history of inflating book sales and hyping an author's success. But these practices have declined, they added, with the emergence of Nielsen BookScan in 2001.

Citigroup analyst William Bird in a client note kept a "Hold" rating on shares of Scholastic, saying the stock already prices in much of the Harry Potter momentum. He has a $36 target price on shares. He anticipates the book will generate $210 million in sales in 2008, a contribution of as much as 62 cents per share to earnings.

The analyst noted that Scholastic's financial performance has been volatile, and has been significantly influenced by the success of Harry Potter book sales. Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble Inc. and Borders Group Inc. immediately began advertising the book on their Web sites, with 40 percent discounts for pre-ordering. The book is anticipated to run to about 600 pages, and has a suggested cover price of $34.99. Amazon is offering the title at $18.99.

Price competition has been so intense over the years that many retailers have acknowledged they don't make money on the series, depending instead on customers buying other books along with Potter. Shares of Scholastic fell 8 cents to $35.27, while Amazon rose 81 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $38.48, both on the Nasdaq. Barnes & Noble added $1.01, or 2.6 percent, to $39.94, while Borders added 28 cents to $21.26.

Sidney Sheldon had a prolific and award-winning career writing for theater, movies and television, but he often proclaimed his greatest love for another creative outlet. "Writing novels is the most fun I've ever had," Sheldon once said. The best-selling author died Tuesday at 89 at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage of complications from pneumonia. His wife, Alexandra, was by his side. "I try to write my books so the reader can't put them down," Sheldon explained in a 1982 interview. "I try to construct them so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she has to read just one more chapter. It's the technique of the old Saturday afternoon serial: Leave the guy hanging on the edge of the cliff at the end of the chapter." Sheldon mostly wrote about stalwart women who triumph in a hostile world of ruthless men. His notable novels included "Rage of Angels," "The Other Side of Midnight," and "If Tomorrow Comes." "I like to write about women who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity," he said. "Women have tremendous power - their femininity, because men can't do without it." Several of his novels became television miniseries, often with the author as producer.

*****

Though he won a Tony, an Oscar and an Emmy (for "I Dream of Jeannie") during his career, Sheldon said he derived the most satisfaction from writing his novels. "I love writing books," he said. "When you do a novel you're on your own. It's a freedom that doesn't exist in any other medium."

What's a guy to do when he's "dated and made love to some of the most desirable, beautiful starlets in Hollywood" but still can't find love? If you're Scott Baio, you find two co-writers to package up your pinhead thoughts and try to sell a book. Perhaps emboldened by the success of early '90s casualty Tori Spelling, who sold her memoir to Simon & Schuster for $300,000 in December (albeit, after asking for $2 million), Baio is shopping around his own, poignantly titled tell-all, BaioWatch: How I Dated and Loved Hollywood's Most Beautiful Women and Ended Up Alone.

The book, which Radar obtained the first 60 pages of, is effectively a compendium of love advice Baio gleaned from flings with everyone from Pam Anderson to Heather "The One That Got Away" Locklear to, um, Liza Minnelli (A taste: "Take it from me, when a woman says, 'I need time to think,' it's over. You're f**ed. That train has left the station. Cry for two days, then find someone else.")

Those looking for a little Baio lovin' to put next to their Charles in Charge: Season One DVD will undoubtedly be thrilled if he happens to find a publisher (though, a publishing source notes, "several have already passed.").

*****

On the exact moment he knew his relationship with Pamela Anderson was over: "One day Pamela came home and said, 'I'm thinking of getting my boobs done.' Admittedly, I was surprised. My initial response, 'Reduced?' She already had large, beautiful, natural breasts. At that moment I knew our relationship would soon begin to crumble. Pamela had finally gone Hollywood-or whatever it is that happens when a woman becomes a hot celebrity."

*****

Perhaps most bizarre, however, is an exchange he details in which a 51-year-old Minnelli tries to get Baio to become her surrogate baby daddy: "'I really want your sperm. You're a talented, good-looking Italian guy. That's what I want my child to be.' I was incredulous. 'What are you gonna do with my sperm?' 'Well, I'm going to take my egg and put it into somebody else's body.'"

1. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R Tolkien

2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

3. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

4. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus - John Gray

5. 1984 - George Orwell

6. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone - J.K Rowling

7. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

8. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

9. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

10.Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank