Publishing house Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., has acquired the rights to the first lady's book. In a statement, Scriber says the memoir will offer "an intimate account of Mrs. Bush's life experiences, including eight years in the White House."

Nan Graham, Vice President and Editor-in Chief of Scriber, will edit the book. Neither Scriber nor the White House has said how much Mrs. Bush will be paid. Laura Bush's predecessor, Hillary Clinton, received a blockbusting $8 million advance for her book, "Living History." Former First Lady Barbara Bush's memoirs far outsold her husband's.

In 2010, HarperCollins will release an investigative work, currently untitled, by reporter-anchor Andrew Kirtzman, who has been featured on the New York City television stations WCBS and NY1. Random House will publish a Madoff book, also currently untitled, by Richard Behar, a journalist who has written for Time, Fortune and other magazines.

Upon learning that the widely publicized Holocaust love story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat, which inspired the picture book Angel Girl, is not entirely true, Lerner Publishing Group announced yesterday that it would pull the book from shelves. Lerner imprint Carolhroda Books published Angel Girl by Laurie Friedman in September 2008. The house has canceled all pending reprints and is issuing refunds on all returned books. The company is no longer offering the book for sale and is recalling the book from the market.

Angel Girl retold a portion of Mr. Rosenblat's story about surviving a work camp during the Holocaust by receiving food from a girl from the other side of the fence, and then meeting this same girl many years later on a blind date in the U.S. and marrying her. After investigation by the New Republic, Rosenblat and his agent, Andrea Hurst, released statements on December 27, saying parts of his story were fabricated. Hurst's statement said that although Rosenblat's stories from the concentration camps were true, he invented the love story. Rosenblat also revealed that he made up the chance reunion with the girl.

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Berkley Books, which was set to publish Rosenblat's memoir, Angel at the Fence, has cancelled its project as well. Berkley will demand that the author and the agent return all money they have received for this work.

• Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Definitive Collection DVD Box Set. Fans of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who solves crimes using his little grey cells, will adore this fabulous boxed set of the BBC series which starred the brilliant David Suchet.
  
  
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children's Books, 3rd Edition by Harold D. Underdown (Alpha Books)
  
  
• A Silent Ocean Away by DeVa Gantt (Avon), a breathtaking saga of an extraordinary American family.
  
  
• Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon, an ingenious and mirthful exploration of small-town America. (Little, Brown)

Separately, a spokesman for the Knopf Publishing Group that assumed control of the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese imprints in the recent reorganization said that there had been layoffs Wednesday in the Doubleday imprint. A spokesman for the Crown Publishing Group said there had also been an unspecified number of layoffs at the Broadway imprint.

Ms. Kamil, who has headed the Dial Press since 1993, recently shepherded the best-seller "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, and has worked with authors including Allegra Goodman and Elizabeth McCracken.

Ms. Kamil will continue in her role as editorial director at Dial while taking on the new editor-in-chief post at what is known colloquially as Little Random. She will report to Gina Centrello, who is president and publisher of the Random House Publishing Group. Under the reorganization announced by Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Random House, Ms. Centrello's empire expanded to include Dial Press, Bantam Dell, and Spiegel & Grau, formerly a part of Doubleday.

Publishers now on board include Houghton Mifflin, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette and Penguin Group USA. Having these big names is a big step forward for iTunes itself in becoming an e-book shop and the iPhone in becoming a legitimate e-book reader and competitor to products like the Kindle and the Sony E-Reader.

The first official books will begin to roll out Monday and include titles such as Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight," Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" and a number of others by Christopher Paolini, Brad Meltzer and Scott Westerfeld. There are already several e-book readers in the app store, as well as a number of out-of-copyright e-books, but ScrollMotion's product is unique in that these are stand-alone and newer in-copyright titles and best-selling novels.

Each book is a separate application using Scroll Motion's new reader technology called Iceberg and is wrapped only in the FairPlay iTunes DRM, putting Apple directly into the e-book business by allowing them to pick up a certain percentage of each sale.

The "Australia" helmer has purchased the rights to "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald's tome of the Roaring Twenties. While a script does not yet exist, Luhrmann intends to focus on it after "Australia's" awards run. No studio is attached yet. Fitzgerald's novel of American excess has spawned a Broadway play and multiple films, including Jack Clayton's 1974 pic starring Robert Redford and scripted by Francis Ford Coppola.

• A Curse Dark As Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic )
• Graceling by Kristin Cashore (Harcourt)
• Absolute Brightness by James Lecesne (HarperTeen)
• Madapple by hristina Meldrum (Knopf)
• Me, the Missing, and the Dead by Jenny Valentine (HarperTeen)

The book is just the latest self-help book to be made into a film, although it is certainly one of the most unusual. Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo's 2004 New York Times bestseller He's Just Not That Into You has been made into a rom-com starring Jennifers Aniston and Connelly, Ben Affleck, Drew Barrymore and Scarlett Johansson, while Mireille Guilano's Why French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure, is being made into a film by Hilary Swank's 2S Films production company.

"Michael Wolff has been obsessed with me and my sex life for close to 30 years," she tells us. "I'm finally going to give him what he wants - he's going to get [bleeped] by Judith Regan."

Shortly after Doubleday signed him to write "The Man Who Owns the News," Wolff sent an e-mail to Regan, whose storied career at Rupert-owned HarperCollins had ended. She was fired amid controversy over her plan to publish O.J. Simpson's memoir, "If I Did It ..." "Once again, I beseech you: Talk to me," Wolff wrote Regan. "Considering the dreadful things I write about you when you don't talk to me, it really can't get any worse by talking to me. ... Come on, you know how this works. You're now the News Corp. whipping girl -- so at least put it back to them."

Regan refused. The result? In his book, Wolff allows that Regan succeeded "spectacularly" in producing best sellers for Murdoch. But Wolff also describes Regan as "a nut," "unemployable anywhere else" and "a reviled figure." He also reported in his main text that one of Murdoch's top lawyers accused her of making anti-Semitic remarks. Only in an unnumbered end note does he acknowledge that News Corp. later apologized to Regan, accepting that she never made those remarks (and reportedly paid her $10.75 million).

"Michael Wolff had an obligation to prominently set the record straight," says Regan. "He's grossly irresponsible. I'm going to sue him personally, so he'll have to spend his own money. He projects his own perverted view of the world on everyone else. He is consumed with hatred, vitriol and pathological envy."

Regan also resents Wolff's past claim that "on several occasions, [Judith and I] almost got involved." "He's having fantasies," says Regan. "He's a repulsive specimen." Says Wolff: "Among Judith's problems is a hair-trigger inclination to make loopy accusations. Some years ago when I wrote about her, she announced to The Washington Post ... that I was probably gay -- that I was writing critically of her because I was secretly in love with one of her boyfriends."

The singer and activist Harry Belafonte is embroiled in a feud with the family of Martin Luther King after he tried to sell papers relating to the late civil rights leader. Three documents, including a draft of King's first major speech against American involvement in Vietnam and another found in the pocket of the suit he was wearing when he was shot, were withdrawn from auction in New York following objections from the King estate.

Belafonte had said he intended to give the proceeds to charity. Hours before the sale yesterday the estate, which has been criticised for trying to profit from King's papers, issued a statement condemning the auction and saying that it believed the documents had been "wrongly acquired" by Belafonte.

"The King estate contends that these documents are the property of the estate of Martin Luther King Jr," the statement said. "Mrs Coretta Scott King [King's wife] and the King estate stopped a previous attempt by members of Harry Belafonte's family to anonymously and secretly auction wrongfully acquired King documents through a Beverly Hills auction house." It added that lawyers were "looking into issues related to the December 11th Sotheby's auction of King documents". According to the auction house, Belafonte - who became friends with King in Harlem in the mid-1950s - asked that the items be withdrawn from the sale.

In an interview before the objections from the estate were aired, Belafonte, a long-time social activist, said that he intended to donate the estimated proceeds of $750,000 to $1.3m to charities for "the disenfranchised". "I am at the end of my life," he said, "I will be 82 shortly and there are a lot of causes I believe in for which resources are not available, and there is a need to redistribute those resources."

The company has followed Pearson in curtailing any salary rises for staff "making more than $50,000", while for those making under $50,000 there will be "a pool for modest increases".

In a memo circulated to staff chief executive John Sargent wrote: "We are now clearly in a recession and there is still no clarity on how long or deep it will be. What is clear is that retail book sales are down, advertising revenues are down, and even countercyclical businesses like education are struggling in many cases. We are not immune to these forces, and our business continues to be soft. So the time has come to take action for next year."

Sargent stated: "Effective January 1st for 2009 we will freeze salaries for everyone making more than $50,000. For those making under $50,000 there will be a pool for modest increases. All bonus plans will stay in effect, but all are sensitive to individual company profitability and individual performance. Thus the impact on individual bonus plans will vary."

He said that the company would "continue to review all of our business policies as events unfold this year", adding "I have every confidence that we will be doing as well as the market allows and then some".

I discovered Goddard, a British mystery/suspense novelist, last year, almost by accident. In Pale Battalions, his second novel, was the first book I read on my new Kindle. Since then I've read eight more and have about seven to go. I'll parcel them out, because they're too good to gulp. There are missing heirs, stolen fortunes, mistaken identities, raffish con men, hot sex, and cold-blooded murder.