A formerly obscure title, Get a Grip on Physics by U.K. professor John Gribbin, has experienced an increase in sales after a photo of Tiger Woods’ car accident revealed the book lying among the wreckage.

According to The Independent, the book has jumped to 2,268th on the Amazon bestsellers list from 396,224th the previous day.

From the article:

“This is one of my older and lesser known books – a guide to new physics for non-scientists. I can only guess that Tiger has been interested in the various stories about the Large Hadron Collider, and wanted to learn more. Several of my books have been doing better than usual this year,” Dr. Gribbin said yesterday.

The National Post has compiled reader comments from Gribbin’s Amazon page relating to Woods’ accident, such as:

“Just a warning, that although this book really does help you get a grip on physics, it should not be read while driving, especially at 2:30 am” 

The 2003 book is now out of print, and although Dr. Gribbin is delighted that people are reading his books, he wishes they were reading one that is in print.

A few bookish links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir hits shelves today. Palin tells Oprah in an unused clip from yesterday’s interview that “logistically speaking, practically speaking, it wasn’t a real difficult exercise to write the book” (via GalleyCat) 
• The Associated Press has compiled a list of the errors found in Going Rogue
• Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular Twilight empire series, also sat on Oprah’s couch in a rare public appearance last Friday. In an unused clip (via Entertainment Weekly), Meyer admits to being “a little burned out by vampires” and says that she “may go spend some time with … aliens.” 
• For those of you sick of everything vampire, Bookgasm offers a werewolf alternative in David Wellington’s Frostbite 
• The New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year is “unfriend,” which is defined as: “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”  Runners-up for the title included “hashtag,” “sexting,” “teabagger,” and “tramp stamp”
• The future is digital: the National Post reports that students at Toronto’s Blyth Academy will all receive a Sony Reader to replace those stuffy old textbooks of yore 
• How would you like your Bible?  Handwritten or on your Xbox? 

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Did Ingram accidentally leak the next Oprah book club pick? (By the way, it’s Uwem Akpan’s short story collection Say You’re One of Them)
• Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol sells 1 million copies in a day – but what’s really impressive is that the Kindle edition is outselling the print version on Amazon
• Espresso Book Machine lands a lucrative contract to print Google’s public domain books
• HuffPo partners with The New York Review of Books
• Australian ministers debate the (de)merits of parallel importation (it’s more interesting than it sounds, at least if you’re an Australian publisher fearing the market for domestic books could be decimated)

Bright Shiny Morning, the third book by Oprah-blacklisted author James Frey, is arriving in paperback next week with an added passage that seems to be based on Frey’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show three years ago. The book, which focuses on the lives of several L.A. “lost souls,” includes the following paragraph, which was omitted from the original hardcover edition. From the Guardian:

He went on the show. It wasn’t what he was told it was going to be. He got berated, yelled at, booed, scolded, lectured, humiliated. He knew there was no way to stop it, or defend himself, so he went along with it. Some people said he deserved it, some said he didn’t, he understood both sides of the argument. It got covered live. It was the lead story on the evening news, ahead of the war, the political shooting, the continued disintegration of Middle Eastern governments.

The character continues by explaining that after his appearance on the show he began taping all of his phone calls, including those with the show’s host:

They talked for almost an hour. What she told him directly contradicted all of her public statements. She told him a story about her life before she was famous, about some mistakes she made. She told him a story about a book she wrote, and about what was in it, and about why she decided to halt the publication of it, and who helped her make the decision. He taped everything. Someday he might tell his side of it. Someday he might play the tapes. Someday.

When questioned about the new section by the New York Post, Frey laughed and said: “The book is fiction. Interpret it however you want.”

It’s not quite Oprah, but in the U.K. it’s the closest thing there is. Television celebrities Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan are the hosts of Britain’s wildly popular Richard and Judy’s Book Club, and this year two Canadians have made their reading list.

From the CBC:

Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo and Winnipegger Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle are two of 10 books to make the special list.

Books chosen by Madeley and Finnigan — who appear on digital TV channel Watch — often become bestsellers in Britain.

Galloway’s novel has already been singled out here in Canada by the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury, which included the book on their longlist, and by Indigo’s self-appointed “chief booklover,” Heather Reisman, who chose it as one of “Heather’s Picks” last year.

Doubleday U.S. must be turning cartwheels at the announcement of the Davidson endorsement, since the novel has performed below expectations south of the 49th parallel. Maybe the endorsement from Richard and Judy will help Doubleday recoup at least some of the gargantuan $1.25 million advance it paid out to the author.

The world may be in the grip of a global recession, but that hasn’t stopped some people from spending profligate amounts online for individual books. According to AbeBooks.com’s list of most expensive books sold in 2008, the top price was paid for a copy of Francis Seymour Haden’s Études à l’Eau-Forte, a collection of 25 etchings, which went for the modest sum of $17,216. Also on the list was a first edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which sold for $12,874.

Meanwhile, on the AbeBooks’ bestseller lists, Canada’s own Eckhart Tolle scored the top spot for the North American site, with the Oprah-endorsed volume A New Earth. Other books on the North American list include The Audacity of Hope, by U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom, and – appearing somewhat out of place among the nine other potboilers and self-help pablum – Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Quillblog is puzzled by this one, and wonders whether it represents a momentary lapse of reason on the part of the reading public or whether it just appeared on a massive number of course syllabi in 2008.

The Germans seem to have better more sophisticated more literary tastes than their North American counterparts: AbeBooks’ German site has The Gulag Archipelago and The Divine Comedy at the number one and two spots, respectively.

UPDATE: This story contains material that has been corrected. The title of Eckhart Tolle’s volume was originally cited as A Good Earth, which is incorrect. Quillblog regrets the error.

Some book-related stories and developments over the holidays:

• Good thing writers aren’t in it for the fame. As the National Post reports, nearly half of Canadians can’t name a single Canadian author.
• The Guardian obit for Harold Pinter, an appreciation by Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema, and a less appreciative consideration by Tim Walker, who wonders why the playwright had to be such a bummer.
• The New York Times has the full scoop on the latest phony memoir, this one a Holocaust-related love story that took in Oprah as well as a major publisher.
• Entertainment Weekly breaks down the surprise court ruling that could endanger the upcoming release of the long-awaited film adaptation of the classic graphic novel Watchmen.
• Griffin-winning poet Don McKay and former Playwrights Canada Press publisher Angela Rebeiro are named members of the Order of Canada.
• In The Washington Post, former Harcourt publisher André Bernard ponders the state of his industry and pays tribute to Robert Giroux.

• James Frey was an intern for a day at Gawker.com. Readers were invited to post questions for him — Oprah jokes and inquiries about his fact-checking process ensued
• What’s your seasonal reading pattern? Molly Flatt at the Guardian blogs about the books we choose as the seasons change
• Hugh McGuire at the Huffington Post asks what will happen when the generation of hybrid readers — people who live in a digital world, but grew up reading books — dies out

What happens when a book club’s members are mismatched – when the majority wants pop-lit and Oprah’s picks versus the classics, or when one member is found without an anecdote to contribute to a conversation about soiled Pampers? The New York Times’s Joanne Kaufman writes about book clubs gone bad:

“Who knew a book group could be such a soap opera?” said Barb Burg, senior vice president at Bantam Dell, which publishes many titles adopted by book groups. “You’d think it would just be about the book. But wherever I go, people want to talk to me about the infighting and the politics.”

Sometimes the problem is a life-stage mismatch among group members. “I know of a group where all but one member has young children,” said Susanne Pari, author of the novel The Fortune Catcher and the program director at Book Group Expo. “They talk for 15 minutes about the book and then launch into a discussion of poopy diapers and nap times and preschool.”

Esther Bushell, a professional book-group facilitator, says that one woman left a book club because she couldn’t see herself sitting around and talking about a book — instead, she was looking to network.

Another woman decamped because she wanted to read more chick lit. “I hate to sound ponderous,” Ms. Bushell said, “but I have a certain moral obligation. I don’t feel I can be paid for leading a discussion about The Devil Wears Prada.”

The holiday season is upon us, with Christmas six weeks (count ‘em, folks) away, and Motoko Rich writes in The New York Times that U.S. booksellers and publishers are bracing for a difficult quarter:

Leonard S. Riggio, chairman and largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble, said in an internal memorandum predicting a dreadful holiday shopping season, as first reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, that “never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in.”

Last week HarperCollins, the books division of the News Corporation, reported that fiscal first-quarter operating income had slid to $3 million from $36 million a year earlier, despite its publication of the Oprah Winfrey-anointed novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.

Rich mentions tactics booksellers are using to encourage sales, and looks at an independent bookstore that is instituting a priority seating policy at book readings to customers who purchased the book. And though the retail season is looking soft, it’s apparently not getting in the way of big book deals.

Although some might be cautious about signing a debut novelist, most publishers said they were still aggressively pursuing deals for celebrity books and others with natural best-seller prospects. Last month Little, Brown & Company signed a deal with the comedian Tina Fey for a sum reported as more than $5 million, and Jerry Seinfeld was out with a book proposal this week that some publishers suggested could go for a high seven-figure advance.

One possible silver lining, Rich says, is that since books aren’t selling as well as they would in a better economy, it doesn’t take as many sales to call a book a “bestseller” — a tip to resumé-padding B-listers everywhere.

On the Canadian front, though, things could be very different — and not so dire — for publishers and booksellers. The Canadian Publishers’ Council says in a media release that “books are expected to be one of the most popular gift purchases of 2008,” and Deloitte’s Annual Holiday Survey predicts that holiday spending levels among Canadians will match or be slightly higher than last year, citing books third in a list of top 10 holiday gifts for 2008.