A fight between two high-school cheerleaders has resulted in an American court ruling that print-on-demand services are not liable in defamation lawsuits. (Sounds like a plot twist on Gossip Girl…)

The two cheerleaders, Ms. Calcagni and Ms. Sandler, battled over a boy they both liked and Calcagni allegedly spray-painted hateful graffiti near Sandler’s home. After she was convicted of a hate crime, Calcagni’s family hired a freelance writer to tell their side of the story, which they published using Amazon.com’s BookSurge print-on-demand service, a kind of 21st-century version of a vanity press. Sandler’s family sued BookSurge for defamation, but the suit was thrown out when BookSurge was deemed to have had “negligible involvement” with the authors of the book. MediaShift reports:

Traditionally, book publishers could be held liable for defamatory statements in their books under the theory that they exercised some form of control over the books’ contents. But online print-on-demand companies typically provide printing and distribution services only, and do not perform the traditional editing, fact-checking and marketing functions associated with other publishers. Sandler v. Calcagni appears to be the first case in which someone has argued that a print-on-demand company should face traditional “publisher” liability.

The court decided that BookSurge had no editorial input into the book’s contents, and therefore could not be held responsible for anything libellous or defamatory. It was found that the service acted more as a mass copier than a publisher, which would imply more active involvement with the process of preparing the book for press.

There won’t be an appeal, since the two parties subsequently settled their differences out of court.

Which leads Quillblog to wonder, why all this acrimony? Calcagni and Sandler are cheerleaders: couldn’t they just settle their differences in the good ol’ fashioned Hollywood manner, with a cheerleading competition? Bring it on!

The National Library of India has created a five-person committee to investigate charges that rare books and manuscripts are missing from their collection. The Hindu, India’s national newspaper, reports that the Ministry of Cultural Affairs asked library authorities for a report of their holdings after a survey conducted by the auditor general back in January concluded that “many rare books and manuscripts were missing from the rare books section.”

This came as surprise to R. Ramachandran, director in charge of the National Library, who refuted the charge, saying, “there are no rare books or manuscripts missing from our library.” However, as The Hindu points out, the National Library hasn’t done any inventory on its stock in the past 25 years.

The National Library’s rare books collection contains thousands (give or take a few) of government documents, forgein government documents, manuscripts, 17th-century maps, newspapers (including Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, India’s first paper), and more.

Forgetting to return your library books long enough to rack up massive fines is one thing, but it seems one fellow in Denver took the concept of “checking out” library items a bit too literally. Associated Press reports:

A man accused of checking out hundreds of books and DVDs from libraries around the Denver area and then trying to sell them will be doing all his library borrowing from now on behind bars.

Denver prosecutors say 34-year-old Thomas Pilaar was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered Tuesday to pay $53,549 in restitution. He pleaded guilty in May.

Of an estimated 1,400 books and DVDs that were taken, about 500 have been recovered.

Denver Public Library estimated it had lost $35,000, while Douglas County said it had $11,000 worth of overdue items.

Authorities were tipped off by a woman who recently bought books on Craigslist and noticed the library identification stamps.

Vincent Bugliosi, the L.A. prosecutor who tried Charles Manson and wrote about the case in Helter Skelter, has a new book that accuses President Bush of the murder of American soldiers who die in Iraq. The book is a bestseller, but has received very little mainstream attention so far.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Bugliosi, in a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, said he had expected some resistance from the mainstream media because of the subject matter — the book lays a legal case for holding President Bush “criminally responsible” for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq — but not a virtual blackout.

His publisher and publicist said they had expected that Mr. Bugliosi’s credentials would ensure coverage — he is, after all, fairly mainstream. His last book, a 1,612-page volume on the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History, which was published last year, sought to debunk the conspiracy theorists. It is being made into a 10-hour miniseries by HBO and the actor Tom Hanks.

Mr. Bugliosi said bookers for cable television, where he has made regular appearances to promote books, have ignored his latest offering. MSNBC and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” were two outlets Mr. Bugliosi had thought would show interest, but neither did.

“They are not responding at all,” he said. “I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they’d fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left.”

Non-sequitur graffiti has been the rage in Toronto for a while – the Val Kilmer faces that showed up a couple of years ago being the most notable example – but someone recently gave the fad a literary spin, as reported by Torontoist.com:

It seems that some Toronto taggers are no longer content to scrawl their own names on blank concrete canvases around the city and are trying instead to make more of a cultural statement. Last year, references to composer Gustav Mahler popped up in several places around town. This year, a more cryptic stencil has appeared on the Humber Bay Arch Bridge, boldly proclaiming “ISBN 486-28495-6″ for all to see and ponder. This International Standard Book Number turns out to be a paperback edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.

Making it a reference to the Dover paperback edition is a nice, democratic touch. Even when book nerds go bad, they’re still nerds.

(And being nerds ourselves, we have to note that the ISBN is actually 0-486-28495-6.)

From The Los Angeles Times:

Warner Bros. Pictures and the producers behind the $4.5-billion film franchise featuring the beloved boy wizard will split the seventh and final novel in the J.K. Rowling series into two films.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I” will hit theaters in November 2010, followed by “Part II” in May 2011, a decision that is being met around the world with fans’ cheers but also plenty of cynical smirks.

“Cynical smirks”? I can’t imagine why, when everyone involved says the split “would be to serve the story, not the bottom line.” Why would Hollywood producers lie to us?

Though won’t those kids be in their forties by the time this thing is finally over?

From The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Seattle police are looking for a man who attempted to mail to Paris a box full of books packed with handgun parts and ammunition.

An alert clerk at a Wallingford UPS Store was preparing to ship the plastic-wrapped books on Jan. 31 when she noticed that one of the hardbacks rattled, according to police reports. The woman shook the book and spotted a gun part slipping through the pages.

The clerk phoned police Monday, after attempting to contact the sender. Searching the books, officers found a disassembled Beretta handgun, three loaded magazines and two boxes of 9mm ammunition hidden in hollowed copies of Richard Tarnas’ Cosmos and Psyche, Isaac Asimov’s Chronology of the World, and a communications text.

The folks at Véhicule Press have posted a story from Wednesday’s Montreal Gazette on their web page, about a high-speed car chase that took place on the highway between Longueuil and Montreal and involved police and an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Though it’s not apparent from the story why Véhicule would want to post it, their reasons become clearer in the follow-up commentary:

While poet Asa Boxer was in Toronto on a Signal reading tour, his 1994 Oldsmobile Cutlass was being pursued by police across the Champlain Bridge. It did not end well, and our hearts go out to Asa, who as of today will be using public transportation.

Apparently, some dude stole Boxer’s car, and the chase ended after the thief collided with an SQ Cruiser. The perp was arrested and charged for fleeing police and car theft.

All we could think after hearing this was: poets can afford cars?

If you’re like us, you’re probably getting real sick of hearing about O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional If I Did It, but attention must be paid when the queen herself, Oprah, thrusts it back into the limelight. Yesterday, she invited the Goldman family onto her show to discuss the book and their decision to publish it, a choice for which they have been criticized. According to MSNBC, which has posted a good summation of the show’s highlights, Oprah said it was a “moral, ethical dilemma” for her to give more publicity to the book:

Winfrey acknowledged that her program often promotes books and authors, yet, she said, “I don’t want to be in the position to promote this book, because I, too, think it’s despicable.”

The MSNBC piece ends by stating that, as of yesterday, If I Did It was No. 8 in sales at Barnes and Noble and No. 52 on Amazon.com. According to a more recently updated piece on The Book Standard website, however, the book has subsequently shot up to No. 1 at Barnes and Noble and No. 2 on Amazon.com. Way to go Oprah…

Last month, if you’ll recall, we blogged a story in The Guardian about Polish pulp fiction author Krystian Bala, whom police had arrested for a seven-year-old murder. They were tipped off, it seems, by the author’s own novel, Amok, which featured a killing that was much too similar to the real-world one. When last we checked in, the case against Bala seemed somewhat circumstantial, but it appears to have been good enough for the courts. According to The Washington Post, Bala has now been convicted and sentenced.

The killer in Bala’s alcohol- and sex-fueled “Amok” gets away with his grisly crime. But on Wednesday, a court in Wroclaw sentenced Bala to 25 years in prison for planning and directing the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski.

“The evidence gathered gives sufficient basis to say that Krystian Bala committed the crime of leading the killing of Dariusz Janiszewski,” Judge Lidia Hojenska said. “He was the initiator of the murder; his role was leading and planning it.”

Hojenska said it was not clear who actually did the killing and who might have aided Bala in the crime, but the evidence overwhelmingly pointed to Bala’s involvement in the events that led to Janiszewski’s disappearance.

The judge’s seeming tendency to conflate Bala’s own personality with that of his fictional protagonist is a bit troubling, but in any event, Bala sounds like such an ultra-creep that it’s hard to feel that justice wasn’t served. Incidentally, anyone out there know how his novel is selling now?