That’s certainly true of Pat Conroy, the best-selling autobiographical novelist.

Reading, along with writing, saved his life, he says.

Novels, from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, helped rescue him from an abusive father, who “confused me about what it meant to become a man,” and unwittingly served as the model for Bull Meecham in The Great Santini.

The 15 essays in My Reading Life, some previously published, should delight curious readers, even those who aren’t big fans of the lush torrents of words in Conroy’s novels that include The Prince of Tides and most recently, South of Broad.

The essays celebrate his favorite novels, fictional characters and several real-life heroes — a teacher, a book publisher, and most of all, Conroy’s self-taught mother, who raised him “to tell the stories that will make all our lives clear.”

He writes, “Peg Conroy used reading as a text of liberation, a way out of the sourceless labyrinth that devoured poor Southern girls like herself.”

She read what her son, a lonely military brat, was assigned in school: “Only after her death did I realize that my mother entered The Citadel the same day I did. She made sure that her education was identical to mine. She knew Milton’s Paradise Lost a whole lot better than I did.”

Whether or not you share Conroy’s love of Gone With the Wind (“It will long be a favorite of any country that ever lost a war,” he writes), he’s fun to read and debate.

English teachers looking for new ways to excite students would do well to cite Conroy:

“Before I’d ever asked a girl out, I had fallen in love with Anna Karenina, taken Isabel Archer to high tea at the Grand Hotel in Rome, delivered passionate speeches to Juliet beneath her balcony, abandoned Dido in Carthage, made love to Lara in Zhivago’s Russia, walked beside Lady Brett Ashley in Paris, danced with Madame Bovary — I could form a sweet-smelling corps de ballet composed of the women I have loved in books.”

Newspapers and book publishers used to tout, “News you can use.” Call this “Fiction you can use.”

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has sold more than $150million worth of recipe books, second only to Harry Potter author JK Rowling according to his book publishers.

The 35-year-old has topped the bookselling charts with this 30-Minute Meals cookery book, selling 80,000 copies last week.

Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals is selling almost 80,000 copies a week on the back of a television series and strong promotion by Sainsbury’s, which Oliver endorses.

Tom Weldon, managing director of Jamie’s book publisher Penguin General Books, said: ‘It’s perfect for this moment. People are time-rushed and in this recession want to cook more at home.

‘The reason Jamie has done so well over the past decade is he’s obsessed with every single detail in his books.’

Rowling, 45, and Oliver are the only British authors to have passed the $150 million mark, although Delia Smith has come close, selling more than $100 million worth of recipe books.

Neil Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller, the trade magazine, said: ‘There are three reasons for the success of 30-Minute Meals. It’s very zeitgeist. It’s been heavily backed by Sainsbury’s who have a huge market share of the sales. And the accompanying TV show was on every day when mums were making meals for their kids.’

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President Obama already has “senator” and “Commander in Chief” on his resume, but now he can add his newest achievement: Successful children’s book author.

Random House Children’s Books announced Tuesday that the president’s latest book, “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters,” is the fastest-selling picture book in the company’s history. The book publisher said 50,000 copies were sold in the first five days after the book’s release.

Written before the president took office, the tome for tikes pays tribute to such celebrated Americans as Neil Armstrong, Jackie Robinson, and George Washington. Obama’s proceeds will be donated to a scholarship fund for the children of fallen and disabled soldiers.

Over a million copies of another November presidential release by a Random House subsidiary, former president George W. Bush’s “Decision Points,” have flown off the shelves since the memoir hit bookstores November 9. The book is the third by a presidential author to top the million-copy mark, joining former president Clinton’s “My Life” and President Obama’s last two books, “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams from My Father.”

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Sarah Palin’s book publishers have been forced to file a lawsuit after pages of her upcoming memoir were leaked.

HarperCollins Book Publishers filed legal papers on Friday against the company Gawker Media after they refused to remove pages from Palin’s second book America By Heart: Reflections On Family, Faith And Flag from their website.

on Saturday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order against Gawker, saying it had to take down the pages — which it did, removing the images and commentary relating to them — most shockingly, perhaps, without making any further comment.

Publisher HarperCollins — which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which also owns Fox News, the network that employs Palin as a commentator — brought the suit in New York district court on Friday.

HarperCollins Publishers spokeswoman Tina Andreadis told the Wall Street Journal Saturday evening, “We see the ruling as a victory. Gawker shouldn’t have posted this. It’s a copyright infringement. We are defending our author and our publication.”

But is it infringement? What harm was there in bringing Palin’s pages to light last week? The book is not in draft form — in fact, it’s completely finished and will be in bookstores on Tuesday. Barring some kind of strange machinations, every page that Gawker put on its website will be available for anyone interested to see in just a few days.

The hearing about Gawker’s posting of Sarah Palin’s “America by Heart” is scheduled for Nov. 30.

According to The AP, a judge has now ordered Gawker to remove the offending pages until the issue has been resolved in court.

They had uploaded around 20 pages from the book to their site ahead of its publication date of November 23.

The lawsuit against Gawker will begin in a hearing on November 30.

A new book publishers agreement between Hachette Livre and Google could offer a way forward in the ongoing dispute between authors, publishers and the search engine over the digitising of out-of-print books.

There are between 40,000 and 50,000 books under French copyright that are commercially unavailable but Hachette will have the final say as to what will be scanned. French booksellers will also be able to sell these works.

Speaking yesterday at the announcement that Google can digitise Hachette Livre’s out of print books, Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Book Search, said the deal could “serve as a framework for other French publishers and maybe other publishers around the world”. He added there had been “notional” talks with some British publishers, but no active negotiations were in progress. Hachette UK would not comment on the news.

The dispute between authors, publishers and Google dates back several years. US bodies The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed lawsuits against the search engine for copyright infringement in 2005 after Google had begun digitising books in libraries without authorisation in 2002. Attempts to resolve the issue through the Google Book Settlement – and now the revised Google Books Settlement, currently awaiting judicial approval in the US – have failed to satisfy angry publishers and authors. Novelist Ursula Le Guin led a campaign for a mass opt-out of authors from the revised settlement last year, calling it a “deal with the devil,” while Hely Hutchinson described it as “a weak compromise”. French publishers have also been very active in opposing the settlement.

Under the new deal, Google will be able to scan Hachette Livre’s titles where the publisher wants it to, and will then be able to make them available as ebooks for purchase through Google Books. But the publisher will keep control over which books the search engine has access to and books it doesn’t want digitised will be removed from Google. The search engine won’t have a monopoly on the scanned books either: French booksellers will also be able to sell them.

The deal only applies to Hachette Livre’s French language publishing, but Google has also said it is in “notional” talks with US book publishers about a similar deal. The chief executive of Hachette UK, Tim Hely Hutchinson, declined to comment on whether his publishing house would be following its parent company’s lead.

“Both parties see this as an opportunity to breathe new life into Hachette Livre’s dormant out-of-print works for the benefit of authors,” Google and Hachette Livre declared in a joint statement.

Google senior vice-president David Drummond declared the announcement “a great step for French authors, Google, Hachette and above all, French readers”. He called the agreement “a win-win deal for Google and the French publishing industry”, saying: “French authors will get new opportunities to sell their books and readers throughout the world will gain access to exciting, hard-to-find French-language books.”

The basic terms and conditions of the agreement are to be made available to all French publishers.

But Arnaud Nourry, chairman and chief executive of Hachette Livre, said the new agreement represented a fresh start in the publisher’s relationship with Google. The deal had “nothing to do with a waiver of our claims concerning Google’s past practices, and everything to do with a new and exciting foundation on which to build a fresh start based on fairness, even-handedness and the acknowledgement of our rights and of those of our authors”, he said. He said the agreement “enables us to break the deadlock in an honourable and positive way, while protecting the interests of all parties involved”.

On the surface, the deal achieves a similar result to the Google Books Settlement, though without the costly litigation and long-wait for judicial approval. Piers Blofeld, an agent at Sheil Land, and one of the harshest critics of the original GBS said: “At first look it is a far more collaborative system and crucially Google seem to have come a long way in their interpretation of copyright. This looks like good news.”

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A 76-year-old British writer has been jailed for six weeks in Singapore after the High Court found him guilty of contempt of court over a book that raised questions about the independence of the judicial system.

Alan Shadrake, who lives in Malaysia, had refused to apologise for the content of his book, Once a Jolly Hangman, which deals with the use of the death penalty in the island state.

Mr Shadrake had offered to apologise for offending the judiciary before being convicted two weeks ago, but Justice Quentin Loh ruled that his book had scandalised the court.

He said Mr Shadrake had shown “a reckless disregard for the truth” and “a complete lack of remorse”. The defendant had contended that the book amounted to “fair criticism on matters of compelling public interest”.

At a sentencing hearing on Tuesday, Mr Shadrake was also fined S$20,000 (US$15,400) and ordered to pay costs of S$55,000. The prison sentence was lighter than the 12-week term sought by the prosecution.

M. Ravi, Mr Shadrake’s lawyer, had urged the court to censure the author rather than imprison him. “This is by far the most serious sentence [for contempt]. It is the harshest punishment so far [for this offence in Singapore],” Mr Ravi said.

Mr Shadrake was arrested in his hotel room after travelling to Singapore to publicise the book in July. The Singapore authorities have said that charges of criminal defamation are also being considered.

Overseas human rights campaigners condemned the proceedings. Phil Robertson, deputy director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Singapore was “damaging its poor reputation on free expression by shooting the messenger bearing bad news”.

The Singapore authorities have robustly dismissed claims that the courts discriminate against individuals on grounds of nationality, background or status.

Ministers are unapologetic about restrictions on free speech, however, which they say are essential to prevent conflicts between the prosperous island’s mainly Chinese, Indian and Malay population groups.

K. Shanmugam, the law minister, said in a speech in New York two weeks ago that Singapore’s “small society” could not withstand the impact of US-style media freedoms.

“For example, the faultlines in our society, along racial and religious lines, can easily be exploited,” he told an audience at Columbia University.

Singapore’s controls on expression include a state-supervised and mainly state-owned media, tough libel laws and restrictions on street gatherings of more than four people.

Mr Shanmugam questioned the objectivity of organisations such as Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based press freedom organisation, and Freedom House, a US group that campaigns for civil liberties.

RWB ranks Singapore 136th in the world for press freedom, below Iraq and Zimbabwe, while Freedom House has angered Singapore by ranking it below Guinea, where more than 150 anti-government protesters were last year killed during a rally.

“I suspect that our rankings are at least partly due to the fact that we take an uncompromising attitude on libel – and the fact that we have taken on almost every major newspaper company [in the world],” Mr Shanmugam said.

Singapore, with a population of 5m, also imposes heavy penalties on criminal offenders, including caning for violence and vandalism, and the death penalty for murder and drug trafficking. It has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

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Are apps marketing devices for authors and books, or a new revenue stream? This is just one of many questions book publishing companies are asking as they develop apps from their content. When PW approached large and midsize publishers to find out about their app programs, we discovered that many houses don’t have “programs” per se. Questions loom about what content is best suited for apps—though overwhelmingly it seems that reference and children’s are sweet spots—and how best to look at apps. Should apps be created with the goal of bringing in money independent of books, or as tools to market books and authors? And how do publishers define an app? Many said it was simply anything that could be sold in the App Store. This may soon change, as rumors have swelled that Apple will add restrictions on what can be sold in its App Store. (Currently, a book publisher can adapt an e-book and sell it in the App Store even if it doesn’t feature any content added to the original.) Right now, though, publishers are dipping their feet into this market slowly and, with the exception of a few houses, cautiously.

Random House

Random House has done dozens of apps so far. According to Nina von Moltke, v-p of digital publishing development, RH decides what books might make good apps by looking “at specific categories, brands, and titles for which an experience beyond e-book would provide a significant benefit.” The most obvious, not surprisingly, are children’s, lifestyle, travel, reference, and, occasionally, celebrity books. Asked how RH differentiates between an app and an enhanced e-book, von Moltke said an enhanced e-book could be an app, since anything sold in the App Store is considered an app. Speaking to notable apps in the pipeline, von Moltke said there are more apps to come from Fodor’s—there are currently five Fodor’s apps, mostly city guides, available in the App Store—as well as apps based on children’s books, including two from the house’s Schwartz & Wade imprint: Princess Baby and How Rocket Learned to Read. (In September RH announced a partnership with the digital media agency Smashing Ideas to create apps for its children’s titles.) RH is also prepping a bartender app and a number of language apps.

Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster’s chief digital officer, Ellie Hirschhorn, said S&S is “learning a ton” from its app development. “Apps should be an extension of the book,” she said, so S&S apps mostly contain excerpts or links to books, whereas e-books “should be sold in e-bookstores,” due to differences in how apps and e-books are priced, marketed, and discovered by customers. S&S’s first app was the 365 Crossword Puzzles app, which was recently revamped for the iPad; since then Hirschhorn estimates S&S has done two or three dozen more apps in broad categories: apps for fans (such as Jodi Picoult’s, which lets readers follow the author through social networks, blogs, and other media); utilities (cookbook apps, The Klingon Dictionary, and Pimsleur 2Go language apps); and games (Bro to Go, based on The Bro Code). S&S does much of the front-end design for the user experience in-house, but usually outsources the back-end coding. Prices range from free for the Picoult to $11.99 for The Klingon Dictionary.

Sourcebooks

The difference between enhanced e-books and an app is simple, Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah, said: “It’s interactivity; if the reader can do stuff with the content, it’s an app.” Earlier this year, at the Tools of Change conference in New York, Raccah outlined an ambitious plan to develop apps based on the Sourcebooks list, citing more than 50 apps in development. Since then, she said, the house has become much more selective.Now the house has 12 apps in the marketplace (priced from free to $9.99) and about 20 apps in development; “most of them” will run on both the iPhone and the iPad. Sourcebooks is a licensed Apple developer and “does almost all the development, except the programming, in-house,” with development costs ranging from $3,000 to about $10,000, Raccah said. While Sourcebooks has had success basing apps on nonfiction, such as quiz books and baby names, Raccah said even fiction can work and pointed to the success of the house’s $1.99 iDrakula app, which she compared to Perseus’s Cathy’s Book app. Based on Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel, iDrakula recreates the 19th-century novel as a contemporary epistolary e-novel retold though text messages and e-mail. The app can be downloaded for free and begins the story, but the reader must buy the rest of the updated story. Raccah said there have been 20,000 downloads of iDrakula. “We promoted it heavily,” she said and even praised the much-maligned App Store for helping the promotional effort. Raccah emphasized the importance of doing a “competitive analysis” of apps. “I killed a bunch of apps because there were too many in the market already like them,” she said. “The App Store is like any other store,” she explained. “Discovery can be difficult. But we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to go viral.” She said to look for Sourcebooks to partner with other publishers and even agents to develop apps in the future.

Chronicle Books

Lorena Jones, Chronicle’s publishing director for apps, said the house is moving aggressively into apps right now. The company is first focusing its development on apps based on food and drink books, and will be launching children’s and entertainment apps for the Nookcolor and other platforms in 2011. In November and December, Chronicle will launch five food and drink apps, including a version of the popular backlist title The Art of the Slow Cooker, featuring video and other enhancements. Other food apps will also feature shopping and pronunciation guides for exotic foods. The median price for these apps will be $4.99. “These apps are not promotional at all,” said Jones. “They’re extensions of the publishing program, so we recognize that these authors have communities established, and within those communities there are consumers who have great affinity for their work.” Jones also noted that, being a publisher specializing in design-heavy books, Chronicle art-directs all its apps in-house.

Hachette Book Group

Hachette has done 10 to 15 apps thus far and, like many book publishers, defines an app as anything that can be sold in the App Store. The house said it’s just starting to ramp up its program, feeling out which content works best as an app. Hachette is creating most of its apps in-house, though the publisher has worked with outside developers. One interesting app on the horizon, said Jim Bean, manager of creative applications and workflow, is an Ansel Adams app—Hachette is the photographer’s longtime publisher—that is currently under review by Apple. Hachette worked with Adams’s estate in procuring some of the content, and the app will feature Adams’s letters and photos, and will also give users some creative license, such as the ability to make their own postcards. As to whether the app space is best used as a promotional tool for books or could generate revenue, Bean said no one yet knows. “Right now it’s just a free space,” he said, adding that everyone is still trying to figure out how best to populate it and profit from it.

HarperCollins

HarperCollins’s chief digital officer, Charlie Redmayne, said that HC has large numbers of apps developed for its many imprints in the U.S. and U.K. The development process involves the editorial team and author working with outside partners, though Redmayne speculates that HC may eventually bring development completely in-house. “Each app is treated as a completely new format,” he said. The company is focusing on information publishing as well as children’s books, which Redmayne views as the two areas most suited to apps. Successful HC apps include the SAS Survival Guide ($6.99) for iOS devices and various cookbook apps; HC made an app that can be customized to present multimedia content based on various cookbook titles. Redmayne also noted that it’s difficult to help consumers discover products in the App Store and that he is wary of “just plunking [apps] in there.”

Hyperion

Hyperion currently has two apps available—one featuring Nigella Lawson (which was created with her British book publisher, Random House UK) and one based on Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing… According to Mindy Stockfield, v-p of marketing and digital media, the house has focused on enriched e-book content rather than apps, given the reigning price points in the App Store—between 99 cents and $2.99. “The challenge we face is creating a compelling book product in a store that is essentially the Dollar Store,” she said. In choosing titles to turn into apps, or enhanced e-books, Stockfield said Hyperion looks to consumer demand: “We make sure that the additional assets we have will truly provide an experience that a consumer wants.” She added: “Our vision regarding the acquisition process and editorial process is not just thinking about the one platform of a print book. It is about looking at a story from all platforms and that includes e-books, enhanced e-books, and apps.”

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet currently has 115 apps (based on its City Guides and Phrasebooks, which offer audio pronunciation guides) for the iPhone in addition to the 1000 Ultimate Experiences app for the iPad, said Lonely Planet’s communications executive, Rana Freedman. The travel publisher’s content is particularly suitable for producing interactive experiences, she said. In addition, Lonely Planet has 41 apps for the Android market (based on the same city guides and phrasebooks), 35 apps for Nokia phones, and one free promotional app (Top Cities for 2011) for the newly released Windows 7 phone OS. IPhone apps are $5.99; the iPad app is $3.99, and the Android and Nokia apps are $4.99. Freedman said most apps are developed in-house and are profitable; “although they are costly to create, the marketplace is very strong for them and there’s been strong demand and strong sales,” she said. Brice Gosnell, Lonely Planet’s publisher for the Americas, said the goal is to have “an e-book or an app for every title on the Lonely Planet list.”

Penguin USA

Molly Barton, Penguin’s director of business development, said, “We consider an app to be anything that has interactive elements surrounding the text,” and pointed to the success of The Pillars of the Earth app ($12.99), based on the Ken Follett novel. Enhanced e-books, she said, “are titles with some additional elements,” which could include video, audio, or links. Penguin has 10 apps in the marketplace, ranging from the novel Angelology, a free download that offers a sample, which then allows the reader to unlock the complete novel for $14.99, to Mad Libs apps for $3.99. Barton said Penguin does not “fully outsource” the development of its apps or “have an exclusive relationship with any third parties, but we do work closely with outside [app] developers.” “Every [Penguin] department—editorial, publicity, art—is integral to digital development,” she added. When assessing whether to do an app, she said, “we look at two things: what is the creative vision—what will the app do? and what can the technology support? It all centers on how to best support the content and its delivery.” Barton said Penguin was “pleased by the [sales] performance of the apps we’ve produced and we remain committed to creating products that can be sold through as many places and as many devices as possible.” With the rising popularity of iPads, smartphones, tablets and other devices, she said, “It’s clear this is a market that’s here to stay. As we go forward it will become easier to include video in a standard e-book, and it will be more important to make sure any apps truly bring something new to the table.”

Perseus

Best known for the app based on the first volume of the YA Cathy’s Book trilogy, Perseus has used that app to experiment and guide its app development program, according to Peter Costanzo, director of online marketing. Costanzo said Perseus is working to complete apps for the final two volumes of the Cathy’s Book series, but will focus more on enhanced e-books rather than apps in the future. “Apps are not appealing as reading material,” he said. “They work more as a companion to the book, but we’ve learned a lot working on them.” And like a lot of publishers, he complained about the difficulty of marketing and promotion using the App Store: “Unless you have a partner, it’s hard to market on the App store. It’s easier to work with Amazon to promote an enhanced e-book.” But, he said, Perseus is working on “three or four select” app projects including JFK: 50 Days, an app based on the Perseus title, JFK Day by Day, created to mark the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s election. Created in collaboration with NBC News, the app will be released this week for $6.99 and offers rare photos and NBC video footage of 50 key moments in JFK’s short administration. The house is also working on an enhanced e-book of Alex Haley’s Roots. Perseus works with Vook, KiwiTech, Expanded Books, Ubermind, and several others to develop its app projects, and Costanzo said the focus is on experimentation. “We’re not doing a lot, because they take time to do and cost a lot. We don’t want to find out down the road that we’ve been doing it wrong.”

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The parents of Madeleine McCann are writing a book about their daughter’s disappearance and their so-far unsuccessful efforts to trace her.

A deal has been signed with book publishers Transworld which is an imprint of Random House UK. Few details have been revealed but Kate and Gerry McCann are receiving a “substantial” advance and “enhanced royalties” which gives the couple a bigger than normal share of the profits from sales.

The book is already part-written. Kate McCann said it had been a difficult decision but the money it raised would go directly to the McCanns’ official fund to look for Madeleine.

“My reason for writing is simple – to give an account of the truth,” she said. “With the depletion of Madeleine’s Fund, it is a decision that has virtually been taken out of our hands.”

Hopeful

Gerry McCann said he was hopeful the publication would help the ongoing efforts to find out what had happened to their daughter, who went missing from their holiday apartment in the Portugese resort of Praia da Luz on 3 May 2007, as her parents dined with friends nearby.

“Our hope is that it may prompt those who have relevant information – knowingly or not – to come forward and share it with our team. Somebody holds that key piece of the jigsaw.”

The book publisher, Bill Scott-Kerr of Transworld, is more than happy with the deal and sees the book – expected to retail at £20 – as a big seller.

“It is an enormous privilege to be publishing this book” he said. “We are so pleased to be joining Kate and Gerry McCann in the Find Madeleine campaign.”

There are also expected to be newspaper serialisations around the publication date, believed to be 28 April 2011 which would coincide with the fourth anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance.

The official Portuguese inquiry was formally shelved in July 2008, although private detectives employed by the McCanns have continued the search.