Reports of extensive errors in Virginia social studies textbooks prompted state education officials on Wednesday to propose revamping the approval process to prevent the issuing of flawed textbooks. Fairfax County officials also said they may discontinue using one of the books, according to book publishers.

The new state procedures would require that publishers hire context experts and provide extensive new documentation for claims in their textbooks. Education Department staff also would do more-detailed reviews before passing the books to the small groups of classroom teachers who traditionally have reviewed them, according to a statement from Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright.

“Virginia students deserve textbooks that reflect the quality of the commonwealth’s nationally recognized history and social science standards, and as the errors found by the reviewers clearly show, the review process must be improved,” Wright said.

The Education Department began increasing its scrutiny of textbooks after The Washington Post reported in October that one provided to fourth-graders, “Our Virginia: Past and Present,” included a controversial claim that thousands of African American soldiers fought for the South during the Civil War. The claim is often made by Confederate heritage groups but is rejected by most historians. That book’s author, Joy Masoff, has since apologized for that problem, as has the publisher, Five Ponds Press of Weston, Conn.

Historians whom the department selected to review “Our Virginia” and another book by same publisher, “Our America: To 1865,” submitted lists of dozens of errors this month. A review of books by other publishers also found problems with some descriptions of events in the Civil War. State officials plan to meet Jan. 10 to discuss the historians’ concerns.

Five Ponds Press publishes four other textbooks used in Virginia classrooms: “Our World Let’s Go,” “Our World Then and Now,” “Our World Near and Far” and “Our World Far and Wide.” Officials say they have no plans to have expert panels review those books.

Five Ponds Press owner Lou Scolnik said this week that he was aware of the errors discovered by the state’s panels of historians and will correct the problems in future editions of the books. The company also plans to hire a historian to review its books.

On Wednesday night, Scolnik said through a spokesman that he had no comment on the latest actions by state and school district officials.

Individual school districts choose which textbooks to use based on lists approved by the Education Department. It traditionally approves textbooks after panels of reviewers, often elementary school teachers, verify that the books cover the Standards of Learning themes that each course is mandated to teach.

As Virginia officials attempt to improve their textbook approval process, school districts across the state are grappling with what to do with thousands of books already in their classrooms.

Loudoun County stopped using “Our Virginia” in October, after the controversy over the book’s claims about black Confederate soldiers. Fairfax initially planned to continue using “Our Virginia” but is rethinking that decision, according to school district spokesman Paul Regnier. He said Fairfax officials, who are awaiting further feedback from the state and a response from the book publishers, may stop using the book.

“Initially, we thought it was just a single mistake. But after this review, it’s clear that this is a more significant problem,” Regnier said. “We know we’re going to have to do something.”

A textbook review committee in Prince William County this month recommended approval of “Our Virginia” and “Our America” for use in classrooms. But the division’s review committee made that decision only after being assured by Five Ponds Press that it would receive error-free editions of the textbooks.

Kenneth Bassett, Prince William’s social studies supervisor, said the committee found the books engaging and well-designed. “It’s unfortunate that they had all those things but not the level of historical scholarship that would have made them a home run,” Bassett said.

Officials with Arlington County schools, which use “Our Virginia,” did not return phone messages seeking comment.

Proposed changes would require the Virginia Board of Education’s approval.

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Everyone’s favorite attention-seeking, secret CIA document-leaking anarchist is back. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has reportedly signed a $1.3 million dollar deal to write his autobiography, reports the WSJ. He will be paid $800,000 from U.S. book publisher Alfred A. Knopf and another $502,000 from Conongate Books in the U.K. Assange claims that he doesn’t want to write the book or get the money, but he needs it.

“I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,” Assange told the Sunday Times. “I have already spent £200,000 for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”

Though Assange doesn’t seem to want to even write the book, a spokesperson for Random House publishing seems enthusiastic about the deal. “We are very excited to be publishing this book. The work that Assange has been doing at WikiLeaks has tremendous importance around the world.”

Assange recently made bail after being arrested on Swedish charges of sex crimes. His bank account with about 30,000 euros has also been frozen at the PostFinance Swiss bank. Aside from those legal problems, Assange’s WikiLeaks website faces a number of political obstacles.

After beginning to publish 250,000 stolen cables (emails) from the U.S. State Dept., the organization recieved immense amounts of heat from Gov’t agencies and officials. Under pressure, companies like Amazon, Bank of America, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others dropped support for the Website.  In response, a group of vigilante hackers launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, shutting down all of the publishers services for periods of time. DDoS attacks work by overloading Websites with thousands or millions more hits than they are used to, usually resulting in the Website going offline for a period of time.

Assange may also write about the internal power struggles within WikiLeaks. A number of his staff recently defected and started a new leaking service called OpenLeaks which has similar goals. One of their main problems was that Assange seemed unable to follow one of Journalism’s basic tenets: keep yourself out of the story.

Offering more support than self publishing can provide, Schiel & Denver Book Publishers gives a tangible publishing platform for independent writers to reach their readers with bookstore distribution. However, as Alex Pham writes in the L.A. Times, more and more writers are bypassing the traditional route and selling directly to readers to get a larger slice of the sale price…

Joe Konrath can’t wait for his books to go out of print.

When that happens, the 40-year-old crime novelist plans to reclaim the copyrights from his publisher, Hyperion Books, and self-publish them on Amazon.com, Apple Inc.’s iBooks and other online outlets. That way he’ll be able to collect 70% of the sale price, compared with the 6% to 18% he receives from Hyperion.

As for future novels, Konrath plans to self-publish all of them in digital form without having to leave his house in Schaumburg, Ill.

“I doubt I’ll ever have another traditional print deal,” said the author of “Whiskey Sour,” “Bloody Mary” and other titles. “I can earn more money on my own.”

For more than a century, writers have made the fabled pilgrimage to New York, offering their stories to publishing houses and dreaming of bound editions on bookstore shelves. Publishers had the power of the purse and the press. They doled out advances to writers they deemed worthy and paid the cost of printing, binding and delivering books to bookstores. In the world of print, few authors could afford to self-publish.

The Internet has changed all that, allowing writers to sell their works directly to readers, bypassing agents and publishers who once were the gatekeepers.

It’s difficult to gauge just how many authors are dumping their publishing houses to self-publish online, though for now, the overall share remains small. But hardly a month goes by without a well-known writer taking the leap or declaring an intention to do so.

In addition to Konrath, bestselling author Seth Godin, science fiction writer Greg Bear and action novelist David Morrell recently have used Internet tools to put their works online themselves. Earlier this year, suspense master Stephen King, Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho and Stephen Covey, the author of bestselling self-help books, self-published some of their works exclusively on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.

Godin, the author of a dozen books on marketing, including “Purple Cow” and “The Dip,” cut ties to Penguin Group Inc. in August. This month, he announced plans to self-publish a series of “idea manifestos” on Amazon.com.

Godin, 50, said he realized that he no longer needed a publisher to distribute his work or to find an audience: He had cultivated a following of millions through his blog and speaking tours.

“If an author has the choice of two distribution models, one that costs nothing and has no gatekeeper and the other has lots of gatekeepers and costs a lot of money, a lot of people will go with the free one,” he said.

Amazon’s Digital Text Platform lets authors sell their works through its Kindle bookstore. Those who set their prices between $2.99 and $9.99 per copy receive 70% of the sale price, minus a few pennies per book to cover the cost of distributing files over a cellular network.

Sony Corp.’s online ReaderStore also lets authors sell their works directly to buyers, giving writers 70% to 85% of the sale price. In October, Barnes & Noble Inc. launched its PubIt! self-publishing platform, promising royalty rates of 40% to 65%.

The upshot is that writers can find virtual shelf space in the world’s largest bookstores without the help of conventional publishers. And the number of forums for online bookselling continues to grow.

This fall, Amazon and Google Inc. unveiled online tools that can turn any website into a bookstore.

Google launched an online bookstore with millions of titles and said it would let independent booksellers sell those works on their own sites. Amazon said it would allow any website to sell Kindle books and would pay a referral fee for every sale.

“Publishers used to be the gatekeepers,” said Mike Shatzkin, a New York publishing consultant and editor of the Shatzkin Files (www.idealog.com/blog), a blog about the book industry. “Going through the gate still has certain benefits, but it’s no longer the only way for authors to get to where they want to go.”

For now, those benefits include editing, cover design, marketing support, accounting and advances on royalties. In exchange, book publishers control the copyrights to works and take a larger slice of the sale price.

Authors typically get 10% to 25% of the proceeds of digital sales if they go through a publisher, compared with 40% to 70% if they self-publish.

For Konrath, the math made his choice easy. He said he earned $1.17 in royalties for each digital copy of “Whiskey Sour” sold by Hyperion. That’s roughly 25% of the sale price of $4.69.

When he self-publishes on Amazon, Konrath prices his books at $2.99 and earns $2.04 a copy, or just under 70%.

“If a traditional book publisher offered me a quarter of a million dollars for a novel, I’d consider it,” he said. “But anything less than that, I’m sure I can do better on my own.”

Digital book sales make up 9% of the overall market and are growing rapidly. During the first 10 months of this year, they reached $345 million, a 171% increase over the same period in 2009, according to the Assn. of American Publishers.

Print book sales dropped 23%, to just under $4 billion, in the same 10-month span.

Publishers say they are keenly aware that the ground is shifting, but most don’t see the situation as dire.

Talk of the demise of traditional publishers is “cocktail party sensationalism,” said Neil De Young, executive director of Hachette Book Group’s digital division in New York. “Our core mission hasn’t changed because of digital. We continue to be the venture capitalist for authors, helping them to distribute their works as widely as possible. Now we do that digitally as well as physically.”

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., agrees that publishers can still play a valuable role — for now.

With millions of titles potentially flooding the market, readers will have to rely more on external cues to guide their purchases, whether it’s a favorable review from a celebrity, a tip from a social-media contact or the backing of a major publisher.

“Until someone comes up with an algorithm to sort the good manuscripts from the bad, publishers and their human network of agents and editors maintain an advantage,” McQuivey said. “But sooner or later someone will create a new way for readers to find the books they most want to read, and that someone may or may not be a traditional book publisher.”

It may not even be human.

Amazon, Apple Inc., Netflix Inc., Pandora Media Inc. and other technology companies use software that analyzes consumer behavior to recommend choices in music, movies and other products.

Indeed, the challenge in a world where anyone can publish a book is getting people to pay attention.

In a blog post titled “Moving on,” about his decision to self-publish a book, Godin wrote that “my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works.”

The Internet is opening up new ways for writers to connect with readers.

Last year, Bear and another bestselling science fiction author, Neal Stephenson, teamed up to create “The Mongoliad,” a subscription-based historical novel based on the conquests of Genghis Khan. The authors, along with about half a dozen other writers, take turns writing chapters, which are published weekly on http://mongoliad.com/ and on Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices.

Readers pay $5.99 for a six-month subscription or $9.99 for a year to be able to read the chapters as they come out. A handful pays $1,000 to become lifetime patrons of the series.

The project uses software to let readers discuss the novel in forums on its website, contribute artwork for the book and even spin their own tales using a collaborative writing tool.

Although the technology is new, the creative model is a throwback to the days when newspapers published serial novels, or earlier when storytellers traveled from place to place looking for people who would pay a few coins to hear a tale.

“We’re allowing the reading public to sit there and be our editors, to engage in a dialogue with us,” said Bear, 59, of Seattle, whose 30 science fiction books include “Darwin’s Radio” and “Eon.” “Technology is making it possible for us to take advantage of reader feedback to create a story.

“This is the future of the book as I see it. Fewer and fewer people are walking into a bookstore. You have to reach readers in other ways. Because, ultimately, the new gatekeepers will be the readers.”

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This Christmas Eve, Housing Works Bookstore Café on Crosby Street in NYC hosted “What the Dickens?” a three-hour rendition of “A Christmas Carol” with almost 30 volunteer authors reading for six minutes each, according to book publishers and christian book publishers.

Charles Dickens is sort of hot right now, considering Oprah Winfrey chose “Great Expectations” and “A Tale of Two Cities” as her new book-club selections. And so, twas a full house of hipsters and well-heeled holiday shoppers who ordered cocoa and red wine from baristas with Santa hats, and then settled in against their puffy coats for some good, old fashioned, infantilized storytelling.

Alison Brower, who serves on the Housing Works Board, welcomed the crowd, lifting a red bucket to encourage the audience to “not be Scroogey” and give to the nonprofit, which serves homeless New Yorkers with HIV and AIDS.

The readers lined up along the second level of the bookstore that overlooks the café. Scott Adsit from “30 Rock” said he “felt like Evita Perón” presenting up high, and delivered a ghost of Marley that seemed to be heavily influenced by Darth Vader. Mary Gaitskill (“Don’t Cry”) presented a chilly rendition of Scrooge’s business associates, miming far more cocaine sniffing than apparent in the original text. Zachary German (“Eat When You Feel Sad”) read in a disaffected tone common to Williamsburg, an interesting choice when it came time for Tiny Tim’s mantra, “God bless us all, everyone.”

The authors were asked if they saw themselves in “the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” Ebenezer.

“I’m always a Scrooge,” said Jonathan Ames, the creator of “Bored to Death.” “Always messing up the present.”

“I actually love Christmas,” said Ms. Gaitskill. “It means a lot to me.”

“I think we all relate to Scrooge but we don’t want to admit it,” said Sam Lipsyte (“The Ask”), who added he was “an emotional miser,” not a financial one.

Mike Albo (“The Underminer”) said he was too broke to be parsimonious.

“I’m more like Tiny Tim but not adorable.”

Schiel & Denver is pleased to announce publication of its first communication-on-progress (COP) report for the United Nations Global Compact in New York. The COP looks at the company’s commitment to high professional standards including in Human Rights, Labor and the Environment. The report can be downloaded here on Schiel & Denver’s UN Webpage.

Does the case of Liu Xiaobo show we are we closer to 1984? Schiel & Denver Book Publishers reports on the the latest issue of Index on Censorship which highlights the global plight of writers imprisoned for their views

There’s an apocryphal story about Picasso, who was asked to subscribe to a fund for getting Soviet writers out of prison, but refused. They write better in prison, said Picasso.

Leaving aside Picasso and the Russians for a moment, when you come to examine the English-language’s library of prison books, the pickings are surprisingly slim. In the English tradition, I think there are just three manuscripts directly attributable to the clink: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”), and Money in the Bank by PG Wodehouse, written during his internment in Nazi Germany.

Still, from Shakespeare to Byron, self-expression always came with some fear of reprisal, and the list of English writers whose work has been shaped, however slightly, by the prison cell includes Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens. Arguably, his father’s tenure of the Marshalsea (a debtors’ prison) was, as much as the celebrated “blacking factory”, the novelist’s defining experience.

Further afield, in the English-speaking world there were the injustices of the Raj and, later, of apartheid. From South Africa, Breyten Breytenbach’s masterpiece, True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, owes everything to his imprisonment, which takes us back to Picasso’s provocative contention reported by christian book publishers.

But here in the US, for the last 100 years, literature has been unrestricted. Some homosexual writers might dispute that, but most writers have enjoyed real freedom. What’s more, most US readers and book publishers would say they live in a free society.

Sadly, this has not been the experience of writers, or readers, worldwide.Beyond Bars, the latest issue of Index on Censorship, a co-production with English Pen and edited by Natasha Schmidt, presents a chilling catalogue of literary repression in our time, from China’s Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, to Orhan Pamuk (Turkey), Faraj Sarkoohi (Iran) and the murdered Anna Politkovskaya (Russia).

Beyond Bars is also a reminder of some inspiring journeys from prison to liberation, and thence to positions of political power and influence: Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic and Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives.

These are beacons of hope in a dark and threatening landscape. The 21st century has seen no falling-off in the recurrence of authoritarian regimes, or in their appetite for violent repression. In September 2010, journalist Aleh Byabenin, who had spent 15 years fighting Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, was found hanged at home. Few believe the official verdict of suicide. In Mexico, eight journalists have been murdered and three have “disappeared” since last January. On and on it goes: intimidation, torture and imprisonment.

Perhaps the most chilling section of this compilation is the section devoted to blogs. Once, in the blissful dawn of the world wide web, online writing was greeted as a golden opportunity for free speech. How swiftly have we discovered that repressive regimes police cyberspace as vigilantly as the city streets.

Bloggers recently arrested include Ali Abdulemam (Bahrain); Irek Murtazin (Russia), who is now in a penal colony; Tal al-Mallouhi (Syria), detained for posting poems about Palestine; Suwicha Thakor (Thailand), serving a 10-year jail sentence for criticising the monarchy; and finally Hossein Derakhshan (Iran).

The case of this Iranian-Canadian blogger is especially disturbing. Arrested after returning to Iran, Derakhshan was convicted of collaborating with enemy states, “insulting what is holy” and creating “immoral websites”. Whatever he had learned in the libertarian west was plainly intolerable at home. Now he’s in prison according to book publishers.

Much of Beyond Bars describes the painful collision of rival, and opposed, cultural traditions, but that’s never the whole story. As Tom Stoppard puts it in his introduction: “When you’re safe and sound, you think that being a writer is the most interesting thing about you, and a kind of protection.” The Writers in Prison Committee, celebrated here, “cuts through that to a world where it’s sometimes safer not to be one [a writer]“. Out in a free society, says Stoppard, “it’s debatable whether the writing exerts any leverage over the fate of nations, but when it comes to the fate of individuals… Political prisoners are less vulnerable when they are kept in our view.” If you want to support these writers in prison by penning your own book, Schiel & Denver offers a book publishing infrastructure with complete freedom of expression.

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Four Japanese book publishers have accused Apple of distributing pirated e-books, including Chinese translated works by venerated local authors Haruki Murakami and Keigo Higashino.

In a harsh statement yesterday, the publishers rebuked Apple for profiting on illegally obtained literature.

“We have no choice but to deem it illegal that Apple Inc. distributes materials which clearly violate copyright,” the consortium said in a statement sent to Apple’s Japanese subsidiary and obtained by AFP.

“Some of the works have been deleted in response to requests from authors and publishers but a majority of them continue to be illegally distributed,” the statement said.

The publishers are: Japan Book Publishers Association, the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan, and the Digital Comic Association.

Rather than sue Apple, the publishers have demanded to sit down with Apple to “set new rules in the era of digital networks.”

Pirated books include Murakami’s three-volume “1Q84″ and “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” Japan Today reported in November.

Last Wednesday, author Higashino, who, like Murakami, has not allowed any of his works to be go digital, told Japan Today that a Taiwanese publisher illegally retrieved, translated, and began selling his books through the App Store for “a few hundred yen each.”

“As a copyright holder, I have asked Apple to delete them and am waiting for its response,” Higashino told Japan Today.

The consortium also said it could not accept Apple’s policy of removing illegally distributed works after being flagged for copyright infringement. Google adopts a similar policy with YouTube, allowing the automatic upload of videos without a screen process. It avoids liability thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides a safe harbor for companies like YouTube that respond quickly to takedown requests.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Japanese publishers are so powerful in Japan that the world’s second largest electronics market was one of the last countries to start selling e-readers. Now, however, Japanese e-readers proliferate.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

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Dr Seuss’s Grinch stole christmas early this year for the book publishers, landing major deals to put the children’s books on the Android reading ebook tablet.

Are any of you fans of the film adaptations “The Cat in the Hat,” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas?” But have you ever wondered how the stories with their characters came to light in the first place? The American writer come cartoonist “Dr Seuss,” made them possible, and today they can both be enjoyed on Android devices with the benefit of apps.

The apps which can be purchased for $3.99 each can be used not just for entertainment value, but for educational purposes for the young at heart, consisting of customisable music, special effects and audio. As Mashable reported to book publisher, the two special apps can be used either by read along, having the app talk to you or by auto-play. This works when you simply touch your Android screen and the words flash up in front of you.

Just in time for Christmas, there are two Dr. Seuss books available for download at $3.99 each. They are “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Cat in the Hat”.

The books can be enjoyed in three ways. Once is a read along where specific words are highlighted to build your vocabulary (your child’s that is), another is a narrative and the last is an automatic page turn. The app includes great self-publishing background music and classic Dr. Seuss artwork that will keep you entertained to the end.

The Dr. Seuss app for Android can be viewed on any Android smartphone as well as popular tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Archos 5.

Traditional Book Publishers are playing safe it seems.Taking books which are guaranteed ‘sure things’ – and celebrities with their legions of fans fit this category well. Here’s a few examples:

Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which famously begins: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” The first sentence of The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, goes like this: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

But never mind all that. Life & Laughing is the autobiography of Michael McIntyre, brought out by US book publishers, the 34-year-old comedian who is now arguably as successful as any standup has ever been. At the time of writing, it has sold 169,210 copies. People like it; at my local WH Smith, it seems to be selling like cut-price gold. It starts: “I am writing this on my new 27-inch iMac. I have ditched my PC and gone Mac . . . It’s gorgeous and enormous and I bought it especially to write my book (the one you’re reading now).”

While we’re here, consider also the enticing kick-off passage of My Story, by Dannii Minogue: “Having a baby; joyful, a quiet celebration with family. An intimate and magical moment of discovery shared with your partner. Hmmm . . . I wish!” She goes on: “The car is stuck in rainy London traffic and, as usual, I’m running on what some of my closer friends would call ‘Minogue Time’, which basically means I’m late.” This does not quite get me hooked, though I persevere. But more of that later.

To begin The Woman I Was Born To Be, that blessed national treasure Susan Boyle goes for a gnomic statement of the obvious: “My name is Susan Boyle.” Cheryl Cole’s Through My Eyes commences no less prosaically – “In 2009, we decided to take a break from Girls Aloud. During this time an opportunity came for me to make a solo album” – but it’s essentially a picture book, so maybe I should leave off.

Anyway, these books are not only dominating the bestseller lists at he moment, but my life too. The plan is simple enough for the book publisher: to collect these less-than-literary works, resolve to get beyond the first sentences, and thereby take the national pulse. So, I duly line up the memoirs of McIntyre, Minogue, Alan Sugar, Chris Evans et al – along with the supposed work of a fictional meerkat – and get to it.

First, though, I speak to my agent. Jonny Geller is managing director of Curtis Brown’s books division, and down the years he has occasionally sat me down and patiently explained the frazzled economics of the publishing industry. His contribution to the Christmas market is Nelson Mandela’s Conversations With Myself, which is doing respectably – though it is not quite up there with the work of Radio 2 DJs, TV tycoons and failed Australian pop stars.

How did we get here? He begins the story with the collapse of the net book agreement, which kept prices high and thereby held back the creation of a truly popular market, until 1997. “When that happened, the supermarkets came in with huge discounts, and you got a mass market. And what does a mass market want? They want what they get on radio, and TV, and in music, and film. So suddenly celebrities become the natural thing.”

The watershed book, he reckons, was Billy, the biography of Billy Connolly by his wife – and Guardian columnist – Pamela Stephenson, which was published in 2001, sold more than a million, and thereby pointed the way. Down, on the whole: though the Connolly story was full of pathos, and capably written, what followed did not do great things for the culture. One thinks of, say, the four memoirs credited to Katie Price (she’s already on to number five, apparently), Jason Donovan’s Between The Lines, or Kerry Katona’s landmark Too Much, Too Young: My Story of Love, Survival and Celebrity.

Last year, Geller tells me, was something of a celeb-publishing disaster, embodied by the underperformance of Ant and Dec’s Ooh, What A Lovely Pair: Our Story (which did 330,000 in paperback, but failed to recoup a mind-boggling £2.8m advance). But 2010 is looking much better: with Jamie Oliver’s 30 Minute Meals leading a high street publishing stimulus, and McIntyre, Sugar and the meerkat also doing their bit, the seasonal book market seems to have been miraculously revived, even as consumer confidence apparently plunges. That said, some of the numbers do not quite add up: McIntyre, Geller reminds me, received a reported £2.3m advance from the Penguin group, which means he’ll have to sell in advance of 600,000 hardbacks if anyone’s to make a profit. “There’s no way he’s going to do it, but that’s still a successful book. It depends how you gauge success.”

This last point goes straight to the book industry’s strange business model, the fact that financial exactitude may be less important than keeping the whole machine ticking over.

“You buy turnover by having celebrities,” says Geller. “You’ve got costs: distribution, employment, printers to keep happy . . . and if you’ve got something you know you’re going to print at least 200,000 copies of, that keeps the machine running. You have to have turnover: if you don’t, you’re left with a small company. It’s a self-fulfilling thing.” To some ears, this may sound like the economics of the pre-internet music industry: sign a lot, pay whatever it takes, keep the fun going – and hope you luck out with at least one big hit a year.

But anyway: I have books to read. Having put down what I’m currently reading (Keith Richards’s Life, which is great), I begin with Minogue’s My Story, because she is the one contemporary celeb author I have met: at a west London branch of TGI Fridays circa 1997, when we fell into a weird and bitter argument about whether Robbie Williams should be blamed for losing himself in drink and drugs after exiting Take That. I sympathised with him; she, like a true show-must-go-on veteran of an Australian institution called Young Talent Time, did not – and it all got rather heated and shouty. Which is more than can be said for My Story, in which most of her anecdotes fall flat, like the kind of pub stories that are followed by pregnant silences.

She recalls watching a cast-member from Prisoner Cell Block H chainsmoking at an Aussie TV studio: “It’s odd to think of it now,” she says. Oh, it is! One paragraph from the end, she serves up this gripping picture of her current domestic bliss: “I wouldn’t exactly say it’s a quiet house . . . Kris [her other half] has bought a new 3D TV that looks as big as a cinema with surround sound that makes the house rock.” To cap it all, there is this picture of her less-than-spectacular pop career circa 1989: “I seemed to be a mysterious, dark punk version of my older sister . . . it gave me more street cred.” No it didn’t!

There is much more: a boob job, nude shots for Playboy in which she was done up like Crocodile Dundee, and her valiant efforts to pretend Kylie’s success has never been an issue: “The truth of the matter is that I never felt like I was competing with my sister. I’ll say it again: I NEVER FELT LIKE I WAS COMPETING WITH KYLIE.” So there you are.

After that, I do the Michael McIntyre book, which is a bit like having someone with a mild personality disorder shouting in your ear for six hours. He has an interesting story, of sorts: among the other strands of his pre-fame life, his father was a close associate of the anarchic DJ-turned-comic Kenny Everett, with whom his mum – some 17 years dad’s junior – sated her appetite for the high life by regularly going clubbing. This all contributes to amusing enough stories, but there are insurmountable problems: a habit of digressing at ridiculous length; gags that don’t work too well in bald print; and quite unbearable smugness. This is him, for example, on performing at the O2 arena: “Before my tour started, I saw Madonna there, the first night I did was replacing Michael Jackson, the night before my final gig Beyoncé was there. It simply doesn’t get any bigger than this.”

Over four days of mind-bending effort, I then tackle five more – all from well known book publishing companies.

Chris Evans’s Memoirs of a Fruitcake picks up where last year’s It’s Not What You Think left off: in 1997, when he borrowed £85m to buy Virgin Radio off Richard Branson, and commenced a long lost-it period that included his transformation into “a multi-millionaire part-time DJ”, visits to hundreds of pubs, and his strange marriage to Billie Piper. It just about holds my attention, though I am left wondering how a book so defined by the getting and wasting of huge amounts of money will play in an age of fiscal grimness and belt-tightening. One chapter begins with a list titled “10 must haves when I built my dream house” and describes Evans being helicoptered around the stockbroker belt with a view to buying a new mansion, which I’m sure will resonate brilliantly in, say, Middlesbrough.

Still, at least it vaguely gets my blood rising – unlike Simon Pegg’s distinctly un-gripping Nerd Do Well, in which he expends hundreds of pages on his memories of the 70s and 80s (you know the drill: Spangles, Star Wars, Princess Di haircuts, the usual), mysteriously fails to tell the reader anything much about Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and decides to weave in a very odd, half-written story about a re-imagined version of himself and a “robotic butler”. A talented and apparently nice fella, I’m sure, but his publishers have reportedly paid him £1m for three books, and so far, this one has done around 25,000 copies (insert Family Fortunes-esque “Uh-uhhhh!” noise).

After that, I have to speed up, for fear of madness. Cheryl Cole’s Through My Eyes is a picture portfolio, peppered with laser-like insights (“the paparazzi can be really scary”), which can be satisfactorily dealt with in around 20 minutes. Russell Brand’s Booky Wook 2 seems slight and widely spaced, and amounts to a breathless diary of his recent experiences – though there is a reasonably diverting chapter about what we must now call “Sachsgate” (when, he recalls, “the sky was black with scandal”).

Paul O’Grady’s The Devil’s Ride Out centres on his often grim experience of the 70s, and has one unexpected advantage over most of the competition: on this evidence, he can actually write, with an understated grace and admirable sense of comic timing. Susan Boyle’s The Woman I Was Born To Be, by contrast, is pretty much what I expect: an icky feast of anecdotes, homespun wisdom (eg “Memory is like a jukebox: push the right button . . . and you’re transported straight back to a time and place”) and truisms (“Being a postman is a full-time job”) that seems to have been put together by someone called Imogen Parker. On the whole, it makes me feel unbearably sad: the dedication says simply “for my mother”, which comes unexpectedly close to making me weep.

In other words, I have now taken a distinct turn for the worse – something conclusively proved by an afternoon in the company of Gok Wan’s Through Thick and Thin. Just to make it clear: I have only ever watched How to Look Good Naked by accident, and the entire Gok phenomenon makes about as much sense to me as, say, Coldplay. But after 20 minutes, I cannot put it down.

The plotline is simple and affecting enough: raised by a Chinese father and English mother who ran restaurants in Leicester, he feasted on what he calls “deep-fried love”, and ended up chronically overweight, and bullied. On the former score, he does not hold back: “My eyes were deep set and appeared piggy in the mass of fat on my face,” he writes – a condition that led eventually to anorexia, described in the unsparing detail of food diaries (“Saturday 16 March: two teaspoons of honey, 40 laxatives”). Of course, everything eventually aligns correctly, and he becomes the successful if slightly irksome stylist-cum-unqualified psychiatrist we now know, but fair play to him: he probably deserves it.

And so to Alan Sugar. The thrillingly titled What You See Is What You Get is the best part of 600 pages long. Obviously, there is a story in there somewhere: how a wily Jewish kid from east London sussed out that the future would be defined by consumer electronics, and made a mint. But where to find it?

At one point, Sugar writes: “I could spend hours talking about every single amplifier and product we ever made, and it would be dead boring to everyone other than the old saddo hacks who used to work for me or buy from me.” This lifts my spirits, slightly. But he follows it with this: “Stan Randall arranged the construction of the production line at Ridley Road and Mike Forsey got on with the design of the IC2000 [a hi-fi amplifier]. I did the mechanical drawing for the cabinet and chassis. This time, we moulded some very fancy silver knobs and slider controls. The front panel layout design of the product was down to me. I designed some flash aluminium toggle switches and the whole thing looked a real mug’s eyeful. Moreover, it was a bloody good amplifier and it ticked all the boxes as far as the specification was concerned.”

Who is this for? What is the point of it? The same exhaustive approach is applied to the mathematics of pricing, problems with “hard-disk controller cards”, and just about everyone Sugar has ever employed (“the production line was being run by a no-nonsense fellow by the name of Dave Smith”). You would have to be out of your mind to persevere much past page 30. I have to, and that’s roughly the state in which it leaves me.

Which brings us to the essential reason why the majority of modern book publishers‘ Christmas bestsellers are so amazingly bad. Even if some of them have been ghostwritten, you often sense there has been precious little editing. No one – apart, in fairness, from Paul O’Grady – ever seems to deliver much context, or pause for thought, or indulge in any kind of reflection: better, it seems, to just go: “I was born ages ago and my mum and dad were nice but poor but then I got a lucky break and now I’m on TV and everything and here is a picture of me on our honeymoon in the Maldives.”

Put simply, many of these books are deeply, desperately, profoundly infantile, and at my lowest point – roughly, at around page 300 of the Sugar memoir – I begin to suspect that a miserable formula is at work. It goes like this: get celeb, let them write whatever slipshod rubbish they fancy, and don’t worry because 1) the more pages, the more people feel they’re getting value for money; and 2) by Boxing Day, these books will already be either gathering dust, or on their way to the local Sue Ryder shop.

One other thing. The aforementioned meerkat book is titled A Simples Life, is credited to “Aleksandr Orlov” and contains the chilling inscription “this is an advertisement feature on behalf of comparethemarket.com”, which essentially means the public are being asked to pay for an advert. It is an extremely cynical and thin work, based around a dependable enough trick: laughing at Johnny Foreigner. The prose, if you can call it that, features such gems as: “My home is a bit like English palace of Bucking Hams.” If someone buys you it for Christmas, you should probably hit them with it.

My ordeal finally comes to a close on a Thursday afternoon, when in celebration of the end, I put in a call to the HQ of Waterstone’s and speak to their head of PR, a book publisher industry veteran named Jon Howells, who has been in the trade since 1991.

We talk for 20 minutes: he concurs with Jonny Geller’s picture of the end of the net book agreement sending everything haywire, tells me that McIntyre may have stolen Peter Kay’s comedy-book thunder, and mentions the promotional importance of TV chatshows. Most importantly, he suggests I stop thinking about all this stuff in the same context as what industry types call “range” – ie the books racked in the back of the shop – and realise what I’m dealing with.

“These books are a part of mainstream entertainment,” he says. “Cheryl Cole has got a book out this Christmas, she’s also got a new album out, and she’s all over the telly. The book is one part of a general programme for somebody like that. You could make the same argument about Gok Wan, or Paul O’Grady. Or Michael McIntyre. It’s all part of a brand. These are people with a huge amount of fans, and they want to buy product.”

Has he read any of the big Christmas sellers? “I’m reading the Keith Richards book,” he says. “I’m eking that one out, because it’s brilliant. I’ve read some of the Russell Brand, which is good fun. I’ve read about half of the Stephen Fry book. I’ve got quite a few books on the go.”

I reveal how I’ve spent the last couple of weeks, and mention them all: Minogue, McIntyre, Cole, Boyle, Evans, Pegg, O’Grady, Brand, Wan, Sugar and the meerkat.

“You’ve even done the meerkat,” he marvels. “That’s above and beyond the call of duty.” A Simples Life, he tells me, took people such as him by surprise.

“How do you judge how well a book based on a fake animal in a car insurance ad is going to do?” he marvels, and then delivers his version of an inescapable truth about capitalism. As Paul Weller once sang, the public gets what the public wants – so maybe jumped-up pseuds like me should leave them to it.

“That book is doing well,” he says. “People like it.” He says the next bit with slightly less cheer. “Merry Christmas to them.”

• Christian Book Publishers