Digital lirbaries

The little man began a fight-back this week when Alan Bennett urged fans to buy his book from an independent retailer rather than from a Waterstones or an Amazon. Good-naturedly, Amazon told the BBC that Bennett was "a national treasure" (presumably through gritted teeth). Either way, Bennett is primarily seeking promotion for his new book, Untold Stories Part One, a collection of his writing since his battle with cancer in1997. Nobel laureate and Bennett contemporary Harold Pinter is also both recovering from cancer and seeing new work hit the shelves this week with almost unseemly haste following the Nobel announcement. Various Voices: Prose Poetry Politics is actually a 1998 publication, updated with some of his work from this decade. The recent additions comprise the "politics" of the title, featuring scathing attacks on the Iraq war and British foreign policy. Pinter announced his retirement from writing last year to focus on his political interests.

We wrote last week of Google's plans to digitise several libraries and the US Writer's Guild class action against them for infringement of Yahoo's copyright. Yahoo, once the main player in internet search engines, but now standing ignored beside its bigger, bolder, younger sister Google, has announced that they will take on the giant. Interestingly, they will try to avoid the legal issues met by Google by seeking the permission of the publishers before making the text available to searchers online. They are starting with 18,000 American classics, such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Edgar Allan Poe's Turn of the Screw, which will be available to read via Yahoo by the end of 2006. With all the competition between the two big players, it is surprising that one or a group of publishers hasn't seen the opportunity to steal a march on Google and Yahoo by digitising their own back catalogue.

Future US classics in the making were trumpeted with the recent announcement of nominees for the National Book Award. The presentation, in mid-November, is compared by organisers to the Oscars, but the reality is closer to the Whitbread Prize. Awarded in four categories (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Children's and Poetry) the front runners are two old American favourites who do little business over here, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and EL Doctorow's highly anticipated The March. Also nominated in the fiction category is Mary Gaitskill's Veronica. Formerly known as a short story writer, Gaitskill caused quite a storm in the 1980s on the publication of her first collection, Bad Behaviour.

Nothing like the Christmas decorations to bring out the end of year books – like most of the shops, the book world seems to have bypassed Halloween. Shuffling past the Ashes-focussed cricket books which interest us little, we draw to a halt by the books reminiscing over the deflating Lions Tour, so recent and sadly so forgettable. No chance of a follow-up to Clive Woodward's Winners then? My Grand Slam Year, by rugby's Beckham-lite, Gavin Henson, takes a few shots at those who failed to look beyond his angle-poised locks and fake tan, including his Lions team-mates and tour management. The tone is expectedly self-serving, although it does further fuel the Machiavellian reputation of Alastair Campbell, Labour spin-doctor and tour publicist. In an interview last week, Henson deemed himself "not intelligent enough to give anything but an honest opinion", a double-edged recommendation by any standards.

Brian O'Driscoll's A Year in the Centre presumably faced some redesign after his hopes and captaincy on the tour were dashed after 41 seconds of play. What should have been a centrist retelling of the plays became sidelined reportage and O'Driscoll is far too political a beast to name names like Henson. The moment of his spearheading into the ground by Mealamu and Umagu is robbed of insight because of the in-depth coverage it received at the time. If that story lacks some life for you, there is another tale of spearheading down under which may have a little more bite. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress finds the other grand dame of Irish rugby, Ross O'Carroll Kelly, abandoning his pregnant wife, donning his touring t-shirt (slogan: "It Won't Suck Itself") and following Drico, Darce and the boys on the ill-fated trip. Written by Ross with some input from the Sunday Tribune's Paul Howard, the saga continues its hilarious evisceration of modern Dublin tribes. Without an advertisement for mucker golf clubs in sight, it has the best laugh-to-page ratio available this year.

2005 has been a big year for music biographies with new Elvis books; Bob Dylan's Chronicles garnering great reviews; and a slew of books commemorating John Lennon and John Peel's anniversaries. No wonder then that the biggest advance on offer at the Frankfurt book fair was for the biography of Eric Clapton. Astute publishers recognised the possibilities in Clapton's journey from wild child to mild man, taking in the Herculean drug-taking, sharing of Beatles' wives and the tragic death of his son in the 1990s.