Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a new memoir coming out on Penguin’s Sentinel HC imprint, and the eBook will likely cost you more than the hardcover.

The book centers on Rumsfeld’s career from his first political job on Capitol Hill during the Eisenhower administration through his work at the Pentagon under George W. Bush. His motto: “If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.”

Amazon and Barnes & Noble both have the books available for preorder in advance of the February 8th release of the book. The hardcover is on sale from the $36 list price for $19.72 at Barnes & Noble and $19.92 at Amazon. Both the Kindle store and the Nook store are preselling the title for $19.99.

Is this too much for an eBook?

The New York Times Best Sellers lists for eBooks will launch online on February 11th and will be followed with a print publication in the Sunday February 13th issue.

James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge’s crime novel Tick Tock from Little, Brown, topped the fiction category as the No. 1 eBook Best Seller and the No. 1 combined print and eBook Best Seller.

Laura Hillenbrand’s WWII book called Unbroken from Random House is No. 1 on nonfiction list. This title also topped the combined print and eBook sellers list.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, ranked higher in eBooks sales than eBook and print combined sales. The book is No. 8 on the eBook bestsellers list for fiction and No. 9 on the combined print and eBook Best Sellers list.

Other authors who made the top 10 lists include Stieg Larsson, John Grisham, and George W. Bush.

This really has been the holiday season for the eReader. Today Barnes & Noble announced that the Nook line of eReaders has become the company’s biggest bestseller ever in almost 40 years. While they did not get into exact details about numbers, they did say that they had sold “millions.”

The NOOKcolor faired well this season and was the company’s best selling gift of the holiday season. Barnes & Noble is selling more digital books than physical books on BN.com.

Despite server problems over the Christmas weekend, Barnes & Noble also reported selling about a million NOOKbooks on Christmas Day alone. The bestselling Nook titles of the holiday season were James Patterson’s Cross Fire, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Confession by John Grisham and Decision Points by George W. Bush.

Random House CEO Markus Dohle celebrated eBook gains in his annual letter staff today. His annual message praised bestselling authors like George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Stieg Larsson.

Here’s an excerpt from the letter: “For some of our U.S. fall publication titles, nearly half of the overall first-week sales have been in the e-book format. Led by this upsurge, our worldwide digital sales for 2010 are projected to grow by 250 percent over 2009’s. With the coming proliferation of e-reading devices and e-bookstores in Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Latin America, we expect digital sales increases to resound globally.”

In addition, the executive stressed the need for capable professionals to handle these new formats: “with the emergence of new formats and new channels by which authors and their works can be accessed and discovered, our experience and expertise in every step of the publishing process have now become even more essential in our task of getting the stories we believe in to the largest potential readership.”

While Stieg Larsson’s eBooks continue to be the most popular adult fiction downloaded from libraries, John Grisham’s The Confession climbed to No. 3 last month in OverDrive’s “Most Downloaded Books from the Library Lists.”

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love; Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern and Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler remained the Top 3 library downloads in the adult non-fiction category. AndStephenie Meyer’s three Twilight titles continued to hold the Top 3 most downloaded eBooks in the juvenile fiction category in November.

Decision Points, the new memoir by former president George W. Bush joined the list as the second most downloaded audiobook in the adult non-fiction category. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell was number 3.

Follow this link to check out all of the most popular downloads from libraries lists for November.

Authors Lee Child, Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, John Grisham and Terry Pratchett were the most popular eBook authors this past week, according to BooksOnBoard’s Bestselling eBooks list.

According to the eBook retailer, the bestselling eBook from last week was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, followed by 61 Hours by Lee Child and The Lazarus Vault by Tom Harper. The Top 10 bestsellers also included Cross Fire by James Patterson, Decision Points by George W. Bush and The Confession by John Grisham.

The bestselling romance eBooks included The Debutante’s Dilemma by Elyse Mady, Touch of Temptation by Rhyannon Byrd and Drink of Me by Jacquelyn Frank.

Former president George W. Bush has a memoir coming out on November 9th, and the publicity machine is already warming up. In a recent interview, former First Lady Laura Bush revealed her husband’s iPad addiction.

Here’s more from CNN: “[Laura Bush] told Yahoo news it’s hard to break her husband away from the popular Apple gadget …  “Scrabble is the one that George now seems to be playing constantly,” she said. “Like, I’m trying to get his attention; ‘I’m still here.’”

Drudge Report also wrote about a leaked copy of the former President’s memoir yesterday, our first peek at Decision Points. Read more about the upcoming book here. (iPad link via Gizmodo)