Granta asked some "highly effective people," including book blogger Maud Newton, about their "web habits." The best advice, maybe, came from author and occasional standup comedian A. L. Kennedy, whose newish novel Day is maybe the most depressing (but, you know, in a good way!) book I've ever read:"I don't blog or Facebook. If I want to write, I'd rather do it to some kind of definable end."

Over at UnBeige, mediabistro.com's design blog, Stephanie Murg reports that the design firm Pentagram has taken Decipher, "a small olive green book of 14 cryptograms" sent out as a holiday gift late last year, and turned it into a series of online puzzles. In the image above, for example, you've got to determine the missing letters that would satisfy the clue "midday nap."

They get harder.

So, here I am doing my google research on Sebastian Horsley to find out the latest news about him being deported (again), when I came across this Hungarian site. At first I was a little flattered. "Hey, check it out, they reposted my photo." Then I began reading, and discovered it was a repost of my Pen Cabaret Will Not Give You Brain Inflammation story. Now I'm concerned. There's no credit. Looking a little closer, I see that a few choice words have been changed. "Dandy" is now "Ladies Man." The more I read, the more it appeared that my post was rewritten in broken English, that is until I came to this sentence: "it seems that homeland security unwadded their panties into him." After I finished laughing, I wondered if some sort of Babelfish translation program was in effect. I also wonder, with Horsley's fabled past, if someone ever "unwadded their panties into him." I'll have to read his book and find out.

When I wrote earlier this morning about a book trailer that "hints at some interesting possibilities when it comes to using short films to promote both fiction and nonfiction titles," I swear I had no idea HarperCollins was about to announce the launch of an in-house digital video studio. That said, with plans to shoot "approximately 500 videos annually," it's not likely that this HarperMedia division will be creating the 22-minute cable-ready mini-documentaries I was dreaming about—probably more like three minutes of in-studio talking heads commentary. Here's hoping that, at that pace, they don't find themselves slipping into a "house style" that becomes as obvious and tiresome as the amateur productions with their clip art and public domain music have.

Rick Smolan, the photographer who organized all those Day in the Life coffee table books, is at it again, recruiting hundreds of professional and amateur shutterbugs to provide material for America at Home, which aims to document "the distinctive rituals, the intimate moments, and all the ways in which we work, play, and interact with friends and family members." When you buy the book online, you'll be able to create a dust jacket using your own family photos (the digitized ones, anyway) as a template. Or you can just order the cover for $7.99 and... stick it on some other book, I suppose.

The project is a joint venture between Smolan's Against All Odds Productions and IKEA, with additional support from Google, Snapfish, and Babycenter (along with several other technology companies). It''s not like this is all that radical: Companies like Blurb.com have been enabling users to create entire books from their picture collections for a while now. But it's worth noting that an established figure like Smolan is embracing customization technology as a viable means of trying to make his books stand out from the rest of the pack.

Lit mag Granta, under the auspices of new editor Jason Cowley, launches their redesigned website today with a bunch of bells and whistles including an online archive of the first 100 issues, web-exclusive interviews (the first is with so hot right now Junot Diaz) and a 'New Voices' section, which will, every two weeks, publish a short story that wasn't quite good enough to make it into the print magazine ("Many of these writers will not have agents, and some will have never been previously published. But all will be of exceptional promise," is how the press release puts it.)

But the most exciting news: online editor Roy Robbins is BLOGGING over there now. His blog is called 'The Week in Pieces.' Already we are loving his opinions re: Lionel Shriver's disapproval of the sale of Norman Mailer mistress Carole Mallory's papers and his assertion that "The reality of self-publishing is less cute and more complex than [Rachel] Donadio describes [in the NYTBR]."

But best of all is his analysis of why Salman Rushdie is playing Helen Hunt's gynecologist in her directorial debut: "Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie's ex-wife, couldn't establish herself as a successful actor, and became a celebrity chef instead. Is it the case that, after their divorce, Rushdie wants to spite Lakshmi by becoming a movie star?"

Welcome to my RSS, Granta blog.

So Bertelsmann is publishing a book of the 25,000 most popular of the 750,000-plus entries German Wikipedia next fall, to be titled 'The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia.' Weird, right? After all, why churn out an paper encylopedia when there's a free open-source one perpetually being updated online? Well, for two reasons: to take a snapshot of what's most popular ("Wikipedia," "Wiki," "United States," "Switzerland" and "penis" are the top 5 entries. Fascinating, right?) and to enable people without internet access to enjoy access to the crowd-wisdom of Wikipedia. Also, to make Bertelsmann some cash money -- the material on the site can be used for free as long as Wikipedia is credited as a source, though Bertelsmann will also pay Wikipedia one euro per copy sold just to be nice.

On nerd-news site Slashdot, nerds are debating the merits of this publishing project. In response to the question "Why freeze a living thing?" one commenter replied, "Apparently they think that people in Germany would like to have a hard copy. I'm certain my grandparents (who read tons but do not have a computer) would be interested in a $40-50 edition of this book. Or even, you know, the local library." Another responds, "Dude, you just mentioned two things that are obsolete: your grandparents and the local library." Still, it'll be interesting to see how many copies of this book grandparents and libraries -- and other assorted Germans -- actually buy.

After making a splash last week by releasing The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, a new collection by science fiction writer John Kessel, under a Creative Commons license with a free electronic edition, Small Beer Press is at it again, offering free downloads of Maureen McHugh's Story Prize-nominated collection, Mothers & Other Monsters. The "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0" license essentially allows you to copy the book and give it to all your friends—as long as you don't try to take credit for writing McHugh's stories, and you actually give the book away, rather than charging anything for it. Both books are available in PDF, HTML, RTF, and text file formats, and readers are encouraged to modify the text for other platforms as well; fans have already assembled Mobipocket, Palm-compatible, and Sony Reader editions of Kessel's stories.

No, there are no dioramas. But the website for Nathaniel Rich's debut novel 'The Mayor's Tongue' does have a fun gimmicky conceit of its very own: Because the novel is about a fictional, mythic (and prolific) writer named Constance Eakins, the site aims to generate book covers for all of Eakins' faux-oeuvre. You can even submit one, if you have that kind of design-geek inclination and free time! There's also a long fake 'Paris Review' interview with Eakins (which seems like an inside joke that the author, an editor at that journal, is having with himself) and a selection of scholarship about the great man.

Go to this website and spend some time poking around because, seriously, think of how much time and effort went into this. I admire baroque book websites but at the same time I think it's kind of like going to the beach and building an ornate sand replica of the Taj Mahal over the corpse of a crab.

In the Paper Cuts feature "Stray Questions," where Dwight Garner asks authors the same three stock questions, my favorite part is always the answer to "How much time - if any - do you spend on the Web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?" The answers may surprise you!

"I have zero interest in using the Web for [anything besides research]; I spend enough time staring into a computer screen as it is," 'Bee Season' author Myla Goldberg says today, but she's an anomaly -- nearly everyone else is Internet-obsessed. "If I don't get at least one e-mail every ten minutes I feel unloved. Even junk mail makes me feel seen. Sad, I know," admits Chris Abani. "I'd say that the Internet is probably my biggest impediment to writing," says blogger turned author Julie Powell, who says she spends a lot of time on her MySpace page and gossip blogs -- well, that's not so surprising.

And Alison Bechdel admits that "the Internet has become an integral part" of her "creative process," and that "E-mailing has become almost an autonomic bodily function for me."