Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:

• The Kindle is under attack! California is ramping up its free digital textbook campaign, which does not involve the Kindle DX at any point. Ahnuld might want to check out NW Missouri State’s list of lessons learned vis a vis etextbooks (the entire article is posted in comments in that MobileRead thread). On a different front, Simon & Schuster are selling ebooks through Scribd, a move Jacket Copy thinks might be a direct threat to Amazon. NPR says Google is the most likely Kindle usurper, and Bezos got a bit snippy with Google this week. Finally, here’s an in-depth Kindle DX review at TeleRead. Doesn’t sound like an ideal PDF or textbook solution.

• Yesterday was Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Jacket Copy has some general info about Bloomsday, which will be helpful if you’re interested in taking the Guardian’s Bloomsday quiz. Boing Boing has a recording of Joyce reading. And finally, Galley Cat has a piece about a Ulysses-themed graphic novel.

• Some throwback news: The Guardian has a review of a new Italo Calvino book called The Complete Cosmicomics, which includes all the stories from Cosmicomics the original, plus a host of others, including several that haven’t appeared in English before. It sounds quite tempting. Also, the Sentences blog at Harper’s magazine has a scintillating post about Proust, memory, senses, and music. From Mark Athitakis’s blog, here’s a reprint of a terrific 1978 article about looking for Thomas Pynchon.  Finally, and significantly less enjoyably, a Wisconsin group of old farts—Orwellianly calling themselves the Christian Civil Liberties Union—are suing for the right to enact their favorite scene from Fahrenheit 451 and burn a book they find offensive. What year is it again?

• Quick takes: interesting idea for a reading challenge from As Usual, I Need More Bookshelves; here’s how to apply to read audiobooks; Sony wants $150,000 per song illegally downloaded; much ado about textbooks: Seth Godin ranted this weekend, and Joe Wikert responded Monday;  20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the Guardian is publishing four stories from affected countries– here’s the first; and here’s an interesting piece in Ars Technica about digital TV and “piracy.”

• Random of the week: Is Big Papi, aka David Ortiz, aka David Arias, finally coming out of his slump? Let’s hope so, he’s making $13M in ’09, which should buy more than a .197 BA and .318 SLG. In the meantime, here are some “papi”-related links. First, the game PapiJump, which is better on an iPhone. Here’s Big Papi’s book Big Papi (searching for “papi” on Amazon yields different results). Here’s the video and lyrics of Britney Spears’s “Mmm Papi,” written not long after Ortiz’s career-high 54 homers in 2006. Here’s the IMDb page for the 2003 movie Chasing Papi, about “successful and handsome wolf executive of the cosmetic industry Thomas Fuentes.” Finally, here’s a story about creepy Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi making girls call him “Papi” at parties. Eesh, that’s a bad one to end on. OK, heere’s one more.

Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:

• Oxford University’s 300-year-old poetry professorship has become the center of the biggest gossip maelstrom in the literary world recently. It’s got more than its share of sex, lies, and betrayal. If you’ve missed it, here’s the story in brief. It started about a month ago, when Nobel laureate Derek Walcott withdrew his candidacy following the resurfacing of a sexual harassment complaint against him from 1982, a resurfacing that Walcott called “low tactics.” Oxford refused to  delay the election (an odd way to hire a teacher, to say the least), and Ruth Padel ended up winning, becoming the first woman to hold the post in its history (here she is reading a poem). Barely a week later, Padel resigns, after allegations that she sent emails to journalists reminding them about the complaint against Walcott. She denies the allegations and a big ugly fight ensues. Now Walcott has a job in Canada, and many others are lining up for the Oxford post. So this is what it takes for poetry to get in the news.

• Here’s a great find at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? about a Russian writer suing a journalist over a bad review, and the implicit corollary that readers could sue writers over bad books.

• Quick takes: the UK won’t adopt a 3-strikes anti-piracy law; an interview with Ars Technica suggests that Sony (or at least their PSP division, understands that DRM sucks for customers; here’s a massive summer reading list from Jacket Copy;  the upcoming documentary Bad Writing looks awesome; I’m not a big fan of the Google Books settlement by any means, but I don’t like this alternative either; more data on the effects of piracy on sales; this new Pixel Qi, which is not an E-Ink ereader, looks pretty good; the Pirate Party actually won a few seats in the EU parliament; and the recession hits libraries.

• Random of the week: for every crazy good parkour-style stuntman, there have to be at least a thousand wannabes out there breaking themselves. I don’t know the probability of spontaneous dance-offs during NCAA baseball tournament rain delays.