Some news about books and ebooks from around the web. Side note: after next week I won’t be doing this feature anymore. I’ll be planning for (and going on) a trip to Africa that will last a few months (more about that as it nears). I might be handing Wednesday Links off to other C4 writers; at the least, I’ll pick it back up in December. On to the news.

• Sony recently announced a digital reader service for the PSP, which will evidently be centered around comics for the near future.. Here’s a trailer for “Digital Comics,” featuring precious little actual comics-reading. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve read a comic book, but don’t they sometimes have page-sized panels? Seems like that would be impossible on the PSP. But the implications are good for ebooks.

• Alain de Botton, who went atomic over a mediocre review of his last book, will spend a week in Heathrow Airport, as the “writer-in-residence.” He’ll interview airport-goers and type up a short book during the week, and his writing will appear in real time on a screen behind him. Uhhhhhh, weird. (via)

• Even more Google Books news. The French National Library struck a deal with Google Books. Here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s take on the Google Books settlement. The National Writers Union opposes the settlement.

• Werner Herzog is awesome. That’s a given. In honor of the new collection of the diaries he wrote during Fitzcarraldo, Vanity Fair imagines the diaries he’d write during his current shoot, for something called Bad Lieutenant. If you don’t know the story of the famously fated filming of Fitzcarraldo, there’s an excellent documentary about it called Burden of Dreams. Or you can watch the best bit on YouTube. It’s pretty awesome.

• On the other hand, I’m not a fan of A.S. Byatt. I found Possession excruciating.That said, Byatt’s making news by “attacking” writers who base characters on real people (the original interview is here). Truman Capote famously based a lot of his material on real people. Sure, he died friendless and alone, but I’ll take a Capote book over a Byatt book eleven times out of ten. In the interview, Byatt also says that she knows of a person who committed suicide because they were put into a novel, which I frankly don’t believe. That’s like saying somebody suffered a psychotic break because the girl at the coffee shop didn’t smile at them: there would be other, more serious factors in such a case. Here’s Bookninja’s take, and Conversational Reading’s. Byatt’s not getting much love on this one.

• Quick takes: Author Scoop has a list of ten great movies about writers; here’s a quick interview with Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket, although his adult books, especially Adverbs, are also quite good), regarding his selecting the music for the Believer‘s music issue; Cory Doctorow makes the case for authors giving out free ebooks; E-Reads has an interesting piece about the similarities between the publishing and movie industries; here’s the first look at Dave Eggers’s novelization of Where the Wild Things Are (we need that why?);

• Random of the week: I was going to link to “Imagining the Tenth Dimension,” a mind-bending video about the seven dimensions after the three you’re familiar with. But it got Boing Boinged the other day, so here’s a bonus: condescending conservative nimrod Patricia Heaton flailing and floundering (for 8 minutes) on Millionaire in response to an easy math question. Hurry, though, YouTube’s already taken down a few incarnations of the video.

News about books and ebooks from around the web.

• Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book won the Hugo award for Best Novel. Here are the other Hugo award winners.

• If you have a BeBook, beware. In the new firmware update, BeBook is switching from mobi support to PDF/ePub support. As in, mobi ebooks will no longer work on your BeBook. It’s not a bug; it’s just what happens.

• The Google Books settlement is still causing a kerfuffle. William Morris (a talent agency) is encouraging its clients to opt out of the settlement. The Authors Guild has released a rebuttal, and the settlement is OK by former antitrust lawyer David Balto. Now, generally the Authors Guild’s stance is wrong, but the Google Books settlement―especially for out-of-print, in-copyright books―seems good for readers, and hence good for literature. The opt-in/opt-out date is Sept. 4th. Should be interesting.

• There’s a big Sony Reader press conference scheduled for August 24th. What could it be about? Kindle Review thinks there might be a Sony Reader 900 in the works. I’m not convinced there’s a secret third device, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a wireless Sony network, and that should be the date when Sony Reader software is available for Macs. In preparation, here’s instructions on how to hack Sony Readers.

• Here are a few Kindle-related notes. Kindle might not be the savior of newspapers: Joe Wikert is losing interest in reading them on Kindle, and News Corp. isn’t happy about publishing them on Kindle. Meanwhile, an iPhone textbook app is making inroads into student ebooks, and other etextbook competition is all over the place. Last, the Wall Street Journal thinks Kindle could get passed by if it sticks with its proprietary, locked-in format. Let’s hope so.

• Here’s an interesting piece about how Stieg Larsson’s translator essentially washed his hands of the Girl translations. I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and found it particularly poor in the language department, so this makes a little bit of sense. Also, the literal translation of the Swedish title, “Men Who Hated Women,” would fit much better.

• Sam Leith, of the Guardian, interprets the formatting of Nick Cave’s upcoming novel, which will be sold in an “Enhanced Edition” that includes an iPhone app, an attached audiobook, and a soundtrack by Cave. Sounds pretty cool to me, but I’m already a Nick Cave fan. It sounds a bit gimmicky to Leith, who says it could herald a new format for books. In related news, Thomas Pynchon, who was confirmed as the narrator of the Inherent Vice trailer, released a playlist to accompany the novel (story here). And speaking of new media formats, did you hear about the new one for music? Can’t say I’ve been missing song lyrics and videos in my music, but if they come at no extra charge, what the hell.

• Quick takes: books make you feel better, says the Pepsi Optimism Project (the who?); publishing the first book of a series for free is a great selling system, evidently―the future art of “linking free to paid”; the new NEA chairman sounds cool, Nancy Grace’s upcoming novel does not; the lost art of reading in the L.A. Times; authors, don’t quit drinking; and learn to speed read in 20 minutes.

• Random of the week: The Ballad of G.I. Joe from Funny or Die (via), wherein a bevy of celebrities (including, at the end of the list, Buster from Arrested Development and the pilot from Firefly) enact Joes and Cobras in their downtime.