Bad reviews? Shoddy placement? Nope. Bruce Stockler says the biggest obstacle to publicizing a book is obituaries

The University of Michigan has launched a 20,000 volume digital collection. It uses a system similar to Amazon’s Search Inside the Book feature (minus the page limitation) and you can search through the entire collection for a specific word or phrase. But, unfortunately, there isn’t an author search. Some of the gems I’ve found include Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (with such sterling prose as “Rienzi made no reply; he did not heed or hear him — dark and stern thoughts, thoughts in which were the germ of a mighty revolution, were at his heart.”), Seward Hilter’s Sex Ethics and the Kinsey Reports (“The females of the lower educational levels, Kinsey notes, had more often been afraid that masturbation would mean physical harm and also that it was abnormal and unnatural. We should note, however, that the women of the lower educational levels tend to marry at earlier ages, and that more of them might masturbate eventually if they postponed marriage to later ages.” Oh really?), the complete works of Coleridge, Guizot’s The History of Civilization, and some Thackeray.

De Niro and Scorsese are set to write a joint memoir. The director and star report that they have a unique writing approach. Before they begin each chapter, the two of them duke it out over who gets to sit in front of the computer. So far, Scorsese reports that he’s only lost one ear and three fingers.

Slightly old news, but the FBI reports to be on the lookout for almanac carriers. Anyone carrying an Information Please may very well be plotting terrorist activities, especially if the books are “annotated in suspicious ways.”