Mac OS X only: Open-source application Books is a personal database of all the books you own, read, borrowed, or lent out. With hooks into Amazon and other book information services, you can type the title of a book into Books, and automatically suck in the author, ISBN, cover art, summary, publisher, and other metadata right into the app. Enter multiple reviews and notes for each book, and you can even attach files to a book (like, say, a sample chapter you downloaded). Keep track of who you lent a book to and when as well, and make smart lists of books based on criteria—like all books whose keyword contains the word "business," or all books by a particular author. Take a look at some screenies of Books in action.

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Google Book Search has made Google Books embeddable à la YouTube videos. Check out the Google Operating System post for a closer look at what an embedded book looks like. Now if only sharing a book were as fun as sharing a video, they might be on to something.

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For those writers hoping to hit the big-time with their book ideas, new social publishing company WEbook wants to recreate for books what Digg did for internet articles. Submit your work to WEbook and collaborate and vote on which writing is the best.

Shelve the notion of a solitary writer toiling alone for years in a dimly lit attic. WEbook.com is a place for lively writing groups, groundbreaking titles, and a chance for an engaged and creative community to find unrecognized talent and select the very best written works for publication as books, eBooks, and Audiobooks.

At WEbook, writers can get immediate feedback on their work. Reviewers can tear apart bad writing and make it better and everyone gets a chance to vote. If WEbook users vote your project as one of the best, WEbook will publish it, in print or electronic form, too. For a similar project, check out previously mentioned Authonomy.

Conceptual designer Danny Kuo has prototyped an ingenious solution for getting to the topmost levels of a tall bookshelf with his StairCASE design. The bookshelf combines the functionality of drawers to make steps to reach the high shelves, as shown. For small apartments with high ceilings, this is a pretty ingenious space-saver. The StairCASE doesn't appear to be available for purchase, but a DIY version wouldn't be too hard for someone out to build a new bookshelf.

One of the less pleasant parts of the book publishing industry is the slush pile -- the stack of unsolicited manuscripts that no-one wants to read, but which might just contain the next Dan Brown or Tim Winton amongst the detritus. UK publisher HarperCollins is experimenting with using the crowdsourcing approach to change its approach to the slush pile, and its site Authonomy moving out of private beta this week. Authonomy lets authors upload chapters of work in progress and comment on each others' writing, with the promise that the highest-ranked works (based on site user recommendations) will be considered by Harper Collins editors. Managing the process as the beta expands could be challenging, I suspect, but it's a novel way of identifying new writing talent.

Designer Laura Cahill turns old books into gorgeous and unique vases and coffee tables. Cahill says:

My idea of using second hand books came around after doing research into common unwanted objects. One of the most common unwanted objects that can be found at either charity shops, car boot sales and sometimes on the streets are books. I discovered that the glue in old books make them extremely difficult to recycle. Aware of this I challenged myself to turn the second hand books that I had been collecting, into desirable objects such as furniture, lighting and ornaments.

Her exact methods aren't clear, but it appears she takes the covers off the books, then cuts out the shape on two or more books, then fans them around a pipe or existing glass flower vase. Finally, some glue and clamps and about 12 hours to dry should finish off the project. See more photos of her book vase creations and even a small table over at the Dezeen design magazine.

Popular author Stephenie Meyer put her eagerly-anticipated vampire genre sequel Twilight Sun on indefinite hold after copies of her rough draft showed up on BitTorrent sites. The (obviously somewhat biased) TorrentFreak takes authors to task for not using online leaks as a promotional tool, but I have to ask: Would having access to a digital copy of a nearly-complete book inspire you to purchase the ink-and-paper version? Would having an advanced ebook reader, like the increasingly popular Kindle, change your answer? Let's hear both sides in the comments.

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Design for web sites and other electronic media is frequently a derivative process, with ideas being copied from site to site in an endlessly self-consuming cycle, so sometimes it pays to seek inspiration from a different field. One of the feature sessions at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival was about how book designers come up with their ideas, and I went along to seek out some fresh creative strategies. Read on to learn about the tactics used by three award-winning book designers and how you can adapt them for other design projects, online or elsewhere.

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While books can be a dime a dozen these days (literally in some cases), sometimes you have a damaged book on your hands that a simple trip to Barnes and Noble can't replace. For books with sentimental, historical, or other value to you it's possible to perform simple repairs on your own. The members of the Preservation Services of the Dartmouth College Library have put together a comprehensive beginner's guide to repairing damaged books.

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Self-educator Josh Kaufman says you can bypass business school an earn a "Personal MBA" by reading the best books in business—and he offers 77 of his picks. Kaufman writes:

Top MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

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