Three UK book distributors have temporarily stopped supplying Borders UK amidst worries about the company's future. An anonymous sales director explained to The Bookseller: "We really hope they can get through this, everyone will try to help them. But if we don't think we are going to be paid, we are going to have to stop supplying them."

In addition, here are a few publishing headlines for your evening enjoyment...

Publishers Weekly reports that Random House will put out a paperback of National Book Award-winning "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann months ahead of time, printing 100,000 copies for a Dec. 4th release date.

A Georgia woman won $100,000 in damages from a libel lawsuit, as a jury agreed that a fictional character in Haywood Smith's novel "The Red Hat Club" closely resembled the novelist's old friend--portraying her as "a sexually promiscuous alcoholic." (Via Sarah Weinman)

Next, the folks at Mediaite have launched a book club.

As Oprah Winfrey steps down from her show, many wonder who will replace her as publishing taste-maker. Mediaite senior editor Glynnis MacNicol thinks it will be conservative icon Glenn Beck (pictured). Listen to more Beck-ian book speculation on the Morning Media Menu.

Ever since she published Sugar ten years ago, novelist Bernice L. McFadden has felt marginalized by the literary fiction world--exiled in the name of diversity.

In an email interview with GalleyCat, she explained her problem with labels in the contemporary publishing industry: "[Publishers] have placed all African-American authors in one box, forcing them to compete for the attention of ONE audience," she explained, calling the practice "Seg-Book-Gation"--voicing a concern that we've heard from other writers as well. What do you think?

McFadden continued: "Art of any medium should transcend color, race, class, religion and ethnicity, but alas, that is not the case in the publishing world ... We're expected to push our books on the streets like our Urban Lit writing colleagues. But we are not hustlers--we are writers."

Finally, she concluded: "I believe the key is cross-marketing ... The success of the novels "The Help" by Kathyrn Stockett and "The Secret Life of Bees" by Sue Monk Kidd was due to cross-marketing by Penguin. Even though the cast of characters in both books are predominately African-American, the books were not pigeon-holed as 'Black Books' because they were written by white women."

As Sarah Palin sold 300,000 copies of her book last week, she became an even bigger target for everybody from cartoonists to political readers lurking in the GalleyCat comments section.

Today msnbc.com cartoonist and cartoon curator Daryl Cagle (pictured) has archived 30 different editorial cartoons mocking the former Alaskan governor as she embarks on her book tour.

The comic images include: Palin hunting ducks on the Balloon Boy's balloon, a pop-up edition of the book, and Senator John McCain's cartoony reaction to the memoir.

Just in time for the holiday season, one company has launched a way to self publish your Twitter feed and immortalize your tweets in a $30 hardcover.

Tweetbookz currently offers four cover and design styles--covers in color, pages in black and white. The hardcover copies cost $30 and softcover copies are $20, and can be printed in English, Spanish, French and Hebrew. There are bulk order discounts.

Here's more from the press release: "[Tweetbookz] will contain up to 200 of their most memorable tweets. Users just log onto the site where they can access their own tweets and choose from their favorite ones. To keep the tweets authentic, users are not allowed to edit past tweets or add new tweets directly to the books. Additionally, users CANNOT purchase books of other people's tweets, although they can send gift cards to fellow Twitter users enabling them to print their own books." (Via Gawker)

A few writers received an unexpected bookstore boost today as they nabbed spots on Hudson Booksellers' Best Books of the Year list. The list will earn these writers some coveted placement in the company's bookstores, reaching the most captive readership in the whole world--the airport reader.

Hudson runs 65 full-service bookstores around North America, but sells books in over 350 Hudson News stands in airports and transportation hubs. This year the company sold $93 million worth of books. Here are the fiction winners, a list with only a single National Book Award nominee on it. The best nonfiction, business, and young adult books follow after the jump...

Best Fiction: "The Year of the Flood" by Margaret Atwood, "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave, "Spooner" by Pete Dexter, "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman, "The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver, "Fool" by Christopher Moore, "The Song is You" by Arthur Phillips, "Lark & Termite" by Jayne Anne Phillips, "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, and "Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

continued...

Robert Allen has been named editorial director at Macmillan Audio, the company announced today.

Allen's publishing career began as Baker and Taylor sales manager, followed by a move to Bantam Doubleday Dell sales. While there, he rose to vice president of sales marketing at Doubleday Broadway and then publisher of Random House Audio. Since then, he co-founded Brands-to-Books agency, working with clients like TV Guide and Housing Works.

Macmillan Audio publisher Mary Beth Roche had this statement: "I think Robert is going to be a spectacular addition to our audio team ... Robert's broad publishing background in both sales and acquisitions makes him ideally suited for this position."

According to Scribd CTO Jared Friedman (pictured), the solution to a healthier publishing industry is simple: increase the amount of books available from 300,000 to 3 million.

Over at our sibling blog BayNewser interviewed Friedman, getting his unconventional thoughts about the future of publishing. Scribd has been nicknamed YouTube for books, an online repository of millions of texts--one of the companies included in mediabistro.com's eBook Summit. The interview covered everything from Harry Potter to e-readers.

What do you think? Here's an excerpt: "Our thesis is that the limiting factor in the number of books that are published per year is not the amount of content that people are able to write and it's not the amount of content that people are able to read. Rather it's a structural limitation of the publishing industry itself.... We think that if we can cast off the artificial limitations that are imposed by the way the economics of the publishing industry currently work, we could potentially dramatically increase the amount of work that is published."

It wasn't long after talk show host Oprah Winfrey's announcement of her intention to retire in 2011 that publishing insiders began referring to her departure as "a blow" to the industry, one from which it would be difficult if not impossible to recover. "We probably won't see something else to match its overall potential impact on book sales in the broadcast arena any time soon," Random House's Stuart Applebaum told the Wall Street Journal. "Happily she enjoys reading books and wants to persuade her viewership to enjoy them as much as she does. It's not a characteristic shared by any other TV personalities with her persuasiveness."

Now, we fully concede that you could shoot down just about anybody else on television by saying they don't have "her persuasiveness," but still, the suggestion that Glenn Beck or Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert aren't doing their bit to put books into American readers' hands is... well, it's just not right. Beyond that, though, maybe it's not outrageous to question how helpful Winfrey's book club has really been to publishing, beyond the obvious sales boost it gave to nearly 70 books over the years.

Some of Winfrey's impact on America's reading culture is probably impossible to quantify, like Edwige Danticat's assertion (in the WSJ article) that "she makes reading seem democratic, within everyone's reach, and also a lot of fun." But it would be possible—if you had ready access to Nielsen Bookscan—to get some sense of her broader impact on book sales. After the summer of 2005, for example, how many people moved on to the William Faulkner books Oprah hadn't recommended? How are the novels Cormac McCarthy wrote before The Road doing? (Granted, No Country for Old Men has had attention-grabbing opportunities of its own.) Or, take it further back: How are Oprah picks of the late 1990s, like Danticat or Chris Bohjalian, faring today—how many readers have stayed with them over the years? (That'd be an admittedly tricky question to answer, because you'd have to balance any attrition against the new readers the author might have gained over the course of his or her career, without that sticker having appeared on one book, simply by virtue of being as good as he or she is.)

What really annoys us, though, is the whiff of defeatism that clings to these public statements about "losing" Winfrey, the same way we got annoyed at "What'll we do without Harry Potter?" chatter or "OMG, what if Dan Brown never delivers that new novel?" doomsaying. (OK, maybe we're exaggerating the latter situation a bit.) And that's why we say it would be better for book publishers if Oprah had simply shut down production after last Friday's episode, forcing everybody to come up with alternative strategies right now instead of wringing their hands for two years over the impending loss of a hitmaking machine over which they never had any control in the first place.

Now, here we are exaggerating for effect, as we know plenty of marketers and publicists who are working hard every day to forge new connections because they recognize the foolishness of counting on Oprah Winfrey's blessings. But you wouldn't know it from the statements in the Journal—and though some of that is attributable to the Journal knowing "publishers are worried about losing Oprah" is a more dramatic story than "publishers have a job to do with or without Oprah," it's not like the staff had to make up any of those quotes, either.

Last week, Harlequin announced the launch of Harlequin Horizons, a new division billed as "[an] opportunity for women's fiction writers and romance authors to publish their books and achieve their dreams," provided they've got at least $599 to subsidize that publication. The partnership with self-publishing specialists AuthorSolutions drew instant opposition from several authors guilds, which quickly branded Horizons as a vanity press operation: The Romance Writers of America announced Harlequin wouldn't be eligible for favored-publisher privileges at next year's national convention, the Science Fiction Writers of America flat-out declared "NO titles from ANY Harlequin imprint will be counted as qualifying for membership in SFWA," and the Mystery Writers of America said it might also take that route, but not until after they've given Harlequin a month to set things right. SFWA can play hardball because not very many of its members are qualifying on the basis of Harlequin publications in the first place; MWA has a slightly more delicate situation in that a not-insignificant portion of its membership publishes under Harlequin's MIRA imprint, although not nearly as strong a contingent as would exist in the RWA ranks—if SFWA's hardball is largely ideological, RWA's hardball is both ideological and material, and has already had an impact, as Harlequin is already looking to rebrand the enterprise.

(Making Light has all three statements in one handy spot, by the way, and lots of commentary. Which is also in abundance at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.)

Not everybody hates the Horizons concept, however. Publishing industry analyst Kat Meyer argues this is exactly the sort of new business model experimentation publishing needs to survive, and says "it's sad that Harlequin's history of author advocacy, smart business decisions, and leadership in the publishing world aren't enough for authors (or agents) to trust them as they explore and introduce these new models." Meanwhile, Michael Hyatt—who has a dog in this hunt as his publishing company, Thomas Nelson, has entered into a similar arrangement with AuthorSolutions—has rebuttals to the three most prominent lines of attack; let brand owners worry about maintaining the integrity of their brands, he argues, and let authors make their own decisions about the publishing options that might be right for them.

And this is pretty much the issue in a nutshell: Is Horizons a potentially useful alternative to publishing's broken business model, as Meyer suggests, or it is, in the words of John Scalzi, "a skeezy, cynical and horribly demeaning thing Harlequin is doing, padding its bottom line by suckering a bunch of folks who don't know better into thinking that paying for publication is a legitimate path into the publishing world"?

Let's tease out some context: The pay-to-play model does have a historical lineage, and has not always been regarded so prominently as a means for unscrupulous "publishers" to prey on aspiring authors' dreams, but as authors have increasingly banded together, declared themselves professionals, and attempted to establish the proposition that money should flow in the direction of the writer as a fundamental principle, respect for the model has diminished. You could argue, however, that it's a question of how much the developing writer should—or should be expected to—invest in his or her success: Is it enough to deliver a manuscript, or might it be appropriate to invest some of one's own capital the way an entrepreneur launching a business in any other field might?

So what do you think?

Today's Featured Book of the Day is How to rule the World from Your Couch by Laura Day who, among others, has worked with movie star Brad Pitt. As a Healer,Day gives valuable lessons on how you can achieve all you want and make your life happier.

Day's book will give you the results that you have been searching for quickly and sufficiently. By following the techniques that Day recommends, you can do all of this without even leaving the comfort of your couch. She gives you the strength to look inside yourself and how to use that knowledge to better your life. So get ready to get to know your true self and learn how to make your life more effective and easy.

The cinematic adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" has already shattered two opening weekend records, as the vampire books struck multiplex gold once again. UPDATE: Gawker reports that the film earned an estimated $140.7 million over the weekend.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the film pulled in $26.3 million in midnight screenings in the wee hours of Friday, beating the $22.2 million record previously held by "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." The article also notes that the film earned $72.7 on Friday, topping the previous one-day records held by comic franchises: "The Dark Knight" and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."

GalleyCat has been archiving Twilight ephemera all week, starting with Twilight Tattoos. Next, find out what America's most critically acclaimed writers thought about this bestselling series in this timely GalleyCat video from the National Book Awards. Finally, read our interview with an author who studied the mysterious world of Twilight tourism and one town's annual Stephenie Meyer Day.

For your weekend reading pleasure, here some publishing news briefs...

Oprah Winfrey announced today that she will end her popular show in 2011, closing the televised side of the most influential book club in America. Author Edwidge Danticat told the Wall Street Journal why she will miss the club: "When she calls to tell you that your book has been selected for the book club, she sounds so excited that you feel as though she's both your ideal reader and your biggest cheerleader."

To write its embargo-breaking scoop about Sarah Palin's memoir (which has reportedly sold 300,000 copies already), the AP ripped, scanned, and mined the text for juicy tidbits.

Kat Meyer interviewed Angela James, the executive editor for Carina Press on Twitter for her weekly Follow Reader Twitter chat. Read the whole exchange at #followreader.

Why author and literary blogger Maud Newton is writing a novel instead of a memoir.