Romance novel expert Sarah Wendell was perusing some romance ebooks rendered by running old romance novels through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, when she noticed something unusual. Lines such as “Mrs. Tipton went over to him and put her anus around his neck,” and “When she spotted me, she flung her anus high in the air.”

Stephen King himself could not have come up with a more twisted, gruesome plot than the reality of the Craigslist killings that took place in Ohio in 2011. Now the exploits of Craigslist murderer Richard Beasley and his teen sidekick Brogan Rafferty, the stories of their victims Timothy Kern, David Pauley, and Ralph Geiger, and lone survivor Scott Davis, are detailed in a new ebook published by the Akron Beacon Journal.

Readers of all ages and backgrounds love a trip to Barnes & Noble for the selection, the atmosphere, and the service. And that really great coffee. But lovers of e-books have ignored Barnes and Noble’s proprietary Nook e-reader in favor of the iPad from Apple and Kindle from Amazon. As a result, the foray into its own tablet has hemorrhaged loses to the point that the retailer appears to have given up on the much ballyhooed effort.

College professor Timothy Messer-Kruse didn’t think that something as small as making a tiny edit a Wikipedia page would spark national headlines, but it has. After finding proof that a historical event, the Haymarket Square riot, did not quite happen the way historians have long believed, Messer-Kruse decided to update the Wikipedia page of the event to reflect his findings. What he found was that it was going to be an uphill battle to make that change.

Gone are the days when paying through the nose is the only option for students who need textbooks, now students can rent textbooks from Amazon.com. While renting textbooks is not a new idea, the ability to do so through Amazon offers an attractive, easy, and simple textbook rental option, especially since so many students already have Amazon accounts.

Much of the technology world was stunned to learn that an antitrust lawsuit against technology giant, Apple Inc, and several book publishers, was filed by the US. Government Wednesday morning. The lawsuit charges that Apple and the named publishers conspired to raise the retail prices of electronic-books in order to shun the competition, namely Amazon.com, who many say has monopolized the e-book industry.

The Google Book Store or, perhaps more accurately, the Google eBook Store, was officially launched today. The store, stocked with at least 3 million books, allows you to download Google books from the Google eBookstore to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android phone or device, the Sony Reader, and even the Barnes and Noble Nook, as well as to read Google eBooks with your browser.

The Espresso Book Machine (“EBM”) is a new variation of “print on demand” – an Internet-connected book vending machine which, by tapping into a vast online book catalog, can print – on the spot – your choice of a mind-boggling selection of two million titles, including currently in-copyright titles as well as those in the public domain, and out of print books! The Expresso Book Vending Machine is available from On Demand Books (ODB), and below we include a list of current Espresso Book Machine locations, so that you can see it in action.

The new Sony Reader is an eBook reader introduced by Sony that is about the size of a paperback, but weighing just 9 ounces. The Sony Reader works with the Connect service, which is like iTunes for books. With 64mb of memory on board, and an expandable memory card slot, the Sony Reader is capable of carrying dozens of ebooks at once.

Here is a list of books that we here at the Internet Patrol recommend. In fact, we think so highly of these books, that we will give you a money back guarantee: if you buy any of these books and don’t like them, we’ll personally refund the purchase price!

HarperCollins plans to digitize 20,000 books from their publishing catalog. They say that it will protect their copyright, but how?