What would Halloween be without a little trick-or-treating? This year, make exploring some of these classic spooky tales part of your treat. Discover who famously uttered "nevermore," why Van Helsing was forced to behead the "bloofer lady" and how Ichabod Crane met his untimely end in a tranquil glen called Sleepy Hollow.

Since we've digitized the full text of these stories and novels, you can search every word. But that's not all -- whenever you see a Download button, you're free to download, save and print a PDF version to read at your own pace. And if you decide you want to buy a bound copy, "All editions" will show you multiple editions, many of which are available for purchase.

Joy Behar got herself a publisher, Crown, an agent, Bill Adler, and a book idea, "When You Need a Little Lift . . . By Joy Behar and Friends." She's asking celebrity friends to share whatever picks them up when they're in the dumps because, as her letter says, "Even Richard Simmons is sometimes down." So far contributors include James Earl Jones, LeAnn Rimes and D. Trump.

He said the Gordimer was robbed of cash and jewelry when three unknown men gained entrance to her home at about 10:30 a.m. local time on Thursday. Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, is noted for her novels and short stories about the inhumanity of apartheid. Several were once banned in her own country.

Tsunke said in a statement released Saturday that the unarmed men held Gordimer and her domestic worker up. One of the men took Gordimer to a bedroom and demanded she open the safe. She handed over cash and jewelry, but would not part with her wedding ring from her marriage to art dealer Reinhold Cassirer, who died in 2001. "The suspects then locked both Gordimer and her domestic worker in a store room and fled the scene," Tsunke said.

He said the domestic worker, whose name he did not know, had managed to press a panic button, triggering an alert with a security company. Tsunke said guards arrived about half an hour later and released the women. He said a case of house robbery and common assault was opened but no arrests had been made. South Africa has become notorious for its high rate of violent crime and there is concern about the negative publicity about the country before the soccer World Cup it will host in 2010.

Beginning today, visitors to Barnes & Noble.com can join online conversations with authors like Carl Hiaasen, the popular novelist whose latest book, Nature Girl, debuts November 14th. Nearly 30 authors will lead discussions about their books this fall, and Barnes & Noble.com’s Book Club moderators will lead discussions of other popular books, including literary classics and noteworthy titles in such categories as self improvement, personal finance, cooking and health.

Readers can access the Book Club message boards at their convenience, and can enhance their experience by creating user profiles, sharing lists of favorite books and authors, subscribing to e-mail updates, and sending private messages to other users.

"With Barnes & Noble.com's Book Clubs, readers are now able to find literary companionship 24 hours a day from wherever they are," said Marie Toulantis, chief executive officer of Barnes & Noble.com. "The new Book Clubs are a natural extension of the thousands of book clubs at Barnes & Noble stores nationwide. This new online community meets the needs of authors who are eager to reach as broad an audience as possible, and our customers, who want to interact with their favorite authors and with like-minded readers in an online forum with easy-to-use features."

Norman Buckley, 44, began his thefts after breaking up with his long-term girlfriend. He made more than £11,000 from sales of books on eBay but hardly spent any of the money, claiming the sales gave him a buzz.

Among books he stole was a 16th century Geoffrey Chaucer, worth £35,000, and a volume of political works by Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. He also took broadsides - newssheets detailing the history of Manchester - including one that contained an account of food riots in 1757. An antiquarian books expert in Somerset became intrigued when he saw a copy of John Donne's Elegies, from 1654, for sale on eBay. He saw the Manchester Libraries seal on it, then contacted the library. Staff subsequently contacted police.

Buckley, who worked part-time in the local studies and archive team, was arrested at his home in Hulme, Manchester, in March, on suspicion of theft, and dismissed from his job. When police raided his flat they found 400 books. Buckley pleaded guilty in August to 10 specimen thefts and asked for 445 offences to be taken into consideration. At Manchester crown court yesterday, he was ordered to perform 250 hours' community service. Judge Clement Goldstone said his 15-month jail term was suspended for two years because he had helped police to find the books.

Denise Fitzpatrick, for Buckley, said he had become depressed after his girlfriend left him: "Norman Buckley's motivation for taking these books was not financial. It was an emotional release."

Brian May traded rock 'n' roll for the big bang as he launched a book about the origins of the universe. May, who abandoned doctoral studies in astronomy to play guitar with '70s rock legends Queen, has returned to his first love as a co-author of the book "Bang! The Complete History of the Universe," which was launched Monday.

Co-written with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott, presenters of the British Broadcasting Corp. astronomy program "The Sky at Night," the book recounts the formation of the universe from its origins more than 13 billion years ago and looks forward to its end, several billion years from now.

May, 59, whose guitar playing drives "We Will Rock You," "Bohemian Rhapsody" and other hits, sees similarities between his two great loves, music and astronomy.

"I think there's a sort of purity about both of them," he said recently, according to The Guardian newspaper. "Because you can immerse yourself in thoughts of the universe, or in music, and you're really abstracted. You're a million miles away from all your worries and personal problems and the dust and smoke of where you are."

With native support for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, Digital Editions delivers an engaging way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications. Initially available as a free public beta for Windows, Digital Editions will support Macintosh systems as a universal binary application, Linux platforms, as well as mobile phones and other embedded devices in future versions.

"Adobe Digital Editions builds on the ubiquitous reach of PDF and Flash and will further energize the eBook and digital publishing market," said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief operating officer at Adobe. "By creating a specialized, consumer-friendly application like Digital Editions, Adobe is ensuring publishers can securely deliver high-impact content to the widest possible audience, across hardware platforms, operating systems and devices."

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Digital Editions is designed to support a wide range of business models including public domain texts (open content), ad-supported content, library lending and other borrowing/subscription models, and the purchase of eBooks and digital content.

Digital Editions will integrate with a new hosted content authorization service to protect publisher's rights while maintaining ease-of-use for consumers. This new Adobe Digital Editions Protection Service, based on LiveCycle Policy Server, will allow publishers to choose from a flexible array of business models, with user-ID-based authorization that provides an improved user experience over competitive DRM models.

Relatives of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, the two victims of the 1994 double murder that made headlines around the world, expressed disgust and frustration that Simpson might be continuing to profit from a crime that most Americans are convinced he committed, despite his notorious acquittal.

"If this is true, that is blood money and it's evil and disgusting," said Denise Brown, the sister of Simpson’s former wife who has become a prominent campaigner against domestic violence. “Any company that actually pays him for this is just as bad as he is." The book is reported to have the working title If I Did It. Details were published by the National Enquirer newspaper last week on the same day that Goldman's father, Fred, launched a new court attempt to seize some of Simpson's assets in part repayment of a $33.5m judgment against him after he lost a 1997 civil court case.

The former American-football star has never paid a cent of the judgment, despite the civil court's finding that he was responsible for Brown and Goldman's deaths. "It is horribly frustrating and at the same time demoralising for Fred Goldman and his family, especially when they read about things like this," said Jonathan Polak, a lawyer representing Goldman in an attempt to obtain rights to Simpson's income from selling autographs and appearing at sports celebrity events.

Polak added: "Simpson appears to be attempting to profit not off his football fame, but off the very thing that was so inhuman and that everyone knows he did." The National Enquirer's account could not be verified this weekend but the newspaper provided extensive details in a four-page report on what it called a "tell-all blockbuster". Simpson is said to describe how he "grabbed a knife from a man who accompanied him to Nicole's home — and moments later found himself covered in blood and looking down on the bodies of Nicole and Ron".

Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro told SCI FI Wire that he wants to make a more faithful film version of Roald Dahl's dark fantasy children's book The Witches, which was adapted for the screen once before, in 1990, by director Nicholas Roeg. "I liked a lot of the Roeg film, but I really, really disliked that the ending was changed, because I think the essence of the Dahl story is that the kid remains a mouse," said del Toro, who said The Witches is his favorite Dahl book. "Having said that, how the hell do I know that they won't change it on me again? They probably did that to Nicholas Roeg. So it may happen again. But I want to try."

In The Witches, a group of witches aims to rid England of all children, but their plot is thwarted by a resourceful little boy who won't give up, even after he's transformed into a tiny mouse.

Del Toro added: "Growing up, it was my favorite Dahl book. It was my favorite, because the witches represent adulthood. They represent the world. They represent all things that f--k up a kid. And I always thought it was great that the grandmother and the boy were essentially the same age and, therefore, were susceptible to witches that were in the guise of respectable old ladies. I thought Dahl has that subversive streak in him. It was there in his Unexpected tales, but it was also in his children's books. And much like H.H. Munro, Dahl has a very definitely sophisticated point of view on what the children's world is. That script is written. It's budgeted and awaiting a green light."

The agreement, which also involves book publisher Scholastic, gives Sega interactive rights to all three books in Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy. New Line is currently shooting first entry The Golden Compass and expects to make two more, with Sega producing companion games.

Electronic Arts has made several successful "Lord of the Rings" games not tied to the pics and recently extended its deal with New Line and books rights holder the Saul Zaentz Co. to produce more. Sega would have to make a separate deal to produce games not tied to film releases.

The studio is expected to unveil several other major licensing deals for "Materials" in the next few weeks, including a master toy license and numerous promotional partners. Sega is already at work on the "Golden Compass" game and plans to release it on multiple consoles along with the pic next November.

"We believe 'Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones' is detrimental and dangerous to the thousands of women who will read it," Dr. Erika Schwartz, a Manhattan internist on the board of the SUNY Downstate College of Medicine, told Page Six. "The book freely and repeatedly blurs the line of medical ethics and science with hearsay."

Schwartz and five other top docs have written Somers and her publisher, Crown, to complain because "we cannot stand by and allow nonexperts to dispense medical advice that could potentially harm women." The "Three's Company" star - best known for hawking the ThighMaster exercise gadget - touts "bioidentical hormone-replacement therapy," in which supplemental doses of synthetic sex-steroid hormones replace conventional hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women.

Somers says her book is a "medically validated approach" that can help reverse "the aging process" and maintain "a healthy, vibrant, mentally sharp, sexually active life - while building the body's natural defenses against age-related diseases." But Schwartz says that many of the claims in the book are "scientifically unproven" and that Somers mixes "quotes from qualified physicians who are experts . . . with those of a person with no medical or scientific background" - which "will further confuse women and, we believe, may potentially put their health at risk."

Somers' rep didn't get back to us, but a Crown rep said the perky blond actress "spoke with 16 credentialed doctors whose interviews are all included in the book . . . She states clearly, and repeatedly throughout the book, that women need to consult with a responsible doctor who is practicing this new approach to health and together determine an individualized course of action. She has embraced this medicine because she has seen the results in her own body."

This year's book award finalists are an eclectic, and even unlikely, mix. It's not just a matter of geography but also of aesthetics; the books reflect a national literature in transition, with shifting perspectives, shifting priorities. Several books, fiction and nonfiction, draw their inspiration from the events of Sept. 11, but even more there are experiments in style, in format, as well as forms and genres that had gone unrepresented. Gene Luen Yang's "American Born Chinese," a finalist in the Young People's Literature category, is the first graphic novel ever nominated for a National Book Award. Yang teaches computer science at a Bay Area high school.

This sense of the unconventional is particularly prevalent in the fiction category. The list of finalists featured none of the highly regarded works from big names that one might have expected. Missing are "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, "Everyman" by Philip Roth and "Thirteen Moons" by Charles Frazier. Many expected to see a nod for Thomas Pynchon's long-awaited novel "Against the Day."

Perhaps the most surprising finalist was Los Angeles writer Mark Z. Danielewski's "Only Revolutions," an experimental, nonlinear novel involving two parallel narratives, one running front-to-back, the other back-to-front. The book comes with instructions, advising readers to move back and forth between the storylines in eight-page chunks.

The biggest name on the fiction list was Richard Powers, a highly regarded novelist whose "The Echo Maker" is about a man with Capgras syndrome, a rare condition that leads its sufferers to believe that their loved ones have been swapped with doubles or robots. Fiction judge Marianne Wiggins, a Los Angeles writer who was nominated in 2003 for "Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel," said she and her colleagues winnowed 258 novels. She argued in vain on behalf of McCarthy's "The Road." As for Pynchon, she said, "It was patently obvious it wasn't a contender."

The Indian-born novelist Kiran Desai triumphed last night by winning the £50,000 Man Booker prize with her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, a story replete with sadness over globalisation and with pleasure at the surviving intimacies of Indian village life.

She beat the bookies, who put her fifth out of six in the award shortlist, rating her as a 5/1 outsider, compared with odds of 6-4 on Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, the favourite.

At her first attempt Desai, 35, not only became the youngest woman to win but achieved a victory which repeatedly eluded her mother. The esteemed Indian novelist Anita Desai - to whom The Inheritance of Loss is dedicated - has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker. On hearing the result Desai said: "The debt I owe to my mother is so profound that I feel the book is hers as much as mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness."

This year's head judge, Hermione Lee, left no doubt that it was "the strength of the book's humanity" which gave it the edge after a long and passionate debate among the judges. "It is a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness," Professor Lee said. "Her mother will be proud of her."

Google, the world's most-used search engine, is seeking information on rival projects by the companies, including book lists, costs, estimated sales, dealings with publishers and possible benefit or harm to copyright owners, according to papers filed in U.S. District Court in New York. Publishers and authors have sued Google, claiming the Mountain View, Calif.-based company doesn't have the right to make copies of books without permission. Google says it is complying with copyright law because the search engine shows only "snippets" of protected books to the public. Google said it would keep subpoenaed information confidential.

"We have also made clear to these organizations that we will work with them to address any concerns about their confidential information," Google spokeswoman Megan Lamb said. A judge has issued an order to restricting who can see confidential documents, she said.

Spokesmen for Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo didn't have immediate comments. Microsoft and Yahoo announced plans to scan library books a year ago. They are part of a group called the Open Content Alliance, which includes Britain's National Archives and the University of California. Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, offers a feature called Search Inside that lets users search for specific terms and view a limited number of pages. Publishers need to enroll and submit books to be included in the project.

Google, which doesn't disclose how many books it has scanned, also wants to know the titles, authors and copyright status of books already offered through competitors' book projects, the documents said. The company also is seeking information from Random House Inc., HarperCollins Publishers Inc., Holtzbrinck Publishers and the Assn. of American Publishers. The subpoena notices were filed with the court Wednesday and Sept. 29. On Sept. 26, U.S. District Judge John Sprizzo issued an order that any information gathered in the case would be used only for litigation purposes.

"I worked hard not to make it a clever book," he said over a cup of coffee in the pale late summer sunshine on the bank of the River Thames outside London's National Theatre. "I didn't want to be affected. I wanted this book to belong to the people in it. There is a lot I don't say, so that the reader gets to be involved. I wanted to be really honest. I wanted people to say, 'Yes, that is what life is like.'"

The book "is almost ready," the Pope recently told his publishers, The Vatican Publishing House, but he has urged them to have "a little more patience." According to the Pope he has already written the preface and is preparing the bibliography.

Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone was the first to reveal the existence of the text. In an interview in Argentina last summer, the cardinal said the Pope was completing a book on Jesus Christ and what he meant for humanity.

Anyone worth their salt in the publishing world is set to descend on Frankfurt to attend the world's largest and most important annual book fair from October 4 to 8. Publishers are agreed that it is the event of the year and too important to miss. Trade revolves around rights and licenses and the Frankfurt Rights Catalogue lists more than 19,000 titles from 70 countries in 55 languages with rights for sale.

More than 7,000 exhibitors from 111 countries are expected to attend this year's fair spread over 172,000 square metres or around 45 football pitches. Exhibits on display include around 380,000 books, audiobooks, DVDs, CD-Roms, films, magazines, comics and new media products.

Around 180,000 trade visitors are expected on all five days. Unlike the world's second largest book fair, BookExpo America, and much to the annoyance of publishers, the Frankfurt Book Fair will open its doors to the general public at the weekend when around 100,000 visitors are expected. In 2005, total visitor numbers came to 284,838 people - an increase of 6.3 per cent over 2004. The fair's status as a cultural, media and commercial mega event is reflected in the diversity of the events taking place.

In order to give the fair more content and to improve orientation, the idea of a Guest of Honour was first introduced in the 1970s. But it also draws attention to the literature of lesser known countries and players in publishing. While the objective of becoming Guest of Honour is to give the native publishing industry a new commercial impulse and improve its standing, the honour is also political and prestigious.

The focus of attention in the run-up to the book fair is not only on literature, but on the country as a tourist destination and its cultural diversity. This year is set to become a festival of India.