It was only a matter of time: Mygazines features "member-scanned full digital copies of magazines, which can be browsed, shared, archived and even re-assembled to create aptly-named 'mygazines'" reports The Wikinomics Blog, and the site is hosted by the same company that hosts The Pirate Bay. "I think that our current copyright laws and their application tend to be a bit heavy-handed," says The Motley Fool, "but even so I can't justify this project under 'fair use.'" But Joe Wikert at the Publishing 2020 Blog thinks, "This is a golden opportunity for the magazine industry to see how a Napster-like platform for periodicals could and should work effectively. Mygazines is essentially doing e-content R&D for the entire magazine industry; I just hope the industry takes the time to study and understand the results before they look to kill the service." Seriously, print magazines, this is a good time to embrace the Internet: FishbowlNY has statistics reporting that traffic to consumer magazine websites in the second quarter of 2008 were up 8.5% from the same time period in 2007.

Last week, Vermont-based political press Chelsea Green announced that it would make its big fall title, Obama's Challenge by Robert Kuttner, available two weeks before its publication date exclusively to Amazon.com customers with special coupons. Independent booksellers are mad, and B&N cancelled its 10,000-copy order. "It's not every day a publisher manages to piss off both Barnes & Noble and the indie bookselling community, but Chelsea Green . . . figured out an easy way to do it," writes GalleyCat.

Also on GalleyCat, Kelley & Hall, the publicists for the originally self-published The Lace Reader, which ended up selling to William Morrow for a reported $2.5 million in a two-book deal, want more credit. Jocelyn Kelley writes, "We became the unsung heroes--and are mentioned rarely in interviews . . . You can see that without us, The Lace Reader would not have achieved the stratospheric success that it ultimately obtained." The Lace Reader is currently #7 on the NYT bestseller list (and author Brunonia Barry does some fun blogging at Bru-Haha).