At Comic-Con this year, the Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) announced its commitment to make all seven of the Chronicles of Narnia books into feature films, releasing one a year starting in May '08 with Prince Caspian. This decision follows the success of the adaptation of the first book -- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -- which grossed almost $300 million.

This decision is not surprising, following the conclusion of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, which has no immediate plans to continue. Disney is predictably looking for its next goldmine franchise, and what better to use than a seven book series which already had a successful start?

The only question is whether the quality of production will suffer in the sequels from such an ambitious filming schedule, and after Disney pulled off the Pirates trilogy with such dazzling effects, I doubt that will be a concern -- although the quality of the Pirates scripts did fade down the stretch. At least with these movies, the writers will have a classic source to guide them.

If I Did It, how much would I be worth? That's the question many buyers on eBay and reporters from the Wall Street Journal are asking today. Many listings of If I Did It, OJ Simpson's supposedly hypothetical retelling of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, have already been pulled by eBay, Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) at News Corporation (NYSE:NWS)'s HarperCollins unit's request. The bids were reportedly in the thousands before the auctions were ended, although many booksellers interviewed by the WSJ said they would put the price of the book closer to $1000 (although they'd only pay $100, buy low, sell high, anyone?). This auction ended at a whopping $8300.

Some put the book's price between $2000 and $5000, although everyone seemed to agree that such a price wouldn't be sustainable in the long run.

Instead of beating the First Amendment drum, I'll just riff on a capitalist beat: people obviously want to read the darned thing! My objection would likely be more literary snobbishness than righteous horror -- Judith Regan ain't known for her wordcraft. But if people want to read it so badly they'll pay thousands ...

In a move that already has the Association of American Publishers, Authors Guild, and Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in an uproar, Google has secured rights to digitize all the books in 100+ libraries spread throughout the University of California's 10 campuses.

The Google Book Search initiative is premised around scanning any and every book it can obtain, then allowing users to search for a book based on its contents and how they correspond to the user's search parameters. This is important to Google because the more content that is searchable, the more users Google can attract, and the more pay-clicks it can generate through its AdWords mechanism.

Google Book Search's main competitor is the Open Content Alliance (OCA), an open-source counter move launched by Microsoft and Yahoo!, which has already secured rights to the University of California libraries 'un-copyrighted' works.

The Google Book Search initiative differs from the OCA in two distinct ways.

1) The digitized material obtained by Google will be searchable only via Google while the OCA will have its digitized works available via Yahoo!, the OCA's own public portal, and will support various initatives to expose the data to the public.
2) The OCA is digitizing only un-copyrighted works, while Google is digitizing both copyrighted and un-copyrighted works.

The second point surrounding digitizing copyrighted works has landed Google in the familiar hot-seat as it is facing two lawsuits by the Association of American Publishers and Authors Guild, respectively. Google however contends that it is not breaking any copyright laws and is within the realm of 'fair-use' because it does not display the full copyrighted texts, only snippets of text, but allows the work to be identified via search.

The OCA has so far amassed a greater collection of works, although only un-copyrighted works. In the academic realms Google has signed on Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Michigan.

Yahoo! will thus eventually have a respectable book search, but will not be the leader in the field as the OCA's digitized archives will be available via other channels. Yahoo! also does not provide as robust a search as Google, which will identify for a user all relevant works, including copyrighted material (though they will limit the content that is displayed).

This is a huge win for Google, as the more copyrighted materials it can get a hold of, the more it will distance itself from competitors.