My favourite publisher is at it again. Soon after announcing they would be experimenting with DRM-free audiobooks, Penguin today announced their new Penguin Tasters program.

From today (or actually from six months ago if you were sniffing around some of our new novels on the Penguin website) you can download the opening chapter (or chapters) of all Penguin's new fiction for free. Yes, that's right. FREE. For nothing. In pdf form - which you can print, email, view on your PC screen or a Blackberry, Palm or iPhone - these Tasters offer you the very beginnings of Penguin's latest novels. You can get your mitts on some great stories without having to give a jumped-up calculator the keys to your bank account. It's an entirely risk-free way to discover new authors, to read new stories (and to pass them on to your literate friends).

I've been quite effusive in my praise of Penguin before, but I think deservedly so. They seem to relish in experimenting with what it means to be a publisher in this day and age, and it's a joy to watch them innovate.

(Disclaimer: My employer was recently purchased by Pearson, who also own Penguin. Make of that what you will)

The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There's some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you've never seen before. You're still really inside some annotated version of your own head.

- William Gibson, interviewed on the Amazon Bookstore Blog

Hat tip: Boing Boing

Purchase it via the official site and the Drupal Foundation will get some loving in the form of cold hard cash.

OK, here I go. I’m going to make this whole website right now on this dry-erase board.

- No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July

Most creative website I've seen in a long time. Well worth 5 minutes of anyone's time, and I want to read the book now.

Hat tip: Daring Fireball.

Wow, this is great news.

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.

When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in which he lives is stifling creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter that serves as a guide through a surreal alternate world. Stephenson will adapt his novel for the miniseries, the first time the Hugo and Nebula award winner has written for TV.

So lets see, we have the Sci-Fi channel who continue to keep me on the edge of my seat with Battlestar Galactica, George Clooney whose recent output behind the camera has been enthralling (Good Night, and Good Luck, Syriana), working with Neal Stephenson on an adaption of one of his books (which also happens to be one of my favourites) ...

... pleasedon'tfuckitup pleasedon'tfuckitup!

Hat tip: Boingboing