LISNews: Librarian News

Like any avid reader, I appreciate the beauty of good cover art. No matter what they say, millions of people judge books by their covers every day.

These retro covers for Penguin's reissues of Ian Fleming's master spy stories fit the style and sexiness that fans all over the world have come to associate with James Bond. Some of the covers are completely original while others pay homage to the movie based upon them. (See Dr. No for the now iconic white knife belt worn by Ursula Andress and then most recently by Halle Berry.)

Obviously these come just in time for the release of Quantum of Solace, the newest big screen film featuring Daniel Craig as 007.

Consider yourself a geek? You'd be in good company at San Diego's thirty-ninth annual Comic-Con(vention), which opened yesterday. It started as a comic book conference way back when, but has since expanded into a multitude of entertainment formats.

Reports from Reuters, E Online, NYTimes, Empire OnLine, Publishers Weekly, AP, various live-bloggers and more.

It's happened to all of us. We read a novel that blows us away, and a few years later its title appears on posters underneath the face of Harrison Ford or Natalie Portman. But at some inevitable point in that darkened theater, the movie takes a turn we didn't expect. Our eyebrows go up, our lips turn down, and the disappointment begins. Maybe the wrong director or writer can curse an otherwise excellent project — or maybe some things were just never meant to be filmed. Here are 10 books that io9.com thinks should never have been committed to celluloid.

Everyone follows along with the biggest box office draws, top selling games, Billboard Top 100, and best seller lists, but how can you compare them? How Iron Man was trounced by a scruffy car thief tries to quantify the GTA lucrative launch against other mediums. The book "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" sold more than 10 million copies at launch. That's actually four million more than Bellic, but the Hogwarts student's final adventure cost about half as much as the game. *NSYNC beats them both, the pop quintet's "No Strings Attached" holds the record for biggest first-week CD sales with 2.4 million copies when it was released in 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That's far meeker than the first-week success of "Iron Man," "Deathly Hallows" and "GTA IV."