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Joining their counterparts in the film industry, large book publishing houses are the latest to take aim at users of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. John Wiley and Sons, the publisher of the popular "For Dummies" how-to book series, is suing 27 Bit Torrent users for downloading PDF files of the books, thereby infringing on Wiley's copyrights.

How extensive is the alleged book piracy? Demonoid.me users are said to have swapped copies of Photoshop CS5 All-In-One For Dummies more than 74,000 times, according to the lawsuit.

Online book publishing service Blurb today launched a new way to publish collections of photos - as an eBook for the iPad. The new eBooks come in templated or custom two-page layouts, which readers can swipe through, search the text of and zoom into full resolution images.

Publishers pay $1.99 per book and get to keep 100% of the profit beyond that cost. Paper books from Blurb start at $10 each to print on demand. Two buck easy-to-make eBook publishing on demand sounds awesome.

The digital age just gave birth to something few of us were clamoring for, but that might turn out to be a worthwhile experience: books with soundtracks. Booktrack, a startup that publishes e-books containing movie-like soundtracks, went live with its first few titles yesterday.

The result is a Kindle-style e-book with music and sound effects that play in the background as you read. The books are sold as stand-alone mobile applications, currently for iOS with Android support reportedly underway.

Nearly the entire text of The Art of Assembly Language Programming has been posted online for the Processing Systems and Structures course at Washington University. The book begins with machine organization and then works through basic to advanced assembly language.

A while back we asked whether all programmers should learn assembly language. Most of you thought either all or most programmers should learn assembly.

Kindle Profiles is a social service that was quietly launched by Amazon in March of this year. Its existence was little known, probably because it wasn't very useful as a social tool until Amazon recently added connections to Twitter and Facebook. I myself only discovered the service after VC Fred Wilson blogged about it the over the weekend. Kindle Profiles appears to be gaining some early traction now, thanks largely to Kindle Profile users auto-following people in their Twitter and Facebook networks. As Wired pointed out, this is a somewhat dodgy tactic, because the user cannot turn off this auto-follow behavior.

Regardless, what's of most interest to me is how Amazon is actively trialing a social reading service connected to the Kindle brand. While Amazon owns the social reading service Shelfari, which it acquired three years ago, it hasn't integrated Shelfari in a deep way into Kindle. In this post, we review the features of Kindle Profiles and ask whether you'd want to use this over competing services like Goodreads or Library Thing.

Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim has been updated for Python 3. The new version of the book covers Python 3 and the differences between it and Python 2. It's available in print, or as a free e-book.

Unlike the other free Python e-books we covered, Dive Into Python is geared towards experienced programmers. It's considered a classic among Python developers.

Learn Ruby the Hard Way is a free online book on the Ruby language for beginner programmers. It's an adaptation of Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way translated into Ruby by Rob Sobers.

Facebook announced today that it has acquired a startup called Push Pop Press and most of the media coverage of the news has focused on Push Pop's dazzling e-book technology for clients including Al Gore. There's been some mention that one of Push Pop's co-founders, Mike Matas, was a former Apple designer.

There's a whole lot more to the story than that, though. Matas wasn't just one of many Apple designers; he designed many of the key interfaces you probably interact with every day if you own an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac. Now he's at Facebook. It's a big deal.

Push Pop Press, the digital book software company known for creating the highly interactive iOS version of Al Gore's book Our Choice, has been acquired by Facebook.

The social networking giant assures us it's not getting into the e-book publishing business, but rather snatched up the startup so that it can allow "some of the technology, ideas and inspiration behind Push Pop Press to become part of how millions of people connect and share with each other on Facebook."

If "lean startups" these days are supposed to release a minimum viable product, get reactions from initial customers, and then rapidly iterate - might not a book about startups work the same way? Every Book is a Startup is Todd Sattersten's new book, published by O'Reilly, about the changing publishing industry. You can buy the first two chapters of the eBook today for $4.99 and get subsequent chapters as free updates as they are written. But if you wait for the full book to be completed and published in paper, the price will be $25.

It's a fascinating experiment in eating your own dog food but it's not without historical precedent. Many novels throughout time were sold by subscription (Dickens, for example) and Samuel Johnson once took nine years to write the Western world's first authoritative printed dictionary. It was supported by subscription along the way and the end product weighed 20 pounds. That project was initiated by the publishing industry in response to massive disruption caused by the proliferation of printed materials and a need for a reference book defining common words. Perhaps this period of technological disruption will be well suited for another experiment in a similar format.