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Other titles selected by reading groups, who placed their votes via the Penguin and Orange websites and by entering themselves for the Penguin/Orange Broadband Readers' Group Prize, include former Orange and Booker Prize winners, older titles such as Barbara Kingsolver's tale of a missionary who takes his family to live in the Congo, The Poisonwood Bible, and bestsellers including Victoria Hislop's The Island.

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Hosseini's editor at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle, believes he is popular with reading groups for opening a door into a different culture. "We are bombarded in the news with Afghanistan so to be taken by the hand into that country and to meet the people through the joy of reading a novel is a really remarkable thing. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun does that too - you feel you've been absolutely changed, that your understanding of the world has been significantly enhanced, and not through reading a dry history book. There's a huge appetite for that, and I think Khaled is the strongest at providing it."

Hosseini said he was "deeply grateful" to reading groups for embracing The Kite Runner, which has now sold more than two-and-a-half million copies in the UK. "The writing of this book was a labour of love for me. I grew quite attached to the characters and came to care for them in a most personal way," he said. "Sharing this book that means so much to me with readers in the UK has been gratifying to me beyond words."

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"I am very disappointed to hear that my publishers, Random House, have cancelled another author's novel, apparently because of their concerns about possible Islamic reprisals," Rushdie said. "This is censorship by fear and it sets a very bad precedent indeed." The withdrawal of Jones's book has renewed the debate over self-censorship in the treatment of Islam.

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In a surprise move, Warner Bros. has moved the release date of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" from Nov. 21 to July 17. Warners president Alan Horn blamed last winter's 100-day WGA strike in large part for the shift, suggesting all the major studios have been hurt in the development of new tentpole films for next summer.

"We are still feeling the repercussions of the writers strike, which impacted the readiness of scripts for other films -- changing the competitive landscape for 2009 and offering new windows of opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of," Horn said. "We agreed the best strategy was to move 'Half-Blood Prince' to July, where it perfectly fills the gap for a major tentpole release for midsummer."

The move also reflects execs' belief that the "summer season is an ideal window for a family tentpole release," he said.

How bad is the business outlook for Tribune Co.'s newspapers? Bad enough for the company to take a $3.8 billion goodwill write-down on the value of its newspaper assets, which include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel.

In all, Tribune is reporting a $4.5 billion loss in its second-quarter, according to figures released Wednesday. The red ink was fueled by the newspaper write-down, costs associated with its sale of the Long Island-based newspaper Newsday to Cablevision, and an 11% decline in revenues in its publishing division, or an $83 million drop from the same period last year to $701 million.

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Tribune's TV stations fared better than the newspapers, but the overall market woes were a drag on stations as well. Revenue at its 23 stations was up 2% from the same period in 2007 to $292 million. However, TV operating expenses climbed 7%, which cut into the stations' operating cash flow. In that important measure, operating cash flow dropped 8% to $92 million.

Dimitri Nabokov says in an interview with the German edition of Vanity Fair that his father must have wanted the work published. He is quoted as saying: "Had my father really wished that this novel not be released, he would have destroyed it himself." The interview is to be published Thursday.