Lisa Padilla

JD Lasica's Darknet, a book about Hollywood and digital copyrights and the underground shared networks of material available to us all.

Here's an excerpt. IF you do not know why she is a publishing legend, Jane Friedman will be happy to tell you. "I am actually credited with inventing the author tour," Ms. Friedman, the president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers, told a group of aspiring editors and publicists recently at New York University's Center for Publishing. That boast is not without merit. In 1970, as a young publicist at Alfred A. Knopf, Ms. Friedman was assigned to schedule Julia Child on morning television shows to promote the second volume of her seminal work, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Ms. Friedman added a series of kitchen demonstrations by Mrs. Child at department stores across the country, and - voilà! - the author tour was born. Ms. Friedman also regularly tells of how she started the audio book business for Random House, bringing the idea of recorded books into the mainstream, and how she worked her way up from Dictaphone typist at Random House to the top of HarperCollins, helping to make it the country's third-largest publishing company along the way. After a speaker introduced her at N.Y.U. by saying that her company's profits had risen 100 percent since she took over in 1997, Ms. Friedman gently corrected him: "The profits went up 1,000 percent."