Shelf life

• Sir Salman Rushdie will be upstaged by Sir Sean Connery at this year's Edinburgh International book festival, as the former Bond star will be launching his memoirs. Sir Connery's memoirs, entitled Being A Scot, will coincide with the actor's 78th birthday and with Ian Fleming's centenary. The Edinburgh International book festival, which runs from August 9 to 25, will involve 800 authors and include 750 events.

• Lisa Jewell has won the Melissa Nathan Award for comedy romance for her sixth novel, 31 Dream Street. Speaking at the ceremony, Ms Jewell said that "You feel undervalued when you write the kind of fiction I write. So it's great to have this genre given its own night of appreciation and recognition."

• Sales figures for JK Rowling's Harry Potter series have topped 400m worldwide and are catching up with Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, which has sold 900m copies. Despite having been translated into 67 languages, Harry Potter still holds a very remote chance of ever catching up with the Bible which, since 1815, has been translated into 2,233 languages and dialects and sold over 2.5bn copies.

• Journalist Mark Lynas's Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet won the £10,000 Royal Society Science Books Prize. Mr Lynas's book studies the impacts of global warming and highlights the urgency with which climate change should be tackled.

• Anthony Puzo, son of author Mario Puzo, has sued Paramount Pictures, saying that the studio did not pay revenues from a video game based on The Godfather. Mr Puzo, who is claiming at least $1 million in damages, claims that Paramount had struck a deal with his father agreeing to give the author share of the revenue of any audiovisual products sold or rented with elements of The Godfather movies.

• President George W. Bush is planning to write a memoir of his own following blistering critiques by his former spokesman Scott McClellan in his memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington.