Magazine genre books: Pauline M. Millard of the AP does a round-up feature on current fiction about magazines, including The Devil Wears Prada, In Full Bloom and Fashionistas. There’s also, The Fabulist, the Stephen Glass “autobiographical novel” (or roman a clef, for my Ivy League friends). If you’re not up for a book, there are also some DVDs with magazine-twists you can watch.

Not to worry? This is one of those tech trends from Japan that I guess will chill U.S. magazine publishers. According to the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, users of cellular camera phones are posting page-by-page images of magazines to the web (probably to their moblog - or, mobile blog for those who don’t hang out in the blog world). I know that camera phones are much more ubiquitous in Japan than in the U.S., but can’t judge how real this phenomenon is. I’ll e-mail the definitive expert on blogging in Japan (and everything else, for that matter), Joi Ito, to see if he can shed light on the magazine-blog trend. As for me, I would think magazine publishers would like the exposure…and the “community” support these so-called “shop-lifters” are building around their print brands. Just one more example of magazine publishers not “getting it.” (Via Slashdot.org)

Involvement Index: Media Post’s Larry Dobrow reports on a consortium of magazines that are backing a new “Involvement Index” that shows magazines are, in effect, the most engaging medium. I’ll be posting more on this later.