POP GOES THE... Dr. Ruth Westheimer will bring her expertise to a Golden Books kids' pop up book called ''Who Am I? Where Did I Come From''? ''I am explicit in calling a penis a penis and a vagina a vagina, and not just 'something down there,''' says the therapist. ''I am certainly not going to say, as a children's book I saw says, 'vagina rhymes with Carolina,' because that's not the way Dr. Ruth talks, and what does the state of Carolina have to do with a vagina?'' Golden Books also has two titles from TV anchor Deborah Norville (''These are 'mommy books,''' not celeb books, Norville says).
IS IT ILL-E-GAL? In the first major battle of the e- book era, Random House, arguing that it owns electronic rights to all of its backlist titles -- including those published long before e- rights were in contracts -- has sued e- book publisher RosettaBooks, which has just launched with eight titles currently published by Random, including William Styron's ''Sophie's Choice'' and Kurt Vonnegut's ''Slaughterhouse Five.''
''We believe these rights are ours, and we don't appreciate somebody else taking them,'' says RH spokesman Stuart Applebaum. Rosetta, which negotiated directly with the authors and their agents, responds that Random has revised contracts in recent years to include e- book rights -- an admission, the company argues, that earlier contracts didn't cover them. ''The authors own these rights, period,'' says Rosetta CEO Arthur Klebanoff, who has retained David Boies' law firm. A U.S. District Court hearing is set for April 20.
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