British writer gets sales boost from Tiger Woods crash

In happier times...:

Sales of a little-known British scientist's book have soared after it was pictured in Tiger Woods' crashed car, he said Thursday.

"Get a Grip on Physics" by Doctor John Gribbin was photographed in a footwell of the car after the US golf superstar smashed it into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his Florida home last month.

Within days of the pictures going round the world, the book's best-seller ranking on Internet retailer Amazon.com shot up from 396,224th position to 2,268th.

Unfortunately for Gribbin, an astronomy expert at the University of Sussex in southern England, the book was almost out of print, but the publicity has boosted sales of second-hand copies online too.

"I'm delighted by the publicity, but chagrined that it wasn't a book that is still in print," he told AFP. "There were only a couple of hundred copies left in stock, and they all went in a day or so.

"Now it sells second-hand for 75 dollars, but of course I get nothing from that. I don't even have any spare copies to put on eBay myself!," he added.

The fact that Woods had a book like his in his car was not a huge surprise, since he was roughly from the target audience of educated layman with an interest in science.

"I can only guess that Tiger was reading the book because like many people he has heard stories about the Large Hadron Collider and wanted to get some background," he said, referring to the world's biggest atom-smasher.

The book - originally published as "Get a Grip on the New Physics" - is "about the new physics of the second half of the 20th century - quarks, string, and so on," he added.

It is unclear whether Woods - whose life has been plunged into turmoil amid reports of multiple extra-marital affairs and signs he could lose lucrative sponsorship deals - was actually planning to read it at the time of the crash.

If he had, "it's designed to dip in to, not to read from cover to cover," said Gribbin.

The Briton also noted that the book had since slipped back down the best-seller rankings, after available copies had been exhausted.

"The sales spurt was not as impressive as it seems, because Amazon compiles these lists hour by hour, so if you sell a dozen in an hour you shoot up the charts," he said.

By Thursday the book stood at 127,820 on the Amazon.com best-seller list, while several copies were available for bids on eBay, at least one of them described as "Get a Grip on Physics - Tiger Woods". LONDON, Friday (AFP)