It’s about IBM’s years-long effort to build a computer smart enough to beat the world’s best “Jeopardy” players. And we’ll know how it turns out next month, when the quiz show airs a series of pretaped matches between Watson–IBM’s machine–Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, “Jeopardy”’s most successful champions.

But Baker and publisher Houghton Mifflin aren’t waiting for the end of the show to start selling the tale.

You can buy an e-book version of “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything” via Amazon or Barnes & Noble today, and start reading immediately–you just won’t get the last chapter, about the climactic battle.

Then in mid-February, immediately after the face-off has aired, the booksellers will send readers the end of the book, either beamed directly into their e-readers or shipped to their PCs.

(And if you’re into delayed gratification, or paper and ink, you could also just wait till mid-February to buy the complete edition in hardcover.)

Novel, right? Sort of. For e-books, the serial approach is a new one, and both booksellers had to be coaxed into doing it.

But selling books on an installment basis is a really old idea, dating back at least to the 1800s, when greats like Balzac and Dickens used to serialize their stories. New Yorkers supposedly gathered at the docks to ask incoming passengers for updates on Dickens’s characters.

And perhaps we’re headed back that way, since digital media allows creators to put out work in as long, or short, a format as they’d like, at whatever pace they want.

Amazon is already playing around with this with its clever “Kindle Singles” format, which sells mini e-books (i.e., novellas or long magazine articles) at mini prices.

And in Baker’s case, the strategy theoretically allows him to piggyback on a wave of publicity that IBM and “Jeopardy” are generating in advance of the shows. If you watched the NFL playoffs this weekend, there’s a good chance you saw, or at least fast-forwarded past, this spot:

Now the trick is to figure out how to turn that kind of media into book sales, which isn’t a given.

But Baker’s a clever guy–prior to writing this book, he was a longtime BusinessWeek writer and editor, and spent the last several years of his tenure covering technology–so I give him decent odds. He was able to get me to write this piece, for starters….

The justification for that request? A recent piece by New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera accusing TomorrowNow of “the most serious business crime you can commit” and suggesting that former SAP chief Léo Apotheker–who was recently named CEO of Hewlett-Packard– was well aware of it. “He may not have been directly involved in this brazen theft of intellectual property, but it defies belief to say he didn’t know about it,” Nocera wrote. “And he did nothing to stop it until it was far too late.”

A damning indictment, were it not for one problem: Nocera’s fiancée serves as director of communications for the law firm representing Oracle in its suit against SAP, a clear conflict of interest for the columnist and one that wasn’t disclosed when this article was first published. And for SAP, reason enough to demand an order preventing lawyers on both sides from discussing the case outside the courtroom.

“The episode involving the New York Times article–coupled with Oracle’s counsel’s refusal to eschew publicity efforts during trial despite recognizing that jurors may not heed a court instruction not to read press coverage–leads to this motion,” SAP’s attorneys wrote. “Referring to this copyright dispute as ‘the most serious business crime’ is inflammatory and, to the extent anyone credits the author, prejudicial. The same is true of almost any type of extrajudicial statements by counsel that a juror might read. The jurors should hear evidence and argument in court only; they should not be exposed to counsels’ extrajudicial repetition of, or spin on, the in-court evidence and argument.”

Arguments on the gag order are due tomorrow, with a ruling to follow sometime after that. Trial starts in a week, and with a witness list that includes Apotheker as well as his harshest critic, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, it should be great fun to watch.

That’s an unprecedented move in the ongoing fight between cable providers, broadcasters and networks over programming fees. And the news was a big deal for the digerati and people contemplating the future of video.

But it doesn’t seem to have registered in the broader world, and you have to work hard to find any mention of the story in old-media news outlets. And even Cablevision, which uses any ammo it can in the PR fight against Fox and News Corp. (which also owns this site), hasn’t said much about it.

Here, for instance, is Cablevision’s newest message to its customers. If you fast forward to the 1:35 mark, you’ll find a two-sentence description of the Web blackout. But hard to believe many Cablevision customers will be sticking around to hear this one:

At the very least, blacking out part of the Web sounds scary. So why is Cablevision so (relatively) quiet on this?

Two theories, which are not mutually exclusive:

• It’s not worth complaining about because this stuff doesn’t really resonate with consumers–at least, not in the way that losing access to NFL games and play-off baseball does. No one spent Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon in a bar because they couldn’t watch “Glee” on Hulu.
• It’s not worth complaining about because Cablevision and News Corp. are actually on the same ideological page when it comes to this stuff. Neither side is really that happy about free TV shows on the Web. The only real difference the two sides have is about money: News Corp. wants to get more of it for its programming, while Cablevision wants to pay less.

On a related note: I still don’t understand why News Corp./Fox backed off so quickly on Saturday, once news of the blackout got out.

There’s no official reason, but there were mutterings about the technical difficulty of cutting off access to Cablevision TV subscribers while leaving Cablevision’s Internet-only subs alone. But hard to believe that News Corp. didn’t think that one through in advance. Same goes for any “optics”-related reason–the whole point of a move like this was to generate publicity, right?

Yahoo and Electus, the multiplatform content studio headed by former NBC entertainment head Ben Silverman, debuted its first original, branded entertainment programming tonight with “Ready, Set, Dance!”

The site, which is now live on Yahoo Music and sponsored by State Farm, merges the candid-camera phenomenon with reality television and “aims to tap into the pop culture interest in television dance shows and dance videos on the Web….”

The Yahoo (YHOO) site is relatively spare right now, with only one episode, titled “Magic Sparkle Chunk and Frisky Ris.”

Reads the description of the show: “Will’s ‘Magic Sparkle Chunk’ style is invading the tranquility of Madison Square Park, while Marisa and her moves will do their best to win over the Times Square crowds.”

“Magic Sparkle Chunk” is as described, and it is both riveting and humiliating. Which is pretty much the point.

Even though no one knows about it, there are already 29 comments, such as: “He’s got chutzpah–besides, if it’s all about fun, he’s got it. She was a bit too serious and honestly…just not as entertaining as the chunky shiney thingie wingie.”

Yahoo’s partnership with Electus was unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show by Yahoo execs Joanne Bradford and Jimmy Pitaro, both of whom you can see in a BoomTown video interview below.

Ironically, U.S. sales head Bradford left Yahoo earlier this year for Demand Media, and Pitaro, as I reported today, is expected to leave the company soon from his post as VP of Media.

Silverman left the broadcast-television network under a cloud last year, but immediately announced he had struck a deal with Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) to form a studio–called Electus–to make multiplatform content that is backed by big brand advertisers.

The move is similar to a new kind of production company started several years ago by former ABC and Yahoo exec Lloyd Braun and his partner, Gail Berman.

Braun has created online programming for Microsoft (MSFT), including an innovative celebrity site called Wonderwall, as well as producing television shows for networks.

Silverman’s take was to focus on an episodic style, although much of what has been done online so far in this genre by many others has been only moderately successful.

But execs at Yahoo believed that advertisers have been looking for opportunities to put their brands near quality content online.

With the deal, which has been touted by CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo is putting big hopes in Silverman, who had been a successful producer of television programming in his early career.

But his tenure at NBC was marked by a lot of negative publicity about him personally and, more importantly, by a sharp downturn in ratings.

Here is the first of 12 episodes:

And here is Bradford and Pitaro talking about the Electus deal: