Looks like the literary bug is biting hard at Microsoft this year.

In an unusually prolific display of writing, employees and executives at the Redmond company are releasing at least four new books this fall on topics as diverse as photography, management and electronic memory. Of course, technical books from Microsoft employees are nothing new. But it’s unusual to see the company's researchers and managers churning out so many general-interest titles.

One of them, “Total Recall,” describes efforts by Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell and his colleague, Jim Gemmell, to digitally document and store almost every element of Bell’s life for many years -- from the food he ate to the websites he visited. The book, published in September, explores the implications of a coming era when cheap methods of recording, saving and retrieving data will give more and more people “electronic memories.”

In the foreword, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates calls the implications of the project “profound and exciting.”

Microsoft’s photography club, meanwhile, released a book in October, “Photographers@Microsoft 2009,” that showcases their work. It’s not cheap -- selling for $66.95 softcover and $81.95 hardcover -- but the proceeds go to benefit charity as part of the company’s annual philanthropic “Giving Campaign.”

Also in October, Microsoft researchers released a book called “The Fourth Paradigm” to highlight the need to create new tools for scientists to make discoveries by tapping large amounts of data from a variety of sources. The book, available for free download, builds on the work of Jim Gray, the Turing Award-winning Microsoft researcher who was lost at sea in January 2007.

All of this is in addition to “One Strategy,” the collaboration of Steven Sinofsky, the Windows president, and Harvard Business School Professor Marco Iansiti.

As we noted yesterday, “One Strategy” makes extensive use of internal blog posts written by Sinofsky during Windows 7’s development to explore ways that people managing large projects can get their teams to formulate business strategies and then execute on them in a way that actually matches the strategy. It’s due out Nov. 30.