The race is on in the publishing industry. Who will be the first to get a Bin Laden book out into the market?

Monday, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal book blog, it was announced that, “Jon Meacham, an executive editor at Random House, is assembling an essay collection about the Al Qaeda leader titled Beyond Bin Laden: America and the Future of Terror that Random House expects to publish as an e-book next week. It’s expected that the work will have about half-a-dozen contributors, plus an introduction written by Mr. Meacham.”

Meanwhile, yesterday the New York Times Media Decoder reported that, “Peter Bergen will write the ‘definitive’ book on the hunt for Bin Laden,” explaining that Random House imprint Crown had acquired a book by Bergen that it described as “an immersive, definitive account of the operation that killed the world’s most wanted man.”

Tentatively titled Manhunt, Bergen seems the perfect author for the job given his three prior books on terrorism and Al Qeada—The Longest War, Holy War, Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know—and the fact that he was the first Western Journalist to ever interview Bin Laden. But no release date has been set, either for an e-book or print book edition, leaving Crown behind at the first turn.

Then, yesterday evening, the New York Observer‘s blog Media Matters reported that one publisher is ahead of the pack. Not through resourcefulness or planning, but by sheer luck:

“Sometimes you get lucky with current events,” said Marc Resnick, the executive editor at St. Martin’s Press. A year ago, Mr. Resnick acquired SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy Seal Sniper, by a retired Team Six Seal named Howard E. Wasdin and his Seal-trained co-author, Stephen Templin. It was a standard acquisition for an imprint that can publish a dozen or more works of military nonfiction every year.

Then Team Six took out Osama bin Laden, granting Mr. Resnick a publicity opportunity he called “incredible.” The book was scheduled to come out May 24; St. Martin’s moved up the release date to May 10, flew Dr. Wasdin to New York from his home in Georgia and presented him as a ready-made Team Six expert to the New York media, which promptly made him talking head of the week.

“What he does is help readers understand who a member of Seal Team Six is—just their abilities, their training, and what’s involved in reaching the best of the best,” Mr. Resnick said.

Dr. Wasdin’s prose is hard-boiled: “Yes, hopelessness has a smell,” he writes. “People use the term ‘developing countries,’ but that is bullcrap.”

Recounting one firefight in Mogadishu, he refers to the enemy as “booger-eaters.”

Looks like St. Martin’s won the Bin Laden book sprint. But the smart money is on Crown’s Bergen book for the long haul.