The post above is deleted because I wasn't satisfied with it (the book sounds pretty great and I didn't feel like my comment had that much relevance). I'll bring it back since it got a reply:
The title is misleading; the book seems to be mostly about "information" in the colloquial sense, and only peripherally about information theory. For anyone seriously interested in the latter, David Mackay's book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms is available online. It's great.
And to other incarnations: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html.