in reply to Scaler found where opeartor expected Error

It appears that you are attempting Bash shell style expression evaluation in perl.

Change that to: 

 push @body, "<tr><td rowspan='" 
   . scalar( @$books ) 
   . "'>$Author2</td>\n";

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             I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it.
                   -SNL

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