Agreeing with everyone's answers about the curses.
To add to the Book question, the reason you cannot do this is for the same reason that DoN does not work on Lampstand, because it is "Discard PERIOD Negate". The first part of Book's ability has no interrupt/negate, and so the card cannot be played in this situation even though the copy would eventually do so. In SI, the card you play must interrupt or negate the source of SI, so the abilities "Copy PERIOD ITB" would not work unfortunately.