Apple was charged with colluding with publishers to fix e-book prices. At the root of the dispute lie two different ways that publishers can sell books to retailers.

First, there's the wholesale model, the way that book publishers have sold printed books to bookstores and other outlets for years. The publisher sets a cover price for a book, sells it to a retailer at a discount (typically 50 percent) and then the retailer can sell the book to consumers for whatever price it chooses.

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On the political junkie side of this chasm are those of us who follow politics and social issues closely. We typically get our information through niche media, email newsletters, membership organizations and the attendant social media feeds. The media that serves this audience seems perfectly happy to commodify dissent by providing niche content that speaks only to a narrow audience -- and nobody else. To many looking in from the outside, that creates the image of a holier-than-thou insularity that is, to say the least, off putting. Ultimately, from within this bubble, "activism" becomes narrowly defined as a grinding project of political work trying to somehow convince A) politicians to do things their donors don't want them to do or B) the larger politically disengaged world to do stuff that can seem too difficult (door knocking, phone banking, etc.) or wholly futile (signing petitions, sending a letter to a lawmaker, etc.).

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Adam Johnson's "The Orphan Master's Son" was in the top 10 on Amazon.com as of midday Tuesday, a day after the novel received the Pulitzer. The paperback edition was out of stock for one to three weeks, although the book remains available in electronic format.

No fiction prize was awarded in 2012, a decision which angered publishers and booksellers who count on the Pulitzer as a sure way of increasing sales.

Paper editions of other winners announced Monday also were out of stock on Amazon.com, including Sharon Olds' poetry collection "Stag's Leap" and Tom Reiss' biography "The Black Count."

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The news peg is the success of a self-published series of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels, "Wool," by Hugh Howey. Available as e-books and print books from Amazon, the series became a hit, and Howey recently sold print-only rights to a New York publisher, Simon & Schuster. Print-only because Howey and his agent determined that they were making plenty of money selling the e-books on their own.

Wired characterizes this as a "huge concession" on the part of Simon & Schuster, and in one sense it is: The publisher won't receive any e-book revenue, and it is in e-book format that "Wool" has seen its success so far. On the other hand, "Wool" is not only already very popular among the genre fans who made it an e-book bestseller, it's also an object of curiosity for the many otherwise-uninterested people captivated by Howey's rags-to-riches story in the Wall Street Journal. (By far the best-selling e-book by self-publishing exemplar John Locke is not one of his thrillers, but "How I Sold One Million E-Books.")

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Reuters:

It will lobby on issues such as allocation of visas for engineers and matters of privacy and piracy, said the group's president Michael Beckerman, a former advisor to Fred Upton, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee.

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The Internet retailer has a major press conference scheduled for next Thursday in Santa Monica, California. It's widely expected to reveal a new model of the Fire there, so the announcement that the first model is "sold out" suggests that Amazon halted production a while ago to retool for a new model.

Seattle-based Amazon launched the $199 tablet last November. It was the first Kindle with a color screen and the ability to run third-party applications, placing it in competition with Apple's iPad, at half the price of the cheapest iPad.

Amazon doesn't say how many Fires it has sold, but says it captured 22 percent of U.S. tablet sales over nine months. That would make it the second-most popular tablet, after the iPad. Based on iPad sales reported by Apple, Fire sales can be estimated at somewhere around 5 million units.

Separately, ABI Research said Thursday that sales of dedicated e-readers, like the non-Fire, black-and-white Kindles, peaked last year. It expects worldwide sales of e-readers at 11 million in 2012, down from 15 million in 2011.

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So should readers entirely discount Amazon reviews? Some already have, perceiving that the extreme responses (positive or negative) that motivate many volunteer reviewers don't offer a reliable sense of a book's merits. Anyone who knows an author (which, in this era of self-publishing, is pretty much everyone) has been hit up to praise their friend's book on the site. Then there are the news stories about authors who adopt sock-puppet identities to write nasty pans of books by writers they regard as rivals.

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As someone who's never browsed Amazon looking for new titles, I was intrigued by their remarks. I've written in the past about the proliferation of "spam" or plagiarized books and repurposed public-domain content in the Kindle store -- the "junk" that my friend objects to. (The retailer has since vowed to crack down on such abuses.) But I never would have encountered these faux books if I hadn't gone looking for them in search of a story. My friends' observations reminded me that readers discover books in a wide variety of ways.

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That a Brooklyn book festival would promote small presses and their authors isn't surprising. But the sponsor of OnePage has raised a few eyebrows. As the festival’s press release noted, “The project is made possible with a grant from Amazon.com.”

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The unnamed player in this drama is Amazon, which had been selling e-books at a loss until two years ago, when the iPad came along and publishers used the emergence of the new device to pressure the online megaretailer into adopting the agency model, too. If Amazon wanted to sell e-books from the Big Six (as the six largest book publishers are called), it could no longer sell those titles for $9.99.

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Booksellers have been complaining about "showrooming" -- the practice of using a bookstore to browse and learn about new titles while buying the actual books online -- for a while now. Amazon's holiday-season gambit, and a New York Times op-ed denouncing it written by novelist Richard Russo, alerted readers who value their local bookstores to the possibility that those stores will vanish if we don't make a point of patronizing them.

But what if you prefer e-books? Because of my job, I rarely buy print books. (I get too many sent to me as it is.) Yet, for various reasons, I've found myself purchasing a surprising number of e-books to read on my iPad. At first, I automatically opted for Kindle books; the Kindle app for the iPad works great, and if I decide to switch to reading on my iPhone, it will automatically keep my place. Above all, Amazon has the richest and deepest online books database, where I can instantly find out whether a title is available in e-book (or audiobook) format, scan reader reviews and follow reader-generated tags to find similar titles.

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It was enough of an honor for me. The shiny addition to my Web page would boost sales, regardless of what was written inside it. A gold badge plastered to a rock would help it sell, even if what was written on the badge was, “This Rock Sucks.” It draws attention to the rock, makes you at least consider its worth.

As a debut novelist, that is all I had hoped for. So I properly celebrated, meaning, I posted the news on Facebook, drank some champagne with friends, who were very enthusiastic, shouting, “That’s the coolest thing ever” and “Wow, I shop on Amazon!”

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“Congress should help address the states’ budget shortfalls without spending federal funds, by authorizing the states to require collection of the billions of revenue dollars already owed,” Misener said.

Currently, through a loophole created in 1992, online retailers that do not have physical stores in a state do not have to collect sales tax on the goods that they sell there. This sales tax loophole creates a loss of approximately $23 billion in uncollected state sales taxes every year. During tight budgetary years, state governments are now hungry to collect that money.

Whether Republican or Democratic, state governments have started duking it out with corporations such as Amazon, arguing that having a distribution warehouse in a state counts as having a “brick and mortar” presence there, thus requiring the company to pay sales tax. Recent congressional legislation, introduced by Reps. Steve Womack and Jackie Speier, known as the Marketplace Equality Act in the House, would allow states to opt into collecting sales tax from online retailers without the struggle. (A corresponding Senate bill has been introduced by Dick Durbin, Lamar Alexander and Mike Enzi.

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The oohs and ahhs on Twitter all morning have been deafening. With a seven-inch color screen, the Fire is designed to showcase Amazon's books, music, and rapidly expanding movie and TV offerings for a list price of only $199 -- about half of what an iPad costs. You can be sure that Netflix is looking over its shoulder with some consternation. First, Amazon announces a deal to stream Fox content, and then, unveils a gadget to do the streaming. Apple, for its part, suddenly has a competitor. Jeff Bezos: Genius, again!

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The ad aims to show how this e-reader can improve your life, but this guy looks like he's losing out. If I were a single man in my twenties and a hot young woman asked me to accompany her to a bookstore, I'd leap at the opportunity, even if I had no desire to purchase a book. Bookstores are generally acknowledged as enjoyable places to hang out. That's why the characters in romantic comedies ("You've Got Mail," "Dan In Real Life," "Notting Hill," etc.) are often seen together in bookstores. And so, as the commercial ended, I fumed to my wife about the manifold evils of a society that encourages people to use electronic devices in order to avoid such things as intercourse with other human beings who are actively seeking one's companionship. And yet, there was an element of hypocrisy in my ranting and raving.

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Although this is not news to e-publishing insiders, the proliferation of junk e-books in Amazon's Kindle store became more widely known when a Reuters story appeared last week. Alistair Barr reported that, thanks to a concept known as Private Label Rights (PLR), get-rich-quickers are able to buy large collections of miscellaneous content (from short articles to longer texts) for a pittance. They can then do whatever they want with the texts, from rewriting them, to breaking them down to provide copy for promotional brochures and websites, to reformatting them as e-books under new titles and author names for sale in digital bookstores. With this method, it's possible to "publish" as many as 10 Kindle e-books per day.

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Now another self-published author reached a significant milestone: John Locke -- not the 17th-century philosopher, but the thoroughly  21st-century thriller-writer -- sold his millionth e-book on Amazon.

Locke sells most of his works for 99 cents each (although his "How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!" costs $4.99), and he can now boast membership in the same (very small) authors' circle as Stieg Larsson and James Patterson -- two more of the nine individuals who have sold more than a million Kindle volumes.

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It gets better. The teaser on the inside jacket, The Hollywood Gossip reports, reads:

He got naked and got inside Bristol Palin. Then he got naked in Playgirl. Now it's time for Levi to get you the naked TRUTH about Sarah Palin. Respect.

It is worth recalling, in light of this, that Johnston told the AP that he was releasing the book for himself, for his "boy Tripp and the country." Thank you, Levi.

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"The Greek Seaman" is the third of Howett's self-published, straight-to-Kindle affairs, and it probably would not have drawn much attention had it not been for a blog called Big Al's Books and Pals. On March 16, Big Al reviewed "Seaman" and gave it the most positive review the writer could muster:

"If you read 'The Greek Seaman' from the start until you click next page for the last time I think you’ll find the story compelling and interesting. The culture shock felt by the newlywed bride, Katy, who finds herself far from her native England, living on a cargo ship with her seaman husband Don is a good story in itself ...

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The cables were self-published as a Kindle e-book by an author listed as Heinz Duthel. People in the U.K. can buy it for 7.37 pounds ($11.60).

WikiLeaks has embarrassed Washington in recent weeks for exposing a trove of sensitive diplomatic documents. WikiLeaks has been migrating around the world, using Internet companies in different countries to host the site. Last week, Amazon.com Inc. ousted it from its servers.

Last month, Amazon came under fire for selling a guide offering advice to pedophiles, which raised questions about how -- and if -- it vets the self-published books it sells.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a message.

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