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As Salman Rushdie intones his own elegant prose in a rich, musical British accent, a soundtrack plays softly but distinctly in the background. If the music seems particularly well-selected -- if its rhythms subtly match the story's turning points -- that’s because it was commissioned expressly for the purpose.

Though the story is short, Rushdie stops several times to ask the audience if he should continue. At each juncture, rapt listeners beg him to go on. After the performance is over, guests murmur words like “mesmerizing” and “transporting” as they turn back to their tablemates -- and I’m one of them.

The event is a glitzy dinner organized by Booktrack, a company that publishes e-books with "synchronized soundtracks"; the occasion is the launch of the e-publisher's first short story -- Rushdie’s “In the South" -- with accompanying music composed by John Psathas. ("In the South" is available for download now from Booktrack's website.)

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I sat down with my iPad to read "The Yellow Submarine" with a friend's 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features -- the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps in a paper pop-up book -- although few of these could steal his ongoing fascination away from the iPad's system-wide "pinch to expand" feature. Nini was aggravated by her brother's pinching, tapping and swiping, and shouted, "I'm trying to read the story!" (Neither one cared much about either the music or the videos, incidentally.) Instead of a cozy interlude of reading, we had a fight.

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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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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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Video clips, the most common add-on, can obviously add value to cookbooks or to more substantive nonfiction, such as Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" or Sebastian Junger's "War" -- enhanced, respectively, with CBS news reports and clips from "Restrepo," the companion film Junger made with the late documentarian Tim Hetherington. Literature, however, is another matter. Most of the stuff appended to the digital versions of new novels, for example, consists of author interviews and background material, most of which can already be easily found online in one form or another. That's especially true if the author has been dutifully following the industry-wide directive to maintain a website, produce a book trailer, blog, engage with fans via social media and so on.

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"So what about the small fortune that publishers have poured into developing tablet editions that dazzle the senses with sleekly produced animation, live video and audio? They’re fine for the men, but a lot of women think there is nothing wrong with plain old words and pictures. "

I'd be offended if the subtext wasn't that women actually just want to read, dammit, without checking Twitter or Facebook every five minutes.

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After all, DSK had a very strong incentive not to commit the crime, including his desire to run for further office in France, not to mention his high IMF salary and strong network of international connections. So much to lose.

Should the "real economist" conclude that DSK is less likely to be guilty than others will think? .... How many economists seriously use the concept of incentives -- more than non-economists do -- to understand everyday events? Is the notion that incentives predict individual behavior actually so central to economics? Should it be?

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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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U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin said the creation of a universal library would benefit many but would "simply go too far."

He said the settlement of a class-action lawsuit that the company reached with U.S. authors and publishers would "grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners."

Chin said the deal gives Google "a significant advantage over competitors."

He said it would be "rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case."

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Whether these features will mean much to the average e-book reader, however, is another matter. Sales of e-books have grown by triple-digit rates in the past year, and industry experts predict no immediate end to the expansion, given that e-reader devices and tablet computers are expected to be popular gifts this holiday season. For every person I've met who swears she will never be lured away from her beloved print books, there's another who raves about finally reading "Middlemarch" on his smart phone during his daily wait for the bus and someone else who reports devouring twice as many books as she did before she got a Kindle.

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But, based on what I can tell from coverage of today's launch event and the company's website, the Nook Color going to be a deliberately crippled tablet computer, locked down so that users can't add apps other than ones B&N decides they can add. There's an obvious reason for the company to do this:  to prevent Amazon from using the new Nook as a platform on which Amazon could itself compete as a bookseller. But it's a counterproductive move in the end.

The Nook Color boasts some strong features, at least on paper, that would appear to justify its higher price (about $250) than Amazon's smaller Kindle (about $140 for the Wi-Fi model). The 7-inch touch screen has decent resolution and, the company says, is treated for reduced glare. It's relatively light, just under a pound, or a few ounces more than the standard Kindle but half a pound lighter than the iPad. It can run audio and video. It has a slot for a micro-SD card for additional storage, and built-in Wi-Fi. Assuming it has a processor beefy enough to power its applications in smooth ways, these are fairly impressive specs, to a point. 

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Verizon Wireless on Wednesday said it will start selling Samsung Electronics Co.'s tablet computer, which is half the size of the iPad, for $600. That's more than the basic version of Apple Inc.'s tablet.

Verizon will start selling the Samsung Galaxy Tab on Nov. 11. It has screen that measures 7 inches diagonally and runs Google Inc.'s Android software. Access to Verizon's cellular data network will cost $20 per month for up to 1 gigabyte of traffic. The tablet has two cameras, which could be used for videoconferencing. The iPad has no camera.

Verizon will start selling the iPad on Oct. 28, starting at $499. It can't access Verizon's network directly, but the carrier will sell an add-on gadget for about $130 that bridges the gap, with the same $20 data plan.

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An agreement with The Wylie Agency gives Amazon exclusive rights for two years to sell e-book versions of novels including Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March" and Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" among others.

Amazon says it is the first time any of these books have been available for electronic readers. They are being published under a new imprint from Wylie called Odyssey Editions.

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Anyone who owns an iPhone can testify that despite the abundance of apps made available for the device (reportedly more than 150,000), it's often difficult to find what you want unless you already know what it is. If you're interested in browsing through apps designed, say, to help you manage your freelance business, you have one broad category to investigate in iTunes -- Productivity -- with thousands of apps doing all kinds of stuff, most of it entirely unrelated to your needs.

The Productivity category is broken down exactly two ways: "Top Paid" apps and "Top Free" apps. The raw list of the thousands of apps under the Productivity rubric can be sorted by popularity, release date and name, but there are no subcategories. Browsing through that humongous list is a nightmare: You have to click through to each app's individual page just to find out what it does. If you know you want an expense tracker or an hours log, you can search on those words, but this rarely seems to turn up all the options, let alone point you to the best one. (There might, for instance, be a multipurpose app that can perform the desired service and more.) In the App Store, you always seem to have either too few options to choose from or too many.

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One weekend into owning the thing and I've only managed to watch half an episode of "Black Adder." I have yet to play a single game. What I've mostly been doing on the iPad is reading, because this much-ballyhooed harbinger of the future turns out to be the ideal device for that most old-fashioned of leisure activities.

One of the very first things I read was an early draft of Joan Walsh's review of the new Barack Obama biography by David Remnick. While I was eager to see what Joan had to say about the book, I wasn't looking forward to having to read it on my laptop. I've always found it difficult to fully concentrate on longer, in-depth stories on my computer unless I was actually working on them as an editor or writer. In the past, when I've needed to really think hard about a longer text, I've even resorted to that terribly analog (not to mention wasteful) practice of printing it out and carrying it off to my sofa to read in peace.

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