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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Books are heavy. They're bulky. When you finish one, it's suddenly useless, and you have to carry it around for the rest of the day, or the rest of your vacation. When you move, it's one more bricklike object driving up the cost. Move two of seven for me was a cross-country one, and shipping a dozen boxes of books to my new address cost hundreds of dollars. Then I had to cantilever each box down the stairs to my basement apartment using a rolling backpack. After that I've never forgotten how quickly an entertaining read becomes a millstone.

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Among the relieved is John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, who was interviewed onstage for the conference's plenary session. His cheerfulness was especially striking when you consider that three months ago, Sargent, the most outspoken of the major publishers sued by the Justice Department for allegedly fixing e-book prices in collusion with Apple, was forced to settle that suit with the DOJ for an undisclosed amount. (Penguin, the other most recent settler, had to fork over $75 million.)

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Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

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While the rest of the world attempts to cash in on "Fifty Shades" fanaticism, Fleshbot Fiction is trying for something different. As CEO Lux Alptraum tells me, she's interested in courting "people who like good stories and good smut." She isn't concerned with appealing to a particular gender demographic (so far, the e-books have featured only female protagonists, but that will change soon) or certain fetishes, so much as publishing good writing. Alptraum believes that craft can trump particular kinks: A well-written story can make cross-dressing hot, even if it isn't your thing, she says. This pansexual, or trysexual, mind-set is no surprise, given that Fleshbot's distinguishing feature in the porn world is that it publishes straight and gay content side by side.

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The booksellers — Fiction Addiction of Greenville, S.C., Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, N.Y., and Posman Books of New York City — are demanding the right to sell what they term "open-source and DRM-free" e-books, files that can be read on a Kindle or any other e-reading device. The publishers are accused of entering into "confidential agreements" with Amazon making this impossible.

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This would be good news — if there were any reason at all to think it was true. Kaufman's only evidence for this imaginary renaissance is the success of George Saunders' story collection, "The Tenth of December," published earlier this year and currently hovering in the middle ranks of several prominent best-seller lists. Saunders' longtime fans (I count myself among them) have reason to celebrate this, but it really has nothing to do with "digital options." Saunders has built a devoted following over the past 17 years, hadn't published a book in a good while and -- most important of all -- was heralded in the headline of a long, radiant profile in the New York Times Magazine as producing "the best book you'll read this year." All of that could have happened 10, 20 or 30 years ago and produced the same result.

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The eight books launched Monday by Harvard Health Publications are part of a new series, "A Harvard Medical School Guide." They will be distributed by RosettaBooks, a digital publisher. The books have a list price of $5.99.

Titles include "Your Brain on Yoga" and "Taming Your Child's Temper Tantrums." Rosetta also publishes books by Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke.

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I’m the devil because Kindle is part of the vast network of Amazon, whose goal is pretty much to destroy everything I hold dear in my brick-and-mortar culture. And they employ a morally reprehensible scheme to do so. They charge less than what a book actually costs them, taking a small loss on each sale, with the hope of driving every other book retailer out of business. Kind of like gas wars from fifty years ago, when two competing gas stations lowered their prices beyond profitability to beat the guy next door, but in this situation Amazon’s the only company that can afford to lose money. Their job, as they seem to see it, is to keep dumping cash into themselves until they become the go-to place for not just books, but everything. “Don’t waste your time going to your local store. Buy it from Amazon for less and you’ll never have to leave home.” This drives many independent bookstores—which rely on profits to stay afloat—out of business, taking with them the entire culture of book buying I value (selling back used books, seeing my money go into the local economy, dealing with a bookseller, author readings, creaky floors, participating in a community as opposed to mouse-clicking, etc.)

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"There were a range options.

"We discussed the book burning while getting the message across that this book is a dangerous trend.

"I think we've got a culture now which has completely sexualised women and in which women feel obligated to take part in that culture. We want to draw a line under that.

"We will be cutting them up, using them for toilet roll and sticking them on our compost heap and they will go back into the ground... although the ideas they represent will continue."

 

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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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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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