My husband follows the maverick financial advisors Motley Fool (two brothers whose parents taught them about the stock market when they were teens), so I was interested this morning when they cropped up on Publisher’s Martplace’s Publisher’s Lunch writing about the Kindle. I looked them up and found an article from December, 2007, blasting Amazon for the Kindle’s $399 pricetag and the disingenious marketing technique of claiming to have sold out in six hours. They predicted the Kindle price would be slashed to $199. Going price right now? $265. So they were 3/4 right, which is pretty good when you’re prophecizing on a brand-new phenomenon from a major industry player. Of course, we all know all about the Kindle now. . .but in December 2007 it was still just St. Elmo’s Fire.

But while we’re with them, let’s read the Motley Fools’ expert opinions on such ereaders as the iPad. The Kindle vs. iPad. The Nook. Sony & Sony. Google’s GPad. The Courier from behemoths Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard. And. . .Nintendo?

Are they right? Are they insane? And are there other ereaders out there they haven’t covered yet?

You’ve got to give Jeff Bezos credit for cojones, if not business savvy. The guy still hasn’t learned to stay off the trapeze without a net.

Motoko Rich of the NY Times and Christina Warren of Mashable both report this week that Amazon is back to swinging wildly from the highwire with a club, demanding a three-year contract from publishers and a guarantee no other bookseller gets better prices. For “other bookseller” you can, of course, read “Apple.” And Bezos isn’t asking nicely—he’s on the offensive.

Well, Apple has the same sentiments about pricing. Nobody wants to be underbid.

But Bezos appears oblivious to the bad fall he took only a few months ago pulling a high-profile stunt like this. Has he forgotten. . .um, he LOST?

And whether or not Amazon and Apple get the Mexican Standoff they want, guaranteeing neither wins the pricing game, that time-lock contract is one spangly costume blowing in the wind. A three-year lockdown? In this technological climate? Is Bezos joking?

Even in Silicon Valley, they don’t know where they’re going to be in three years. There’s Super-Top-Secret Classified stuff going on everywhere, NDAs popping buttons in all directions, deadly competition for marketshare with very real, very heavy millions of dollars hanging in the balance. Lock into three years of emerging technology with one company? I wouldn’t sign a that kind of contract locking me into a high-paying job.

Steve Jobs has five of the six big publishers onboard with him—Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin—and he’ll have Random House before he’s done. They’ve got the money, he’s got the time. He’s a wheeler-dealer. That’s what he does.

It’s not about bullying, Jeff. It’s about making someone an offer they can’t refuse. (Although it’d be nice if someone could teach Steve to pull his legs in and stop blocking the sidewalk in front of Palo Alto cafes, where he likes to do business on his cell phone.)

BUT. There is the possibility Bezos will succeed in splitting the market into Big Pubbers and Small Pubbers if he can offer small publishers deals Jobs isn’t interested in offering. Bezos is already courting the small pubs/self-pubs people. And, I have to say, that would be a fascinating development, reconfiguring Amazon’s rather tarnished persona as the “indie friend.” (Writers are indies, too, and they don’t necessarily appreciate seeing their already laughably-minimal profits chiseled even further just to promote Bezos’ stock.)

But are there enough nickels and dimes out there to balance the Ben Franklins? (See this article about The Long Tail by Chris Anderson in Wired in 2004—oddly retro for only five and a half years ago.)

And what about the reputation of a lot of what’s being self-published right now? Would Amazon come out looking like the champion of mom-&-pop businesses against the big box stores? Or just a franchise of cheap dimestore head shops?

Kathryn sent in this NPR piece by Lynn Neary on ebook pricing, which references this even more detailed and in-depth NY Times piece by Jason Epstein.

I’ve been looking into ebook pricing. Kindle, of course, is racking up “best sellers” that turn out to sell for $.99 or even go out free, screwing with the playing field beyond all reasonable comparison. Smashwords allows buyers to set their own price on some books, presumably at the author’s discretion—I’m sorry, these are obviously amateur “published authors,” not serious writers (you can tell by the blurbs), folks who don’t need either editors or designers, just to see their name on a book cover in the wild hopes that they’ve somehow accidentally written a best seller. Innocence beyond innocence.

eBooks.com has a more realistic range of prices, from $3.95 to $30 in the Fiction category. Sadly, the classics are the cheapies. Jane Austen is $3.95, actually cheaper than a modern rip-off about Mr. Darcy. Even Agatha Christie is priced higher. Anna Karenina goes for $4.95 on the same page as a collection of Tolstoy’s stories for $28.95. Novels priced over $20 tend to have the word “erotic” in their descriptions. For Whom the Bell Tolls for $15. A “re-imagining” of the Brontes’ life during the writing of Jane Eyre for $15. While Wuthering Heights itself goes for $3.95? I’m sorry—I can’t read any more.

Over in the category of Literary Arts & Disciplines (it’s not broken down any further in the main menu, although, oddly, Science Fiction gets its own category as distinct from Fiction), under Composition & Creative Writing, we find 346 titles in a range from essays by nineteenth-century giants like Samuel Butler, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain for less than $10 to the whopping $60 for a tome on writing about avatars. Wait—$64.95 for one on medical writing. Here’s $79.95 to learn how to write narrative and $80 for a book on comedy. Whoa—$115 for a book on information design (how to make things complex?). I don’t think the $125 book on composers counts toward literature. But there are lots more books in the $50-80 range. Oh! A book on point-of-view for $140! Something from the Edinburgh Press on writing fiction in general for the fabulous price of $164.99. And the queen of them all, an instruction book on writing prescriptions for (hold your breath) $229.95!

You can even buy an ebook on greetings for $6.95.

These are all ebooks, people.

My head is reeling.

Now, I have to give an award for this title: I’m Not Eating Any of That Foreign Muck, apparently fiction mis-categorized here.

And In the Too Weird to Be Real arena, it appears that Neil Gaiman wrote Beowulf. I’m flabbergasted. I’ve always thought that was the first known fiction in English—between a thousand and thirteen hundred years old.

The things you can learn on the Internet.

I should have asked you guys your opinions a long time ago. You have been really amazing about the whole book cover issue. I’m sorry—I’m a slow learner. I promise to do better in the future.

So today I’m going to ask your opinions on a subject discussed intelligently and at length by a guy named Craig Mod in Tokyo: the disposability of print books.

Craig was brought to my attention—and a lot of other people’s, as well—by the NY Times.

Is it true? Are there more cons to print books than there are pros? Is the digitizing of books a boon to humankind that writers and designers alike should be embracing, an opportunity for our skills and talents to blossom in ways that print books simply can’t handle? Is our attachment to print books an emotional attachment to familiarity rather than artistic common sense? And what about all those dead trees, anyway?

I love print books. I just bought 11 volumes of Thackerey with leather spines and corners, which—so far as I can tell—were probably printed in the 1890s, and they are absolutely the apple of my eye. I don’t own an ereader. I don’t have any plans to acquire one.

There is a concreteness to physical books that’s deeply tied to my identity, my sense of myself. I grew up in a house where bookcases were important and books embodied respect for the intellectual mind. When my parents bought an old Victorian in Bellingham to renovate in the early 1970s, almost the first thing my father did was build a wall of bookshelves across the study, finishing it with care in old-fashioned trim and staining and oiling it to look like it had always been there. He filled it with his books from his college days. That was the world in which he learned the marvelous flexibility of thought, curiosity, creativity.

My mother reads novels. Not cheap crap, but really amazing works by the great wordsmyths of the English language. Those books were around the house throughout my childhood, so I grew up on the nineteenth-century masters, as well as the wonderful language in books written in the early twentieth-century, the Moderns and Post-Moderns. Virginia Woolf’s experimental short-short stories were a part of my childhood experience. She taught me to look meticulously before writing and to choose words to match that meticulous eye.

The smell of those books has been with me since I first learned to read. The beauty of language and craft is tied intimately in my brain to the beloved smell of words.

Now, I’ve seen gadgets come and go for decades. I know how to write computer programs and recently spent a weekend commiserating with a friend who’s a programmer at Apple over the eternal superiority of Unix and C. I live in a house with more computers than media outlets. I could try to be a Luddite, but what would be the point? I work on computers cobbled together by my husband.

I have not been bowled over by the advent of ereaders. “We already have readers,” I say. “I’ve got stacks of them by my chair even as we speak.”

But Craig has really got me thinking about this. Is he right? Is it time for us writers and readers to quit clinging to dying illusions and move into a vibrant new literary reality?

Is that what you’re doing?

Check out this fascinating look at the evolution of publishing by O’Reilly’s VP of digital initiatives. Are ebooks the new quad type?

And this Week in Review in the NY Times on the history of the relationship between reading and socializing. Didn’t they read Dickens out loud around the fire? And is that the same thing as joining a chat group to hash over the subtleties of megapopular fiction?

MacMillan (including Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, St. Martin’s Press, and Henry Holt) is going head-to-head with Amazon over pricing, with the result that Apple’s sudden appearance with a more flexible price structure has tipped the scale. Although the “news” is that Amazon has pulled MacMillan books from its store, I’m guessing the actual scenario was more like MacMillan saying, “If you won’t play ball, Apple will,” and Amazon saying, “Don’t let the screen door hit you on your way out.” Bluff and counter-bluff, except MacMillan (so long as they’ve got Apple) can live without Amazon, and Amazon can’t live without MacMillan.

I feel for you, Jeff, but you lost this whole stand-off the minute Steve refused to back you up on it. And he’s your competition—he doesn’t have any reason to back you up. Even if you pretend it was always intended as just a “gesture,” you shouldn’t have tried to play it tough. You’re acting like a mob goon at a diplomat’s poker game. And the other players are all eyes wide-open.

On the other hand, Wired magazine has written an incredibly in-depth analysis of how Apple altered the landscape with the iPhone, which industry pundits are saying is what they’re doing now with the iPad—it’s just that they’re not marketing to the average user what’s truly important about it. Which is a polite way of saying, “They think you’re too dumb to understand.”

(What they really mean is these extremely important negotiations are going on behind closed doors, and Jobs is not about to get the buying public involved in them. It’s hard to bluff your opponent when the cards are jumping out of your hand shrieking, “This is what I’M going to do!” It doesn’t matter if your opponent can see more of your master-plan than your cards can. You’re risking a lot on your opponent agreeing with you that your cards don’t know the true score, particularly when it’s not in their best interests to do so, particularly when your cards might very well find out more than you expect and take offense at the insult to their intelligence. Again. I really don’t think Apple should be treating potential customers like they’re stupid enough to pony up $800 for a desktop—but then again, Jobs is a pretty darn successful marketer, and maybe what he knows that I don’t is that the bulk of them are.)

Hey, remember our conversation about workspaces? Well, get this. What do you suppose happens to it in an earthquake? Does it float in a tsunami? Would it become a snowball in an avalanche? Could you get one disguised as a giant peach?

And this is perhaps the most amazing news of all: did you know the Internet is made of cats? Wow, does that explain why mine are so tired they have to sleep all the time.

UPDATE: I have long suspected that everyone out there reads my blog before they come up with their own opinions, but now I know for sure:

Gizmodo.

John Scalzi (via my sys admin via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter).

John Scalzi again, with hot sauce.

Charlie Stross.

And someone’s recommended the Book Depository to replace Amazon, which we will add to our list of bookstores, except virtual.

Pee-Wee Herman gets an iPad!

Oh, look! Something shiny!

That’s my first reaction to the official Apple description of the iPad.

My sys admin sent me links to about six in-depth computer industry articles on the much-touted Apple e-reader yesterday, which—since I am just a tiny bit OCD—I read all of. By the time I was done, you bet I’d convinced myself it was the only e-reader out there. I couldn’t remember anything about the others, even their names.

Marketing: Win!

But then I went back to the official Apple page and re-read it with a more jaundiced eye. And you know what I discovered? No matter what the thing actually does, what they have chosen to peddle in their marketing spiel is less than. . .what word am I searching for?. . .intelligent.

The VERY FIRST feature they laud is that it’s LIMITED. Huh? Yes. It is apparently now a virtue to only see one thing at a time. Which is odd, because that’s what I do anyway. But this is a big deal to Apple—they claim this is how web pages “were meant” to be seen. Fascinating. I didn’t know they invented the web page. Much less that all other similar gadgets force you to look at more than one even when you don’t want to. I’ve learned something from them already!

The SECOND thing they announce is that I can now “see and touch” my emails “in ways you never could before.” Good god. So that’s completely scared me off that feature.

The THIRD feature is that this thing can show me my photos the same way my digital camera can. Okay. Well, my laptop can, too, except for this exciting new business about displaying photos “in a stack.” Oh, wait. . .I get it. What they mean is they’ve fixed it so little bits of the bottom photos stick out around the top photo, giving it a kind of real-world look. Which, again, is what I get from my real photos in, well, the real world. Except better. Also, I’m OCD, so I keep my photo stacks tidy without edges sticking out. So they all look like the top photo, except really thick. If you’re listening, Apple.

Also, I love the photo they chose for marketing the large photo display: adolescent, bright blonde, blue eyes, very white teeth, pink shirt to show it’s a female, because of course everyone would rather look at a female. Particularly a female adolescent. I wonder if they could have tried any harder to represent the Aryan Uber-Race.

Is this supposed to appeal to the 30% Asian population of Silicon Valley? the 30% Hispanic? The 15% “other”? They’re obviously not even wasting their time with blacks, much less the middle-aged, who make up the vast majority of their highest-educated, most-experienced, professional target market. Oh—well, of course. I’m being myopic. This is supposed to appeal to a much greater target market than just Silicon Valley. Like the entire world, which. . .uh. . .includes China, with its single largest ethnic majority on the planet. . .oh, yes. And which includes that 25% black.

This is also looking stranger and stranger, considering that by now I’m getting it their main marketing thrust is toward BIG. And EASY TO READ. Guess who needs stuff to be EASY TO READ? That’s right. Retirement-age Boomers. Who are a vast target market. Represented not at all by that photo.

So, the FOURTH & FIFTH features are all about video. Again, what’s the selling point? LIMITATION. No pesky buttons! You see what they tell you to see. And, according to them, you love it! “You feel totally immersed.” Except I don’t, because this object is about as big as a lunch plate, and I am much bigger than a lunch plate. For anything even close to total immersion, I still have to go to a theater. Welcome to the Monkey-House, Mr. Jobs.

Now, the next four features are total gimmes: you can use Apple stuff! Oh, boy! iPod, iTunes, iBooks, the App Store. . .I am SO going to buy this gadget because it “allows” me to buy exclusively from the people who sold it to me! I also buy magazines just because they come with those cool subscription inserts.

They also offer maps. Not exactly a GPS, but GPS gets a bad rap in a lot of quarters, what with its inability to distinguish a good neighborhood from a bad one. Is this GoogleEarth they’re using here? I have no idea. It says nothing about where Apple gets their satellite photos, just that by looking at them I can “see more of the world.”

Okay. . .that was tea spurting out my nose. Hang on a second—

Okay, I’m back. Now there are three more features offering 1) a calendar, 2) contacts (sounding dangerously close to offering me friends there, guys), and 3) a device-wide search. All of which I have on my laptop. Oh, yeah. And which I also have on paper, especially that thing hanging on my kitchen hutch, which my son and I always make a big deal about going to our local indie bookstore and picking out every year. (He got to choose cats this year, a win with all of us. I am currently in disgrace because last year I chose out-houses.)

Actually, I also keep my contacts list in my purse. It’s really tiny, covered in strikingly-dated stylized leaves from the 1990s, and full of erasures. I call it my address book. And it is a heck of a huge improvement over the gazillions of scraps of paper on which I used to carry phone numbers and addresses in my pockets when I was a teenager, which my mother cured me of by throwing them all away one time when she did the laundry.

I realize I’m skipping one of these types of features. I’m saving that one for last.

ALSO—and I know you’re waiting for this feature on the edge of your seats—along with all these utterly amazing other features, I could even get A HOME SCREEN. That’s right, people. It “features” a desktop. For those of you out there languishing and pining for one of your very own. Gazing over the shoulders of strangers in public. Weeping into your pillow at night. Apple has heard your cries.

Now, we’re all writers here, right? A lot of us make a living or at least part of a living writing ad copy. We all know how valuable every single word is, what a high premium each little area on the page goes for, the huge selling potential of white space. But read this copy here. It’s all about one thing. Repeatedly. And not even a very important thing.

These feature introductions consist almost entirely of pointing out that this is a touch pad. “Touch the screen!” it says. Over and over again. Nothing about the actual touching is revolutionary—it’s all the same stuff I do with my laptop mouse. Once for this, twice for that.

Only Apple will let me touch THE SCREEN.

But I don’t want anyone touching my screen. I don’t even own screen-cleaner. Spit and the corner of my shirt, that does it in an emergency, the same Mommy Solution I use on everything else. What my life really needs is fewer such opportunities. If you could work on that one, Steve, I would be TRULY GRATEFUL.

And the final feature? The real kicker? The one that’s sold me on this $500-$830 ($830! During a Depression!) gadget hook, line, & sinker, no questions asked?

It comes with a notepad!

You read that right. A real, live, (well, not-live) imitation, yellow lined-legal pad just almost exactly like the stack I get for $29.99 at the local stationery store every six months and keep under my desk. Except this one’s shorter, necessitating twice as many page shuffles. And it takes it upon itself to circle things without my permission. And I can’t fold it in half and stick it in the back of my belt or my purse or a shopping bag when I go someplace where all I intend to do is write. And I can’t use just any old pen or pencil I find lying around on it, feeling—along with A.A. Milne—that smooth, gentle, gliding motion under my fingers, triggering the creative part of my brain, starting things trickling out of the dark recesses of my subconscious down my nerves, into my fingers, out into the light of day, where I can thrill to them, mull over them, share them, alter them, wallow in them. . .write them, write them, write them, write them down. . .

Huh. Maybe when they say the price is “unbelievable” they’re really just having a nice chuckle with us all. Ha, ha, Steve! I get it! What a great little kidder you are.

(And for those of you who still haven’t had enough of the subject, check out Scott Adams’ insightful opinion.)

Well, the New York Times has an opinion on the Apple announcement of its e-reader, as well as a lament for the good, old-fashioned book in the Opinionator (you read mine here first!). He makes lots of good points and even singles out two of the indie bookstores we’ve been talking about: the Tattered Cover of Denver and Powell’s of Portland, Oregon. But I wish he’d come up with more of a solution that just, “Hey, readers, carry the torch.” Like if the New York Times didn’t tell us to, maybe we wouldn’t.

Even better, my sys admin has been blogging about netbooks from the perspective of both a writer and an engineer in Device Churn and Geekware of Choice. He knows heck of more about the business end of this than I EVER will. Very smart guy.

And Scott Berkun (who—if you’ve been reading the comments—you’ll remember has written a book called Confessions of a Public Speaker, spawning a webinar my sys admin and I watched the other night, excellent stuff) has a piece revealing the amazing, top-secret, classic, one-step answer to How to Write a Book. Spoiler alert: I tell you guys this all the time. But it’s always good to hear it again, so you know I’m not just making it up for the fun of watching y’all dangle.

Meanwhile, the Harvard Lampoon has written their first novel parody since Bored of the Rings: Nightlight, to go on sale tomorrow. Guess what they’re parodying? Go on—guess!

Well, Amazon is coming out of the chute swinging this week. The good news is that they’re acknowledging the competition by fighting for independently-publishing authors with their 70%-royalty offer for Kindle books. For the record, 70% is a seriously high royalty rate.

Just a year ago, Publishing Frontier ran an article discussing Amazon’s position in the industry and predicting their future. It’s an interesting analysis.

Andrew Savikas has a good post on the O’Reilly site on “why the Apple-talking-to-publishers news isn’t really news.”

And this week Lulu announced they’re going public. This may or may not make a lot of difference for Lulu authors, but it will matter to anyone with money who’s banking on Lulu’s business success. Which looks pretty rosy.

Meanwhile, Daemon News reports that some geeks turned a Barnes and Nobles Nook into a web tablet. Voided their warranty, but hey, now they’ve got a computer! Oh, and by the way—I don’t recommend going for the marketing game that says the Nook isn’t capitalized. That’s trying to play on the grammatical convention that brand names are capitalized, while normal vocabulary words in a language are not. I’m sorry, Barnes and Noble: I don’t think so.

The name of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s parent company, EMPG, is being bandied about, as Barry O’Callaghan’s three-card monte attitude toward stockholders is revealed in this week’s financial avalanche.

Also, Borders continues to tank. Publishers Marketplace reports that Borders is in trouble now for delaying payment to small publishers, although they seem to be keeping the big publishers happy enough (thanks, guys, for your support of independent business owners in these troubled times.) They are also apparently playing around with reporting periods in order to make their numbers look better, but honestly? Beethoven’s Fifth.

On the hurrah side of the ledger:

Santa Cruz’s Logos Books and Records has survived Borders’ attempt to wrest their business away from them. When we rented our little house in the Santa Cruz Mountains to the then-new manager of the then-new Borders in downtown in 2000, the random public out-cry against franchise domination actually crossed the line into personal violence, scaring the wits out of a perfectly nice young woman. She moved to Hawaii. We sold the house. Fortunately, Logos just kept right on doing what Logos does, which is sell great books to people who love them, and they, like Modern Times Bookstore of San Francisco and Powell’s Books of Portland, Oregon, are still alive and thriving.

Hey, what great bookstores do you guys frequent? Can we compile an esoteric list of faves, so when we travel to each other’s parts of the world we’ll know where to check in when we arrive?