This is really fascinating stuff, particularly if you’re a book nerd. Donald Marron wrote a terrific post on the article that asks, more delicately than I would, why book publishers are such boobs:

Under the original system, Amazon paid the publishers $13.00 for each e-book. Under the new system, publishers would receive 70% of the retail price of an e-book. To net $13.00 per book, the publishers would thus have to set a price of about $18.50 per e-book, well above the norm for electronic books. Indeed, so far above the norm that it generally doesn’t happen.

Now, this depends on a very dark interpretation of Amazon’s motives, as Auletta explains at length. Clary Shirky addressed the related anxieties of independent booksellers in a terrific, much-cited post on “Local Book Stores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization“:

Last month, the American Booksellers Association published an open letter to the Justice Department, asking Justice to investigate Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon after they lowered prices of best-selling books to under $10. The threat, the ABA says, is dire: “If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public, and will allow the few remaining mega booksellers to raise prices to consumers unchecked.” Got that? Lower prices will lead to higher prices, and cheap books threaten to reduce the range of ideas in circulation. And don’t just take the ABA’s word for it. They also quote John Grisham’s agent and the owner of a book store, who both agree that cheap books are a horrible no-good very bad thing. So bad, in fact, that the Department of Justice must get involved, to shield the public from the scourge of affordable reading. (Just for the record, the ABA is also foursquare against ebooks being sold more cheaply than paper books, and thinks maybe Justice should look into that too.)

So where does the urgency come from? It’s not all self-interested nonsense, particularly when it comes from so many smart and thoughtful people.

A second group genuinely believes it’s still the 1990s somewhere. They imagine that the only outlets for books between Midtown and the Mission are Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble, that few people in Nebraska have ever heard of Amazon, that countless avid readers have money for books but don’t own a computer. This group believes, in other words, that book buying is a widespread activity while internet access is for elites, the opposite of the actual case.

Very interesting stuff. Shirky is one of these guys who makes usefully overbroad claims. He’s also very good at cutting through cant.

One curious development: I resisted the Kindle for a long time, and was convinced that I was too attached to physical books for their convenience, their tactile appeal, and their aesthetic appeal. But having acquired an iPad, and having installed the Kindle application, I’ve been taking great pleasure — more than I would have expected — in the simple act of reading. Don’t get me wrong: I love reading book books. Somehow, though, reading E-books feels new and fun, and the sequential logic of book-reading is usefully reinforced. Perhaps this sense will fade, but, speaking only for my reptilian brain, the advent of the E-books does seem to have rekindled (ha ha) my love of books.