We've included only e-readers (and one tablet computer) that are either developed by old media companies or have gone out of their way to partner with them; think of this as a compilation of would-be media saviors dressed up as gadgets.

Maker: Barnes & Noble (the retailer)
Name: E-Reader
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble (the publisher); access to books scanned by Google Books; a B&N e-book store. (More)

Maker: Apple
Name: Apple Tablet (unofficial)
Caveat: A tablet computer is much more capable than an e-reader, usually offering the resolution, sound and video capabilities of a laptop computer along with a full-color display.
Old media tie-ins: Apple is in content talks with the New York Times, a large magazine group and at least two textbook companies, sources told our colleagues at Gizmodo. (More)

Maker:Sony
Names:Reader Touch, Reader Pocket
Old media tie-ins: Sony has a great feature that will let you check out e-books from one the oldest distribution mediums out there: your local library. Publishers can't be thrilled with "Library Finder," to say nothing of Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Oh well!

Maker: Plastic Logic Ltd.
Name: Plastic Logic Reader
Old media tie-ins: Content deals with Gannett Co.'s USA Today and Pearson PLC's Financial Times. Digital bookstore from Barnes & Noble.

Maker: Amazon.com
Name: Kindle DX, Kindle 2
Old media tie-ins: e-Books — from fiction to textbooks — sold by Amazon; a variety of newspapers, including the New York Times; a variety of magazines, including Time. Non-participating newspapers, including those owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have complained about the paltry 30 percent cut of revenues they were offered for sales on the device.

Maker: iRex
Name: DR800SG (catchy!)
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble's e-book store. B&N gets around.

And, bringing up the rear, there are the media companies whose devices are, for now, mostly talk.

Maker: Hearst Corp. and FirstPaper LLC
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: Would presumably include content from Hearst newspapers like the Chronicle-s in San Francisco and Houston and from magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan. There has been talk of a hardware device developed by Hearst and, more recently, of an open software platform developed with FirstPaper.

Maker: Time Inc.
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: There are conflicting accounts over whether Time Inc. is interested in making this device. Former Valleywag Owen Thomas of NBC Bay Area obtained a June 2009 presentation indicating plans to finish a prototype this year; Peter Kafka's sources at All Things D said the magazine division of Time Warner is interested in creating a virtual store rather than a physical device. Either way, the company is said to be seeking partnerships with other magazine publishers — Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst, according to the documents reviewed by Thomas.

(UPDATE: Added Sony Reader due to Library Finder feature.)

(Pics via Gizmodo unless otherwise noted)

The Friday before a holiday weekend is the ultimate black hole for news, and thus the perfect time to dump embarrassing announcements. A roundup:

Google: To compensate for this week's hour-and-a-half-long GMail outage, Google has given three free days of service to its paying Google Apps customers. The company wrote in an email we received last night, "We understand that this service outage has affected our valued customers and their users, and we sincerely apologize for the disruption and any impact.

Amazon: Company CEO Jeff Bezos has already apologized for silently deleting copies of 1984 off people's Kindles, but now the company has made official amends, offering affected customers either a redelivery of the book or a $30 gift certificate, the Wall Street Journal reports.

AT&T: The telecommunications company knows its wireless network is the scourge of iPhone owners, so it's just posted a YouTube video of an empathetic, long-haired geek named "Seth" to explain how hard it has been for the company to keep up with the torrid growth in smartphone subscriptions. You know what else is hard, "Seth?" Spending $100 per month for crappy service.

"We have heard you," he soothes. "We are on it." We predict a parody version of this video will be up by the end of the weekend.

(Top pic by spud murphy on Flickr)

All but one of Bezos' reviews are five stars. The geeky retailer raves about Snickerdoodles, "amazing cheese snacks," $1,100 binoculars and a book that indulges his "dream of visiting the outer planets." Then comes the 13th Warrior, the 1999 action film starring Antonio Banderas. It is a four-star picture, according to 334 other customers, but Bezos writes that "one star is indeed one too many."

This is a terrible, terrible movie... this endless stream of uninteresting battle scenes with pointless dialogue and no discernable plot is perhaps one of the worst movies ever made. Sorry if this seems harsh, but I just don't want anyone to buy it unknowingly.

Bezos has apologized for remotely and silently deleting copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles last week. He did so via a quick internet text message, since apparently this incident was too shameful for the CEO to bust out with another YouTube vid:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

What can he say, he was preoccupied with shoe shopping and let his company go a little nuts. Happens to the most maniacal of us.

[via TechCrunch]

Bezos' video, above, was directed not at the press or even customers but at Zappos employees, who Bezos presumably wants to keep firmly in place through the acquisition and integration of the company. The CEO of Zappos, meanwhile, did his talking on the company blog.

Bezos cut out the middleman — the press, in this case — big time. And why not? Instead of having to answer boring financial questions, Bezos got to pontificate on Amazon's history, ostensible focus on its customers, and on his management philosophy. The manic laugher would never have been able to sermonize like this in the Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE: And of course there's a downside, which is being mocked by the likes of Fast Company's David Lidsky. Lidsky's funny satirical liveblog of Bezos' video is here.

A publisher changed its mind about selling George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm electronically. So Amazon agreed to just go ahead and remotely delete bought and paid for e-copies of the books from people's Kindles.

Owners got refunds, but many were still not happy. Which makes sense; your local bookstore isn't allowed to sneak into your house in the middle of the night, take your books back and leave you a check. If Amazon wants to make the Kindle an iPhone for books, it's well advised to get a bit obsessive about controlling the user experience on the device, as Apple would. But this is taking things too far.

Reports the New York Times:

Unlike Amazon, which sets the retail price for its e-books and sells them in its own proprietary Kindle format, Scribd is offering publishers considerably more control over how their digital titles are sold.

Simon & Schuster will sell its books on Scribd for 20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition. Amazon sets a price of $9.99 for many popular e-books, meaning titles there might be less expensive. But Scribd will allow publishers to see what is selling and change their prices accordingly.

Scribd also gives publishers 80 percent of revenue. Amazon reportedly gives publishers about half of the list price of books sold for the Kindle, but also discounts many titles and in some cases chooses to make no revenue itself from those sales.

Simon & Schuster will sell its books with anticopying software from Adobe, which means those books can be transferred to devices like the Sony Reader and some mobile phones, but not to Amazon's Kindle.

Since it's already abundantly clear that Kindle is a false prophet for newspapers, would it be safe to assume that if more disgruntled-with-Amazon publishers were to follow suit and partner with Scribd that Amazon might be in big trouble? Because there just might be more deals in the works.

Trip Adler, Scribd's chief executive, says the company is also talking to other major American publishers. "This is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales," Mr. Adler said.

Back in May, after posting significant financial losses, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tried desperately to convince shareholders that Kindle needed to be viewed as an investment and not an income generator. How will he spin further losses? Probably with maniacal laughter!

Simon & Schuster to Sell Digital Books on Scribd.com [New York Times]

Bezos's family foundation is funding research by University of Washington professor Patricia Kuhl, whose research seems to involve putting babies in really freaky-looking scientific equipment. Will this one day lead to Kindle Nanos getting implanted in their ocular nerves at birth? Will their brainwaves be mined to determine today's specials on Amazon.com? With Bezos looking more and more like Dr. Evil with every passing year, the mind boggles. But he already knew that.

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the dilettante scion of a fading newspaper-family dynasty, obediently showed up to announce a trial in which his company will subsidize the $489 retail price of a Kindle DX for readers who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Times or the Boston Globe — assuming the latter is still publishing, since he's threatened to close it down.

The Kindle DX is a fair-looking device — homely in the way that every gadget not made by Apple inevitably is, but passably designed. But will it save newspapers? No. And Bezos is hedging his bets, even as he has managed to scare the press lords into shelling out their precious remaining cash into funding the distribution of his pricey e-reader. Today, he hawked the Kindle DX as a means for reading textbooks, sheet music, novels, and science journals. Newspapers are just one checkbox in a long list of features — and yet he's cajoled the gullible likes of Sulzberger into handing him a pile of cash.

And it's not like Amazon needs the money. It's a steady cash generator — especially for Bezos himself. On Friday, he sold $63 million in Amazon shares. On Monday, as news of the Kindle leaked, he sold another $16 million. If he's such a big believer in supporting journalism, why didn't Bezos announce he was personally giving away 160,000 Kindles to people who agreed to sign up for a newspaper subscription? He could afford it.

(Photo by Gizmodo)

Did we say "kindled"? Amazon's Kindle, the e-book reader, has indeed sparked fever dreams among the ailing lords of print. The New York Times has paused from chronicling its own doom to contemplate its salvation — a large-format Kindle, better suited to displaying newspaper-like pages. Hearst, News Corp., and other print-media concerns are pushing their own devices, loath to grant Amazon so much power over their future — but they are fumbling, while Amazon may introduce its newspaper-friendly device as soon as Wednesday.

What a petty concern to worry about, rather than asking if that future even exists!

The argument for e-readers goes like this: Newspapers and magazines will once again be able to charge for subscriptions to support the cost of production, while shedding the expense of printing presses. Readers will pay for the convenience of getting the news delivered to a device.

That prediction fundamentally misunderstands the lessons of the Kindle, which made books available in a convenient digital format, on an appealing device, for the first time. Downloading five books for the beach is vastly more appealing than packing them.

What are the publishers really proposing? Taking a product available for free on the Web, dumbing it down, and then charging for it. News without links, comments, or video, in black and white, updated once a day? In an age when print media ought to be learning to do more with less, they are instead fixated on getting customers to pay more for less.

There is one prospective market for this: The old, who may be so attached to printed media that they will accept an electronic substitute. Hearst digital chieftain Phil Bronstein, the former San Francisco Chronicle editor, told Maureen Dowd that the industry's best hope was that people would live longer, so those trained to read newspapers will stick to the habit.

The obvious converse of Bronstein's feeble hope: The young will never learn to read newspapers and magazines again, having grown up reading online. Why would they switch to a product like the Kindle?

Like the libertarian wingnuts who would rather flee to science-fiction cities on the sea, escape to outer space, or cosset themselves in an online fantasy world rather than live in reality, the addled lords of print like Bronstein would rather dream of a technological rescue than face the hard work of survival.

What newspapers and magazines need to do is obvious: Build appealing websites, and sell them better. But that would require changing.

The only thing anyone can agree on was Amazon.com PR's complete mishandling of the situation, once people noticed that gay and lesbian books were getting marked as "adult" titles, which Amazon.com omits from its sales rankings and search results. Top flack Patty Smith didn't do much better with her latest excuseplanation:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for checking in. Best regards -
Patty

In other words, it happened and they're fixing it. That's worse than nothing. So here are the rumors that have crossed our inbox:

Blame France! An Amazon.com alumnus tells us this story about "how it went down":

guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up "adult", which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like "erotic" and "sexuality". That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon. The [customer service] rep thought the porn question as a standard porn question about how searches work.

It's the Conficker worm! A source who claimed to work at Amazon.com told me that internal logs revealed a massive wave of automatically created accounts shortly before the incident, apparently using machines infected with the Conficker worm.

We don't have concrete evidence that it was Conficker, but a few days before the incident, there was a mass registration of accounts on Amazon. We're talking MASSIVE. I don't have an exact number, but from the regions the accounts were registered from, it looked like it followed a trend. There were quite a few from India, eastern United States as well. According to my coworkers who have done more research into it, the regions that the registrations were from followed a strong trend with the regions that Conficker has most affected.

The hacker did it. That brings us back to the claim by Weev, a well-documented website prankster, that he's responsible — a claim which Smith, the Amazon spokeswoman categorically denies. ("No," she said, in response to a series of direct questions asking if Weev was involved. Smith is quite possibly the least verbose director of corporate communications in the world.)

In his detailed explanation of how he allegedly pulled off the stunt, Weev says he hired third-world workers to break Amazon's "captcha" security, which displays a random set of numbers and letters in an effort to block hackers who attempt to mass-register accounts using scripts. Might he have hired a third party which then used a Conficker botnet to create accounts which then flagged gay and lesbian books on Amazon as inappropriate? Or is this all part of an elaborate attention-getting stunt to take credit for an Amazon employee's mistake? Either way, it's a masterstroke to tie together the month's two big Internet memes.

The hacker, known as Weev, with whom we've had dealings before the "amazonfail" episode, is saying that the whole escapade was the result of his exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools.

What to make of people who don't want to believe this was a prank? They're left with the notion of Amazon.com pursuing homophobic censorship, which must be pleasing to people who see evil behind every "Inc." Pick your conspiracy theory: Someone's playing someone.

A recap: On Friday, two gay-themed romance novels disappeared from Amazon's sales rankings — they were still listed on the site, but could not appear on best-seller lists. On Saturday, hundreds more vanished. Writer Mark Probst asked Amazon.com customer service what happened, and got this answer from an "Ashlyn D." in customer service:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Twitter users started decrying the move en masse, tagging their posts "#amazonfail" and accusing the online retailer of homophobia. Amazon.com PR didn't help matters by calling the problem a "glitch." Even though the sales ranks of most gay and lesbian titles had been restored, Twitterers taunted Amazon.com by posting messages with the tag "#glitchmyass."

Glitch my ass, indeed. One LiveJournal user speculated that the mass flagging of gay books on Amazon.com might be the work of organized antigay groups — or troublemaking hackers:

Now, let's just put ourselves in Amazon's shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in fucking Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist.

Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as "adult" content? Why would this happen over a weekend?

Our hacker has an explanation: Amazon.com has long had a mechanism that allowed customers to flag a product as "inappropriate." Only a small number of these votes were needed to get a book off of Amazon's sales rankings.

What Weev says he figured out was a way to trick Internet users into automatically flagging products without their knowledge, with the help of friends who run high-profile websites. He also says he hired "third-worlders" to register fake Amazon accounts and flag books. (His full explanation of the stunt is below.) He hasn't yet offered proof that he carried off the prank as described, but one part checks out: Amazon.com has apparently removed the feature that lets users flag books as "inappropriate." And the scheme he details seems far more likely than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos deciding to become a censor.

The hacker's confession, which he also posted on LiveJournal:

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay
and outrage across the blogosphere
ain't so bad.

Weev has attracted at least one doubter who had trouble following his instructions, saying the code doesn't work. We asked him to answer the critique. He says he believes they were using a different version of a software program called "elinks," and that Amazon has disabled the site feature in question.

In the meantime, you can follow this clusterfuck, 140 characters at a time.

Amazon issued a statement to Peter Kafka of All Things Digital and some other reporters, reading:

"We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible."

The online bookseller now needs to explain why a temporary glitch "recently" discovered has been affecting gay-themed novels going back to at least early February, when (as we noted previously) former gay stripper Craig Seymour saw the sales ranking on his memoir disappear even as Diablo Cody's stripper memoir retained its sales rank. Seymour complained at the time and eventually resolved the issue, so it's not like Amazon didn't have warnings of the problem before this weekend.

Amazon also needs to explain how said glitch appears to have systemically targeted "hundreds" of gay romance books and autobiographies over the past two days while leaving so many similar straight books alone.

The company will no doubt try to do that without reminding its homophobic customers that it is selling hot man-on-man and woman-on-woman and whoever-on-whoever purple prose for gays to read and do lord knows what else at the same time. Better start working on the statement right now if you hope to put it out anytime next week.

Previously: These Books Too Gay for Amazon

UPDATE: Former Amazon.com gay and lesbian studies editor Ron Hogan now works at GalleyCat as senior editor. He raises doubts there about Amazon's "glitch" excuse, pointing first to Seymour's experience in February and then to the fact that Amazon originally called this a "policy" decision (see here) before contradicting itself and calling it a "glitch".

Straight romance like Jackie Collins and straight porn like this book of Playboy centerfolds is still ranked on Amazon.

But not the homosexul stuff: Gay romance publisher Mark Probst noticed hundreds of such books lost their rankings over the past two days, including Transgressions, about a 17th century liaison between a cavalry trooper and a farmer's son, and False Colors, about a 19th century naval lieutenant attracted to his commanding officer.

Probst wrote to Amazon through his publisher's account, and was told

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

There is now an full-fledged Twitter shitstorm, naturally, and a new, snarky definition for the term "Amazon Rank," spreading virally. It's hard to imagine the Seattle-based retailer sticking by this controversial policy after naming a gay Brit's novel their "Book of the Year."

On the other hand, Amazon must be happy, on some level, to have finally expanded its customer base beyond the sophisticated techno elites, straight through into the American cultural backwaters where this sort of material is remotely offensive, somehow.

So probably the store will lump anything vaguely sexual, Jackie Collins and Playboy included, into a romance/erotica category, which will also be rank banned. And eventually the site will just throw in the towel and outsource its entire filtering operation to the cultural arbiters at Wal-Mart. Why not?

UPDATE: Author Daniel Harris wrote in to add some examples of non-romance books that have been banned from Amazon's rankings:

Three of my four books have been stripped of their ranking: Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (a gay history book but with chapters on pornography and S/M), A Memoir of No One in Particular (one chapter discusses my life), and Diary of a Drag Queen. Only my one "secular" book, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, retains the right to be ranked.

And Craig Seymour, whose gay stripper memoir you may remember for its mention of blogger Matt Drudge, blogs that his bio was banned from rankings back in February, even though Diablo Cody's straight stripper memoir wasn't. The good news is his ranking was eventually restored. The bad news is he noticed the memoirs of two gay porn stars were rank-banned while straight porn stars retained their rankings.

As tough as it is to lay off 215 workers, Bezos is betting he'll have reason to laugh (and laugh and laugh) maniacally for some time to come.

Sure, start scoffing. But Digg's past acquisition talks with Current and News Corp. failed in part because they looked at Digg as a media play, and community-generated sites like Digg aren't particularly attractive to advertisers. More recently, Digg and Google got close to an acquisition. That deal fell apart, according to a source familiar with the talks, because Google wanted to closely probe the quality of Digg's engineering staff early on in the deal, and Digg did not relent until talks were well along. (Digg CEO Jay Adelson refused to comment on the company's talks with Google.) The lesson: Digg's not a media company, and not a technology company. It's something else altogether.

Who makes money off of online community? The surprising answer is Amazon. One study suggests that Amazon.com makes $2.7 billion — billion! — a year in incremental sales because of its user-written reviews. Amazon uses the simple mechanism of asking shoppers if a review was helpful to rank its reviews.

It's remarkably similar to Digg's option of "digging" or "burying" a news story. Where might that be useful? Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. In addition to selling digital books, Amazon already charges for some news feeds available for free on the Web. Magazine and newspaper editors are delusionally optimistic that they might be able to charge by the article on a device like the Kindle, through a scheme of micropayments.

Micropayments have been technically possible for more than a decade. The problem has always been consumer behavior: How do you know if an article is worth paying for? The time spent pondering that question isn't worth the nickel people hope to charge for it.

But what if you didn't have to ponder that question? What if you knew, through Digg's rating system, that a large number of people had read the story and given it a thumbs-up?

An Amazon-owned Digg wouldn't have to charge for access to its website or the stories it links to; indeed, that would be against its interests, since the rating activity on Digg requires free access to work. The Wall Street Journal even gives Digg users free access to its stories so they can read them and vote.

Instead, Digg would charge Kindle users for a new service which delivers a personalized newspaper to the device — a service far quicker and simpler than the cumbersome process of going to Digg.com and scrolling through endless lists of popular headlines. They'd only pay for the stories they read — which in turn would provide more valuable feedback on what Amazon can charge for. The payment would be essentially voluntary, since readers could always pull up publishers' websites and read the stories for free there — but they payment would be more for the simplicity and ease of use, rather than the content itself. (Arguably, that's why people pay for music on iTunes rather than download it from file-sharing networks.)

Is Amazon.com thinking about such a move? We haven't heard anything about talks between Amazon.com and Digg. But, intriguingly, we heard whispers that Amazon.com is talking to Twitter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a personal investor in Twitter. Presumably, the attraction would be the same: getting some kind of real-time pulse on what people are interested in.

But Digg's focus on headline voting and Amazon's push into news distribution make them seem like a better match. Will Bezos dig the idea?

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Why is a cable company dabbling in the e-books business? Aside from running Discovery, Hendricks has long played at being a part-time inventor. In 1999, he and two co-inventors filed for a patent, granted in 2007, on an "electronic book security and copyright protection system" which included "a portable book-shaped viewer is used for secure viewing of the text."

Sounds like Hendricks might have a case against Amazon.com, whose Kindle is widely viewed as the first e-book reader with commercial promise. But why does he care? The answer may lie in another patent Hendricks registered, which describes a system for transmitting e-books over "video signals" — an apparent reference to cable-TV systems. Discovery styles itself as a "nonfiction media company." Either Hendricks fears Amazon getting a lock on the nonfiction market. Or perhaps he's just wasting corporate resources to bolster his reputation as an inventor.

Television has been distracting people from the written word long before the Internet came along. And while the Internet has been good for reading, it's mostly encourage the consumption of short-form writing.

Print is a much better way to read long chunks of text — fewer distractions, easier on the eyes, portable from room to room, etc. — and to the extent the Kindle replicates these technological advantages, it is basically a crippled laptop.

But Granger imagines an e-reader that advances beyond the "crude" Kindle. He thinks better technology will do the trick:

... as electronic readers improve, as they add graphics and design and, eventually, color, even more people will opt for the more sustained, contemplative experiences more often. And all will be well with the world.

What he forgets: The Kindle has a built-in Web browser, though few people use it because the Web is not particularly attractive in black-and-white. If it adds color, won't people inevitably use it to read websites, and thus fewer books, just like they do on PCs? There goes Granger's theory out the window.

We suspect he has another reason for touting the Kindle, though. Hearst, the owner of Esquire is working on its own e-reader. By paying the Kindle such a backhanded compliment — right idea, wrong device — Granger is carrying water for his publisher's business interests. And not for the first time.

Hearst has invested in E Ink, a Cambridge startup whose low-power screen technology is used in both the Kindle and Hearst's planned reader. E Ink appeared on a splashy, Granger-praised Esquire cover last year. Perhaps this E Ink-stained wretch has even handled the product he envisions killing the Kindle? If so, it's too bad Granger won't tell his readers how much he loves that, too.

Hearst's e-reader will be larger than the Kindle — more like an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. And it will use technology from E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass. startup Hearst backed more than a decade ago. Hearst hopes to distribute electronic versions of its magazines and newspapers on the device, which a Hearst executive told Fortune will be out later this year.

It's like a terminal cancer patient putting faith in some herbalist's shark-bone treatment.

"The question now is, will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?" asks Fortune. Uh, no. The question is whether people will give up their iPhones and netbooks for these new readers. Cheap laptops and smartphones are an irreversible trend. Factories in Japan, China, and Korea thunder out the mass-produced parts for these devices, which make their economics compelling. And a PC has the virtue of not being designed by a publisher more interested in protecting an old way of doing a business than serving readers.

Hearst has exercised its E Ink fetish before, when Esquire used it for an expensive, pointless cover. But the fact that Hearst owns a stake in E Ink is the silliest possible reason to champion the technology. Economists would call that a sunk cost: It's money already spent.

Newspaper and magazine publishers seem desperate to find some new trick to preserve the scarcity on which they used to profit. In a world overflowing with media, that is impossible. And editors and publishers are not clever technological tricksters. The E Ink reader will start out black-and-white. Wait, aren't the glossy photos and gorgeous layouts why we pick up magazine sin the first place?

What they ought to be doing is fixing their websites: Adding comments everywhere, publicly displaying the comments and pageviews stories garner, and — crucially — adjusting the story mix in light of that information. It's unlikely to happen. The makers of magazines are so used to dreaming up story ideas in their skyscraper aeries. It will never occur to them that their readers might actually be smarter than they are.

Smart enough, at any rate, not to buy a gadget designed by a magazine guy.

(Image via Gizmodo)

Host Jon Stewart seemed discomfited by his guest's wild, table-slapping howls. But any tech reporter who's interviewed Bezos knows that the Amazon.com's CEO hooting laughter is his most distinctive personal quality, the hook of every headline.

As the '90s bubble burst, observers wondered if Bezos's online bookstore would survive, as it lost money with every shipment. In 2000, then-Red Herring editor Jason Pontin called him a "chuckling maniac" running a "terrible company." Oops! Amazon.com survived and thrived while hundreds of other online retailers perished. Every profile writer since then has felt obligated to trot out a tired line about Bezos "getting the last laugh."

Yet that misunderstands Bezos. The laugh is part of his schtick. He's having fun! He's got a surprise! Where Apple CEO Steve Jobs wooed audiences with imperious cool, Bezos plays it loose and goofy. (Like the time he bragged about having sex at a commencement speech.) Just when you think you've got him figured out, he changes his story. It goes something like this:

You thought Amazon.com was a bookstore. No, wait, it's a retailer, the Wal-Mart of the Web. It's a bricks-and-mortar play, with superefficient real-world warehouses. No, it's a software maker whose Web services underpin the likes of Twitter and SmugMug. Oh, never mind — now it's all about the Kindle, which is clearly the iPod of the book world!

By shifting Amazon.com's focus, Bezos gets Wall Street to think about Amazon.com's starry potential rather than the grinding reality of its workaday business, which is a low-margin, highly competitive retail business. Bezos would never get on the Daily Show to talk about Amazon's latest discount electronics offers. That's the real joke here. And that's why Bezos is really laughing.

(Video by Ryan Tate)