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I can't decide whether I'm going to be happy I can get books & the like for insanely discounted prices (yay books I can read because I *want* to), or feel like I'm looting a corpse when I go to my local Borders next to help lighten the load. Anyone else feeling a little conflicted?

If this doesn't take you directly: Please see the article entitled "Amazon's Wild Pitch to Indies: 'Wanna Sell Kindles?'"  Then feel free to chuckle at Amazon.

Caught between Amazon and Apple, a small publisher feels the pressure.

More bad behavior from Amazon.

An interesting article about the effect of eBooks on authors themselves.

An interesting and cute story on the trend of children becoming published book authors. After reading, I really feel like I have no excuse for not finishing my book - enjoy! :-)

President of Author's Guild feels Kindle's "text to audio" feature infringes copyright.

Is the KindleFire really that great? Has anyone used one yet?

I haven't played with the Fire yet, but I'm always very dubious of the "tech analyst". Let's face it, dominating the Android tablet market isn't all that difficult right now, as there is a dearth of poorly built, poorly performing Android tablets on the market today. My own personal opinion is that the OS offers a lot of promise, but ironically the real value of the Fire is its connection to Amazon's own "walled garden" of products and services, which flys directly in the face of Android's selling characteristic of "openness".

Randomly, my friend won a Kindle Fire at an office holiday function and I got to play around with it last night. Here are my impressions: First, it's very simple to use though it has that same noticeable lag that all Android tablets seem to have, though I will say not as pronounced as others. It has a rubber-like backing in the same style that the NOOK Simple Touch employs, so it feels good in your hands and won't slide around. Here's one thing that I was surprised about; it's a bit of a brick, meaning it's a lot heavier than I expected. For an eReader, weight seems like a big deal, so I would definitely take one for a test-spin before buying if you can, especially if you're going to use it for long reads. My friend only had one copy of a book, and I thumbed through pretty quickly, and the Fire seemed to handle it well. It had a lot less lag page turning than it did starting apps. On the web, the Fire did pretty well, it downloaded and ran pages smoothly for the most part. Though I will say I went to one of my favorite sites (arsenal.com) to watch some video highlights of yesterday's game, and even though it has a 7 inch screen, the video "wasn't optimized" for the Fire, so the playback size was smaller than it would have been on my iPhone (postage stamp size). On ESPN.com though it seemed to handle video there much better. My other complaint was that the Fire didn't seem to recognize page widths very well, so you have to do a lot of pinching to get the right view of a page in portrait view. So, I'll put down my pocket-protector, ease off the dork-pedal a bit, and just say for the price it's a solid tablet that runs pretty well.

Google has quietly launched its music search service. Speculation over whether this will affect iTunes or not. More of Google's expansion.

By Jason Boog on July 12, 2011 6:00 PM The next time you feel depressed about the future of authors, bookstores or publishing, watch the video embedded above from Half Price Books-How To Build a (New) Bookstore. The time-lapse video shows the construction of a bookstore from empty warehouse to the customer-ready store.