Mark Muro explains how Kindles are made.

Everyone is probably sick of the topic by now, but I would feel remiss were I not to note April L. Hamilton’s cogent take on the row between Macmillan and Amazon.

Charles Stross examines the spat between Macmillan and Amazon.

Bookninja rounds up recent e-book rumblings.

Farhad Manjoo at Slate covers Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books.

The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here’s one way around this: Don’t buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it.

Like the slavering maws of a multipartite mythological beast, the intentional flaws of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader swiftly swivel to rain disdainful and fetid organoleptic disaster upon all who dare approach the sacred mount.

The Huffington Post has Mark Sarvas’s ridiculously ill-conceived essay on Amazon’s Kindle.

Of course, I’ll still love my library, love sitting amid my shelves, poking randomly through titles I haven’t considered in years. But the destiny of the book lies not in satisfying Luddites, curmudgeons and romantics, but rather in introducing a new generation of readers into the joys of literature and making sure that those words we spend all those years in lonely rooms writing will find as many readers as humanly – or digitally – possible.

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich covers BookExpo America.

There were the panels: “Giving It Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense and When They Don’t,” “Red Hot Readers: Market Adoption of Mobile eReading Devices” and “Jumping Off a Cliff: How Publishers Can Succeed Online Where Others Failed.” Tina Brown, rasping with a bad case of laryngitis, kick-started a discussion with the chief executives of four New York publishing houses by asking if they were shocked when Amazon.com began charging $9.99 for e-books — “that paltry, pitiful sum.”

At Salon Sarah Hepola reports the disappearance of gay-themed books from Amazon’s search results and sales rankings.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo discovers e-books on Amazon’s Kindle platform.

Don’t get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn’t realize the book might move so rapidly into the realm of endangered modes of distributing the written word. I was thinking maybe decades more. The book is so tactile and personal and much less ephemeral than the sort of stuff we read online.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a short segment on e-books and digital restrictions management.

For National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Lynn Neary covers publishers’ and booksellers’ objections to Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device, the second version of which was recently announced.

In n+1’s new book review supplement, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington describes judging Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel contest.

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon.com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

In New York Magazine Boris Kachka writes of the end of publishing as we know it.

Forbes notes that Amazon is acquiring AbeBooks.

Amazon, the online retailing giant with a fast-rising share of the consumer book market, has adopted the literary equivalent of a nuclear option for rebellious publishers who balk at its demands.

In the New York Times, Doreen Carvajal covers the company’s growing market presence and leverage.

The American Booksellers Association notes Amazon’s plan to fight a New York proposal that the online retailer collect and remit sales tax for sales to in-state customers.

Mark Pilgrim’s assessment of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, formed through the juxtaposition of quotations, agrees with my own.

Steven Johnson examines Amazon’s text statistics.

. . .the two stats that I found totally fascinating were “Average Words Per Sentence” and “% Complex Words,” the latter defined as words with three or more syllables–words like “ameliorate”, “protoplasm” or “motherf***er.”

The author of a self-published British children’s book wants the title to be removed from the Amazon UK catalog. The Guardian article says that he feels that:

“When a book gets a certain amount of attention, they will attempt to stock it and cut the independents out. Not with my book!”