The New York Times Book Review

"The e-book list has migrated online, the digital world being its natural habitat," the Times announced. "Given the fluid variety of pricing in today’s marketplace, we have also stopped including cover prices on the lists. The third change is the one you’re reading right now."

The third change is a more bloggy look. There will be a new column, called "Open Book," devoted to readings and panels (there are, after all, many a literary event on any given night), as well as an outlet for archival looks back in time. In the debut column, for example, there is a blurb with choice quotes from a 1925 review of The Great Gatsby (amazingly, people were writing about it even before Baz Luhrmann). "Open Book" will replace "Up Front," the front of book (front of review?) page.

Although nobody, least of all Times Book Review readers, likes change, this one seems relatively benign.

Thomas Pynchon: The Book Trailer (YouTube)

If you can't tell, the opening is composed of the first lines of each Pynchon book. (We got as far as "A screaming comes across the sky," which is exactly how much of Gravity's Rainbow we understood, anyway.)

Open Road Integrated Media, the start-up founded by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, partners with authors and authors' estates to publish e-books of the authors' backlists. It's a business model that benefits from the murky legality regarding book contracts signed before the era of digital publishing, where authors' rights to digital formats of their work were not explicitly stated. Open Road has published e-book versions of the backlists of Pat Conroy, Alice Walker, Rebecca West and other authors.

Other authors in similar situations, including J.K. Rowling, who intends to publish her own e-books, have thus far tended to arrange a revenue-sharing agreement with their print publishers to ensure they will not violate non-compete agreements in their original contracts. Julie of the Wolves might end up setting an important legal precedent!

Five of the big six publishing houses forced Amazon to adopt the agency model in 2010, ending the era of the $9.99 new release e-book. Back then, Amazon claimed that publishers have "a monopoly over their own titles."

The pricing of e-books in Europe is also under investigation by the European commission, reports the Guardian.

Hendrik Hertzberg, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Rebecca Mead, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Susan Sontag, Aharon Appelfeld, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim—plus seven more Talk of the Town pieces. Features include Adam Gopnik on returning to downtown Manhattan after the attacks, Lawrence Wright on the Al Qaeda terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, Steve Coll on the education of the young Osama bin Laden, Raffi Khatchadourian on the American homegrown Al Qaeda terrorist Adam Gadahn, Jennifer Kahn on the complicated death of the 9/11 hero James Zadroga, and Nicholas Schmidle on the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound by a team of Navy SEALs.

Here's how the state reached its conclusion:

Petitioner’s e-books are not tangible and do not include any prewritten computer software. Accordingly, they do not constitute tangible personal property. As to whether the e-books constitute taxable information services, TSB-M-11(5)S provides that the Tax Department’s current position is that electronic publications that meet the memorandum’s definition of an e-book do not constitute information services.

Meanwhile, Amazon continues to do everything it can to avoid paying any sales taxes ever.

The e-book is to feature photographs, though it's hard to imagine quite what they'll look like on the Kindle, whose image-rendering capabilities work best on stipple-portraits of Emily Dickinson. One imagines, given the book's franchise-building title, that more are in the works, but we hope they choose judiciously: downloading a volume of Vanity Fair's coverage of the Kennedys or of Marilyn Monroe might crash our operating system.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The New York Times, however, reports today that Amazon.com is selling certain electronic titles at a bit of a markup compared to their print counterparts. Both Ken Follett's Fall of Giants and James Patterson's Don't Blink are a tad more expensive if you opt for the e-reader editions. And those who discovered the prices while perusing the books seem to be less than pleased.

“Really, James Patterson?” the Times quoted from one of the many negative reviews on Amazon. “Why would it possibly cost more for a digital download than printed and bound ink on paper?”

In the end, though, it seems readers just can't get enough of Ken Follett — despite the outrage over the price, the e-reader edition of Fall of Giants is currently ranked eighth on Amazon's Kindle bestseller list.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs also introduced a new approach to the way it sells products that's incorporated into iTunes 10. "Ping," the site's new social networking tool, will allow users to post song, album, movie and e-book recommendations to a feed. 

But there's an aesthetic redesign detail that could prove irksome. The iconic logo, with musical notation set against a silver CD—well, it's gone. Jobs explains that, after ten years, it's time to ditch the nod to that erstwhile format, a relic from the age of physical music. It's as good a time as ever to switch it up: "iTunes is about to bypass CDs in sales," Jobs said.

And it must have been an amicable separation. It was taken for granted, that silver disc, but logically it has nothing to do with iTunes, especially now that it's expanded beyond selling just music. As integral the the CD was to the logo, it is, at this point, a complete anachronism. If this year's youth can't write in cursive, next year's batch will have never seen a real CD.