My friend Matt just got done working on a special “Best of 2006” section for the Popular Science website. One of the technological awards went to this new electronic reader. The thing that immediately struck me about it was this:

Fill the slim Reader from Sony’s online store — each of the 10,000 available titles costs about 25 percent less than the hardcover — or load any other PDF or text file.

Only 25% less than a hardcover? So you remove the cover, the paper, and distribution costs-essentially every cost involved in a book-and it only knocks a couple bucks off the price? I can guarantee they aren’t passing those profits onto the authors. Writers should really just post their books themselves and charge $5 a pop. They’d make a killing.