Eight Important Principles in Negotiating Contracts

I often hear writers talk about the difficulty in negotiating contracts and how they can't get changes. Admittedly, some publications simply will not bend. However, trying to get what you want is always the wise move, because often you can, even with large companies. For example, I was recently negotiating with a web site owned by a large broadcast company. A number of the clauses were unacceptable to me, whether a measure conveying copyright or a provision that I provide rights to anything in my articles, which would include fair use quotes I took from other sites.

First step was to mark up the contract with what bothered me and, even more importantly, why. Negotiation is a process during which each side tries to convince the other of its viewpoint. I then spoke to the top editor of the site and explained my concerns. In virtually every case, he had not realized the nature of a problem, including the rights transfer, because he thought that there was a provision to use the material elsewhere.

Next, the editor forwarded my concerns, noted as comments or mark-ups in the contract, to their lawyer. Eventually I got a document back with the lawyer's counter arguments. For example, when it came to copyright, the lawyer noted that his organization was in a better position to enforce infringement actions and needed the copyright to do so, which was an interesting line of reasoning that I had not heard from a publisher. In another case, I mentioned the fair use issue and he wrote, "If Sherman is contending that he is using third-party content as 'fair use,' what is the legal basis for that?" Again, a reasonable question and one that I would need to answer to get an agreement that did what I wanted.

Note that I say "did" and not "read." You always have to keep in mind what you are trying to achieve and what you are willing to give up to get there. However, given those restrictions, you must be creative in how you achieve your ends.

In terms of copyright, I countered with something that I said I'd seen at the New York Times Magazine - joint ownership. This is something I do not like to do, however, it is far better than turning over copyright and having no option to use the material. (I knew that I wasn't about to get additional money for their reuse and licensing of material.) The lawyer came back with something that I was told would be a take it or leave it position: transfer of copyright, but with the following added to the end of the rights clause:

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Contributor shall have a non-exclusive license to use the Contributor Content, and any derivative works created from any Contributor Content, in other blogs, and in books and other publications.

In other words, although I transferred copyright, I could resell and reuse the material in any other form of publishing I wanted and could create derivative works. It wasn't perfect, but good enough to make the venture worthwhile.

As far as the fair use provision, my argument that it was regular practice in blogging to take fair use quotes of news stories and blogs held sway, and any third party material was "subject to applicable 'fair use' principles," which, again, I could live with. (There was no way I would sign a contract requiring me to transfer ownership of something I didn't own.)

The entire process probably took three to four weeks - all during which I was writing for the site. Why? Because even if we didn't come to an agreement, they would owe me for what I had done and, in the absence of a written contract, my rights were extensive. The more material they had and liked without a contract, the more pressure they were under to reach an agreement with me.

I don't write this to pat myself on the back, but to make a few practical points on negotiating with publishers:

• Know what you want.
• Know why you want it.
• Know your fall back position and what you are ready to accept that will sufficiently support your interests.
• Dare to ask for everything you want at the start.
• Be prepared to effectively debate a point, with carefully reasoned arguments that use fact and logic to argue your case.
• Learn enough about applicable law to bolster your position.
• Be prepared to walk if necessary.
• Take your time in the process and present your position in writing, unless you can think quickly enough on your feet to handle a phone negotiation. (And even then make sure you've worked out your position and reasoning ahead of time.)

Trying to charm someone or make them feel guilty or complain that a given position is "right" will get you nowhere in the long run. Only sufficient fact and logic will reliably sustain you in negotiation.

What Will Become of Professional Photography, and Why Writers Should Care

Columbia Journalism Review has a good article on how photographers have felt enormous pressure from amateur sources of images, but have just been quieter about it than writers. I'd strongly suggest that it's worth reading and then considering how often we all complain about falling rates, and yet are willing to take advantage of the analogous forces in photography that depress rates there. Freelancers often scowl when "non-writers" have the temerity to provide an article, and yet many of us look for opportunities to sell our own photography and anything else that can boost the profit on an assignment.

I'm not suggesting that there is something inherently wrong in developing multiple skills and making use of them all. Far from it. However, it's easy to fall into the "I'll do it for next to nothing if necessary" mind frame in what one sees as a sideline endeavor. Each of us is gaining an advantage from becoming a single source of story-telling, and so is the buyer, because there is only one set of expenses. However, take a look at the bargain you're making and with whom, because, done wrong, it could come back to haunt.

A Good Observer Blog on the Wages of Procrastination

As I'm still on deadline, but thought that the earlier post was a bit light (although I enjoyed it), here's an amusing post on the Guardian's book blog about publishers demanding repaid advances for books never completed and the important role procrastination plays in the life of every writer. (Well, maybe everyone other than Joyce Carol Oates.)

A Disdainful Remark for Your Next Difficult Negotiation

The next time someone expects you to be thankful for peanuts, and you don't feel the need to curry their favor, try the following:

Oh, sorry, I think you're under a misapprehension. I'm a feelancer, not a freelancer.

Random House Pushes Out of Print Definition

A reader forwarded an email she got about new problems with Random House contracts:

Society of Authors deputy general secretary Kate Pool said her major concern with RHG's new boilerplate was an out-of-print clause allowing rights reversion only if the publisher cannot supply a physical or electronic copy of a book within a month, or if there have been no royalty earnings for a year. The author body plans to raise the issue with RHG.

Pool said: "Random House could long since have given up actively publishing your book, it could have sold one copy a year for the past three years, and take three weeks to produce a print-on-demand copy, but you can't terminate the contract. We can see e-books are another way of reaching readers, and that print on demand for old titles has advantages, but this is a way that publishers can sit on rights for years on end."

As the information was from an article in the Bookseller, it referred to English authors. However, that doesn't mean that Random House isn't doing the same in the US. The publisher is apparently also pushing for more aggressive "high discount" provisions. Although there aren't enough details to tell, my guess is that the company is trying to set high discount provisions, which are a trigger for significantly lower royalties to authors, at levels that would be far more easily hit.

I'm not a member of the Authors' Guild (though I keep meaning to join) - anyone hear anything similar from AG about Random House in the US?

Emirates Airline Dumps Its Magazine

This isn't one of the big markets in the US, but it's worth noting that Emirates Airline will no longer carry its paper in-flight magazines and entertainment guides. Instead it will send "similar content" into its in-flight entertainment system. They figure that they'll drop close to 4.5 pounds per passenger this way. It's part of the cost cutting measures the airline is taking because of high fuel prices. (Any irony that this happens first in the Middle East?)

I'm not sure that it will be so long before other carriers consider the same sort of tactic; they're already charging for checked baggage. Also, the people who produce the in-flight digital material are probably different from those that create the printed magazines. Between these two factors, if you count on airline magazines for a significant amount of your business, it might be smart to branch out as quickly as possible and find other clients so you don't get caught in a change, should it happen. And if it doesn't, the worst thing is that you end up with more clients.

Reusing Material from WMFH Assignments

Some discussion on a writers' board centered on what degree of change was enough so that you could sell a piece originally sold under a WMFH contract, and then if the publication went out of business, did the rights return to the author, even if written under WMFH.

On the first question, I'd personally be wary of including ANY of the material written as-is under a WMFH contract in any other piece. Under such an agreement, the publisher owns copyright and could sue you for using "its" material. You would need to toss the entire piece and start from scratch, although the information in your notes would be available (assuming you didn't sign those away, as some contracts require), and the quotes actually belong to the people you interviewed (it's best to ask if they mind being included in another piece, so you extend the implicit permission you had in the first place). But to take even some of the sentences? Not only would you be looking to lose in court, but you'd involve the second publisher and instead of burning a bridge, you'd reduce it to its constituent atomic parts.

On the second question, unless there is a clause specifically stating that you would get rights back in case the company went out of business - and I've yet to see a clause like that in all the contracts I've reviewed - then, no, you don't get anything back. If you sold your car to someone who then died without any living heirs, would you automatically get the car back? No, because you sold the property and no longer have a claim on it. It's the same with WMFH - you sell the intellectual property and no longer have any claim on it or any right to it.

Free Self-Publishing Event for Readers in Britain

There's a free one-day self-publishing fair in London on Sunday, August 3, 2008, from noon to 6pm. Check the link for more info.

Gawker Media Traffic Jumps with Page View Incentives

Blogger Simon Owens emailed me about a post he had on Gawker Media. Early in the year, the publisher of such popular sites as Gawker, Gizmodo, Valleywag, and Consumerist told its bloggers that they would receive a base amount of money and then bonuses based on the number of page views they got. He analyzed the change in page views since the announcement. The changes were anywhere from 23 percent to 83 percent. In thinking about the changes, a few things became apparent:

• It's impossible to say what caused the growth - general expansion of blog readers, Gawker Media marketing programs, or the work of the bloggers themselves.
• There's no way of knowing how much of the growth will stick with the blogs, or if it will churn, requiring ever more effort to attract people to maintain the numbers.
• From these figures, there is no way to translate between page views and unique audience members.
• People may come by periodically to read the sites, or they may be landing there after a search - and that would put a different interpretation on where exactly the efforts of the bloggers had been most effective. Do readers drop by because of the voice of the writers, are the writers doing their work in such a way that it comes up on popular search results, or are they breaking stories that drive interest?

Whatever the case, it looks like the Gawker sites would be worth some visits and analysis if you're writing a blog and want to get tips on how to help attract more audience.

Two Tools to Better Understand Copyright and Using Someone's Material

I heard to a couple of tools from the American Library Association that might prove useful - either in checking whether a use is permitted yourself or sending to those who would use your work without permission. The digital slider lets you choose a time range and other conditions to indicate whether something is in the pubic domain or if you would have to seek permission. The fair use checklist offers no such certain an answer, but it lists many of the considerations in a favoring/opposing fair use structure.

Authors Guild Warns About Simon & Schuster E-Book Letter

The Authors Guild has sent a message to its members, warning that Simon & Schuster is trying to get many of its authors to sign an e-book royalty rate amendment to their contracts. They're trying to "set those rates at 15% of the 'catalog retail price' of the e-book." The organization suggests caution:

1. Discuss the amendment with your agent or attorney, if you have one.

2. Depending on your existing contract with Simon & Schuster, the amendment may grant the publisher rights that you've otherwise retained.

3. Be aware that the amendment may affect your ability to obtain a reversion of rights.

Furthermore, the Authors Guild thinks that 15 percent of retail price will be "the low-water mark for e-book royalties." The reason is that the publishers virtually no costs in warehousing, printing, shipping, or handling. My guess is that e-books probably strip a good $2 to $3 from the actual cost of a given title. (And if any publishers read this and disagree with my estimation, I'd be glad to hear the arguments on how it should change and why.)

However, I think we all have to keep aware of the broader economic issues that are happening. Yes, costs for publishers drop, but if Amazon has its way, so will the money that the publishers get in the first place. And by no means am I suggesting that S&S has got the best interests of the authors in mind. If they are trying to set the amount at 15 percent, I suspect they are trying to offer something that sounds generous compared to print royalties, but that leaves more money in their pocket. If you figure a $20 cost for a trade paperback and 50 percent discount, that means the publisher is saving maybe $2 on income of $10, which is an additional 20 percent in available profit. Instead of 15 percent, an author might reasonably get 20 or 25 percent of the sale price.

But read about the prices Amazon is charging for big titles. It's very little compared to print prices - even though Amazon itself is also saving lots in the new format - and the company is taking aggressive portions of the money that comes in. That's why they're pushing on the Kindle so hard. Should other e-book readers come out and become popular as well, there might be multiple formats and outlets, meaning far less ability to twist arms. If the publishers are forced into taking $5 to $7 for a title, there's a whole lot less money now available for all of us.

Greatly Improved Profnet Interface

If Profnet's interface has driven you off in search of other tools for finding sources, you might consider giving it another try. I needed to find this morning a type of legal source that Profnet has been helpful in reaching (and I'm guessing that the HARO mailing had already gone out). Happily, they have made some important changes in the interface that makes it more manageable. For example, to set the date, you no longer have to wait for the calendar to come up and then click on the date. Instead, drop down boxes let you quickly pick month, day, and time. Choosing geographic areas all happens with check boxes, and by clicking on one of the associated plus signs, you can immediately expand a given area into its constituent parts. It reminds me of how the service used to work, and is certainly a change for the better.

Watching the Account Payable Metric

There are various numbers that help you keep an eye on your freelancing business. An under-appreciated one is the current size of your accounts payable. That refers to all the companies that owe you money at any one point. The reason AP totals are important is that they become an early warning sign of cash flow problems. Take your monthly revenue goal and divide the AP total by it. That shows how many months of revenue you're expecting in at any given time. I find that the number needs to be between 1.5 and 2, meaning that at any time I'm owed between one-and-a-half and two months worth of invoices. In that range, I can expect a regular flow of funds with clients paying between 45 and 60 days. If the number drops below that, then it doesn't matter how much I've just billed out, because I don't have invoices old enough that I can realistically expect checks. If you've had problems getting cash in and you don't have enough on hand to act as a cushion, or even if you do, consider working to increase your billing for a few months so you begin to develop a backlog that will help provide more dependable cash flow.

Where Have All the Book Editors Gone?

I came across a Stuart Evers blog entry in the Guardian about the new role of editors at book publishers:

These days, experience of shaping, honing and bringing out the best in an author is unnecessary to land a high profile role: all you need to be able to do is identify the product.

It's a sad observation, but has a lot of truth. I know editors who get frustrated with the entire process because they don't get to edit. All they can do is hope that the book comes in well enough constructed that they can free up some time for the market analyses and major manuscript resuscitations that are necessary. So here's my question: if editors don't get time to really edit and the authors have to do a lot of the marketing, then what is it that publishers really do?

Is Media That Delivers a Market That Isn't?

I often hear about freelance woes with various publications, and on rare occassions I do some investigation into them. That just happened today when Lynne Meredith Schreiber posted on a writers' board about a problem she was having with getting a payment from Estates West, which is published by Media That Delivers. She is not the only writer alleging problems with the company, and back in February WritersWeekly had a something about the company owing a writer $2000. Lynne has given me permission to use her name and mention the details. Here is an outline of the saga as she relates it:

1. Lynne wrote a "huge story" and submitted it on January 2. "[T]he editor loved it. They had said they paid on publication and the story was worth $975 - but the editor said she'd try to issue payment early."


2. In March she got a PDF of the story but no check. By April she began to email the editor "incessently" and was referred to the publisher, whom she quotes as saying, "It's a bad economy. A lot of our creditors are not paying us so we can't pay you just yet." She says that the publisher, Mike Dee, offered to send "less than half up front and then the rest when he could. He did not."


3. She had a lawyer contact the company, which sent a check for $100. The lawyer returned the check as inadequate and was told it was all the company could afford for now and that it wanted to set up a payment plan.

I wrote Mike Dee the following:

I write a reasonably well-read blog on the freelance business. I've been hearing that writers are being asked to wait very long periods for payment from your company, and so wanted to ask you about this before I put something on my blog.

I got a response today, as well, from Hayley Gudat, "Director of Estates West & Custom Publications Media That Deelivers, Inc." Here is the response:

Thanks for contacting us about your blog before making any comments about Media That Deelivers. While we cannot stop you from posting about us, we of course hope you will not, simply because we have always maintained excellent relationships with our freelancers, and in most cases have been using the same writers, photographers and stylists for years, which we believe is testiment to our reliability as a publisher of magazines. We have been in business over a decade and have probably the best reputation in our state, be it for our editorial content or the way we treat the people we work with.

In some situations, freelance payment can be late, but never, ever has an invoice gone unpaid. We try at all times to pay any freelancer on time, and in most cases we do, though of course there will be occurances of slight backlogs. We always communicate with our writers, should a payment be late, and from my experiences they appreciate the dialog and we have not had any problems to date. I hope this helps you. Please contact me if you have any other concerns or questions.

The related story and the response don't seem reconcilable to me, but perhaps there is something that I am not getting. At least what I'm missing is not a check, which is an unreasonable situation for any freelance writer to be in.

Using Quotes Left in Your Notes: 7 Considerations

There was a recent discussion on a writers' board about using quotes from an interview you did when they didn't make the original piece you were writing. Can you do that? There's no simple answer, and the considerations are as much business relations as they are contractual.

• You must check the contract from the first publication. Some writers assume that they can do what they want with their notes. However, I've seen a few publishers insert wording in a WMFH contract defining the work in question as including all drafts and notes. In that phrasing, you may have no rights to the material.


• If you do own the notes, then there's a question of whether they are quotes or not. If quotes, then the person who said them actually owns the copyright on that part of the material, not you, even though you took them down. Fair use would allow some use in a journalistic or educational context, but you couldn't necessarily present verbatim everything in there, because then you'd be crossing the fair use bound of what percentage you could quote. (And there is no fixed number to use as a guide.)


• You also wouldn't have rights to do anything at all you wanted to with the quotes: for example, using them in a piece of marketing.


• The subject also has some rights in how his or her name is being portrayed. If you misused quotes in a way that painted the person in a bad light (taking quotes out of context, for example), the person could potentially sue you and win.


• Although the courts are mixed on the issue, it's not clear whether someone could say that you only had permission to use the material for the publication you said it was for, and not for another one. What if you wrote another piece and placed it in some magazine espousing views that the subject found repugnant? Could you be sued for making it seem that the person was supporting those views? Possibly. And once you have to defend yourself, you lose, even if ultimately you win, because of all the costs you incur.


• Aside from the legal issues are the practical ones. If you want to speak with someone again, being respectful is smart. That means letting them know what you're doing (unless you say up front that it could appear in other places). You could just state that you would be using the material elsewhere, but that could tick the person off. What if the person says, "I don't want to appear in that publication," or "You misrepresented my views in the first piece and so I don't want you using the material anywhere else?" Can you ignore them? You would at least burn a bridge. There are times you might feel that you had to, but you should make a knowing choice.


• If a PR person was involved in getting the interview and you burn the client, you've also burned the PR source. Again, I'm not suggesting that you tiptoe about to smooth the sensibilities of publicity representatives, but realize what you're doing when you do it.

Some of the solutions include getting a written release from the subject or even taping the subject's provision of assent to your use of the material. I try to remember to tell people up front that I could end up using an interview in some other publication as well, if the topic were similar and/or relevant.

More Copy Editing to India

Businessweek has a good story on an Indian copyediting and reporting outsource firm that is even doing work for the Miami Herald:

Mindworks has been handling outsourcing assignments from non-Indian publishers for four years. It expects plenty more business as the cost-cutting in U.S. and European print media grinds on. Some Western publishers do their outsourcing in-house—Thomson Reuters (TRI), for instance, has moved basic Wall Street reporting on U.S., European, and Gulf equities to a new bureau in Bangalore. But other media companies prefer to outsource to the Indians directly. On June 24, Mindworks made global headlines when the Associated Press reported that the company had taken on copyediting and layout work for a couple of publications owned by the California media publishing group Orange County Register Communications.

We're in a time where geographic situation means ever less when it comes to getting work. If you are not building expertise and abilities that are difficult to replicate, then you are facing a more uncertain professional future.

Gawker Pay? Gaak

According to Radar, Gawker has cut the pay schedules of its blggers for the second quarter running:

"We've broken the site budget," Gawker Media owner Nick Denton told the staff in an email yesterday. The only answer, from the company's perspective? To keep getting more traffic—but to pay the producers of that traffic less for each pageview. So for the second and now, according to a new memo regarding the pay rate for the quarter that began this week, third quarters of 2008, the company has reduced the rate of pay per pageview. Other Gawker Media sites, including Jezebel, also had their pageview rate cut.

It used to be that if a writer got a million page views a month, that translated into $7500. Given the amount of work it takes to get that much attention, the money seems short. But now it's even shorter, at $5 a thousand, or $5000 for that million page views.

So more ad inventory—actual pages served—should mean more income for the company—particularly since Gawker seems to be mostly increasing in pageviews not attached to any writer. At the same time, reducing the cost of the creation of that inventory also gets the company more of the income that is attached to a writer. Kicking down less money to the workers seems, at best, cheap.

How about predatory or exploitive? Those are pretty good words, too.

Writers' Rooms

Ever wonder where such writers as Bernard Shaw, Lord Byron, and Virginia Woolf worked? The Guardian has a writers' rooms feature online with pictures of said roosts. If you need a distraction but want to justify the tangent as research into efficient working, this should provide a few minutes excuse.

Myth of the Long Tail?

A study in the Harvard Business Review looked at some data in the light of Chris Anderson's "long tail" theory and concluded that while the tail is getting a bit thicker, the head - the "popular stuff" - is really what is growing. Or in the words of that great business philosopher, Ira Gershwin, "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says, and it still is news." I've written about this on BNET (the new business arm of CNET), and that has links to the study as well as to Anderson's reply (which I found essentially unsatisfactory).

But enough of them; let's talk about us. Does the long tail hold any hope for individual writers? Yes and no. The upside is that if you have some writing that will interest a large enough community, and you market hard, then you can make money. You can, that is, if you put in the work and don't sit passively, assuming that the long tail is going to bring your income to you.

I get the sense that many writers look to the long tail concept as a silver bullet that will bring money in without them having to do anything else. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Say that an Amazon sees 20 percent of its 2007 sales of about $14.8 billion in the long tail (though the study would suggest more like 10 percent). According to Anderson, the tail should be everything that you wouldn't find in a Borders or Barnes & Nobel physical location. That means every one of the estimate million book SKUs the 10 or 20 thousand you might find in a store. So be generous and call the remainder 9.8 million. Divide and you get ... $285 per year per SKU.

Even if there is an average of 2 SKUs per book (each SKU representing a specific version of the book you could buy), that's annual revenue of $570 from Amazon. Even if that is only part of what you get (and remember, physical book outlets won't even have your title, by definition of tail), what are you going to make total? Maybe $1100, and that's in total sales. The cut going back to the publisher is half, so you're back to your royalties on $570 a year, or maybe $60. Self-publish and you could get the number higher, but that's hardly the passive approach to the long tail.

The only hope the "long tail" offers the individual author is the old concept of niche audiences, marketing to them, and making money. Nothing new there, and nothing easy. In fact, I'd argue that the only writer who is really making money off the long tail is Anderson himself.

Contract Review: Hospitality Design/Nielsen Business Media

As always, I'm not a lawyer; this isn't legal advice (just my opinion and interpretation); I'm providing comments on contracts, but you still need to read one of the contracts to see how everything applies to your circumstances; and you should always negotiation for the best terms you can get:

• 1 The contract is retroactive, so if you've ever written anything for any of their publications (because the contract is with the company), it will apply to that work as well.


• 2 You give them to use, publish, and distribute your work any way they want for as long and as often as they want. They can grant others the right to do the same, so they are in competition with you for reuse. At least it's not exclusive. They can make "reasonable" changes to the work and will give you credit "where possible."


• 3 You own copyright and may grant others the right to use the material, but that has to be 8 weeks after the first publication by these people.


• 4 You say that you have not infringed on copyright or any other intellectual property rights, and that you indemnify them if the work does infringe a third party's intellectual property rights.


• 5 You're independent, so not eligible for any company benefit, and you are responsible for your own taxes.


• 6 This is a strange one - they say that they have to pay you any mutually agreed upon fees, but they don't say when they have to pay them, or what triggers payment. Is it acceptance? Publication? Who knows?


• 7 This is construed under New York law, and nothing in an invoice, email, or conversation changes any of the terms of the agreement.

A "Champion" Disagrees with Views of Kindle

I got the following as a response to my post Some Additional Views on the Kindle. However, as it eventually seemed to border on the self-serving, I thought I'd address the anonymous remarks in parts on a post.

I, myself, am a Kindle champion as well,

And as you were trying to point people to what appears to be an Amazon-affiliated (not owned) site about the Kindle, I have to wonder what "champion" really means.

and I think that there are a number of intangible "cost" savings and benefits to consider for you skeptics out there.

Ah, yes, intangibles - often the last refuge of the businessperson who cannot point to a concrete benefit.

First of all, think of the convenience the Kindle provides you. Now, you can read all of your favorite newspapers, blogs, books, magazines etc. anywhere and everywhere. You do not have to worry about the weight and size of your reading material and about how you will transport it on the move.

Yes, I always travel with a Sherpa carrying my newspapers, magazines, and books. Realistically, when I do travel on business, it's one book, and I find that airlines are terrific about having magazines that I needn't schlep.

Second, you can do and learn more with what would have been wasted down time while you wait for this or that. You can just pull it out whenever you have a few minutes here and there.

How about the educational use of contemplating what you have already read and heard, or even looking around to see where you are? Not every minute of every day needs to be "productive," in the limited sense of the term.

Third, think of the environmental cost savings. If we, as a collected whole, begin to do more and more of our reading from "paper-like" digital devices, we will be cutting down less trees, maintaining and even increasing oxygen levels and perhaps even fighting global warming.

What of the environmental costs of the semiconductors plants that run through tens of thousands of gallons of water daily? The non-replaceable minerals and metals? The energy costs of manufacturing the whole thing? The energy costs in keeping the acres of servers running to make the "environmentally-friendly" reading available? High tech does not translate into green.

Fourth, you begin reading content that you may have otherwise missed and will become more and more educated/cultured as you seek out new and different reading materials.

Wait, you're going to read it just because it's on a screen, although you wouldn't on paper? That seems like one of the most far fetched arguments I've ever heard for anything.

All in all, while $359 for this device plus the cost of the books etc. seems high, you are getting a great deal of value out of it, be it value from convenience, value from supplementary education, value from environmental protection or other value.

In other words, pay no attention to businessman behind the curtain. And, sorry, I won't be listing your Kindle-centered web site that is "in association with Amazon.com," even if you do end your exhortation with an environmentally-friendly electronic exclamation point.