That’s our buddy Michael Hastings on The Colbert Report (he comes in at 3:30), talking about his blockbuster article in Rolling Stone, which got its subject, General Stanley McChrystal, fired from his post last week.

In the interview, Hastings claims that the piece merely presented the opportunity for Obama to fire a general he disagreed with, but Obama himself cited “The conduct represented in the recently published article” as grounds for McChrystal’s termination.

More importantly, before Hastings became a superstar journo and slayer of kings, he wrote a few posts for this very website last summer. Why? We’ll never know. But you can find them here.

Apple v. Amazon

First there was terror. When the iPad was announced, Jeff Bezos messed his cargo shorts when he heard Apple was supporting both ePub and the Agency model. He promptly caved and let publishers walk all over him—although he did it, of course, with a minimum of maturity, because that’s how he rolls. But Bezos (not to mention publishers) got proper snookered by the sneaky Jobs.

Despite all the furor over Apple’s embrace of the agency model (which might not even be legal in countries where they regulate their corporations), the iPad isn’t selling many iBooks. Penguin claims to be leading the pack (you know, if you don’t count free Gutenberg books, which are “selling” twice as much as Penguin). But let’s not forget that iBooks aren’t very popular, in the scheme of iPad apps—in fact, Feedbooks distributes more books.

If the iPad does start selling tons of iBooks, well, publishers are screwed then, too. Apple can evidently force prices down to $9.99 if it feels like, and in April 2011, they can simply rescind the agency model agreement. Ha!

All this has led to, shall we say, some tension in the publishing industry. Publishers are choosing up sides, and even unleashing their wrath on unsuspecting authors who want to publish ebooks. Then there are the obligatory rumors that Kindle’s grip on the market is slipping, but since there’s a Kindle app for the iPad (not to mention iPhone and soon Android) I don’t understand how Apple will ever win a book fight.

And by the way, Google’s launching its own ebookstore, which I’m guessing and hoping will use Adobe ePub formatting. Meaning neither Apple nor Amazon customers will be able to read Google ebooks. Because Apple hates Adobe, too! Why? Well, more on that after the jump…

Apple v. Adobe (or apple v. flash?)

Nobody ever really expected the iPhone to get Flash, but when the iPad debuted without it—meaning no Hulu, among many other things—it was at the top of everybody’s “What the iPad’s Missing” lists.

Because Apple and Adobe are two of the biggest, most prominent technology companies in America, both saw fit to resolve this disagreement with all the poise and civility of two collicky toddlers slapfighting in a sandbox.

Adobe responded hastily to the iPad’s lack of Flash, saying in part:

It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers.

That one little sentence is so many things. It’s true, OK, but it’s also whiny, passive-aggressive and petty—especially considering that they must have known this was happening before the iPad actually launched.

Steve Jobs responded with a public list of complaints about Flash, including such things as its impact on battery life, its reliability, and its ability to work with touch input. All decent points, but all things that should have been worked out (in private) years ago, especially since Apple and Adobe have worked together productively for years.

Instead Jobs went for the childish public retaliation, and Adobe got itself in a (bigger) huff and struck back with these smarmy We Heart Apple ads. (For a more tasteful statement of frustration with Apple, read this piece by Adobe Photoshop honcho John Nack.)

Personally, I think these companies are both being bullheaded and thin-skinned. Jobs makes some good points about why Flash might not be great to run, but refusing to allow it on his devices hamstrings the user experience. There are lots of cool things out there that use Flash (like Bendito Machine), and, personally, I want the ability to decide for myself what I do with a computer or a phone or anything else I pay for and own.

Apple often treats its customers like Luddites incapable of understanding statements like “Flash uses battery faster than html5.” That’s OK for my mom, who maybe actually doesn’t understand that, but I’m willing to make trade-offs (and they are definitely trade-offs). I don’t want to have a device’s usefulness—or especially the content available for it—artificially limited by the questionable moral (read: censorship) policies of a single corporate ethos.

After all, limiting content is semi-defensible (not really) when it’s porn, but Apple also rejected a political cartoonist’s app on the grounds that they don’t allow satire on the iPhone. Only after that cartoonist won the Pulitzer Prize was his app accepted. That kind of thing is downright scary.

Apple carries a heavy stick these days, but we’re staring at censorship by capitalism here, and that unnerves me deeply. (Oh, and by the way, Android’s getting Flash.) Adobe DRM and Flash are disconcerting because they’re proprietary and ubiquitous, and that’s certainly bad. Still, Jobs’s willingness to sacrifice his customers to win a pissing match is no less disconcerting.

Anyway, after all that the implications for ereaders are simple: a schism between Adobe and Apple means no library ebooks on the iPad. Which makes the iPad a no-go for ereading, in my book. I hate all DRM but until it goes away, Adobe is my DRM of choice.

Twilight sucks. We don't have to keep talking about it. But we can, if you want to.

It’s pretty easy to work up a good hate for intellectualism—especially the smarmy, condescending kind. Books (or “literature” if you want to get snooty about it) and the serious discussion of them sometimes get confused for just that sort of pretentiousness.

One instance of such confusion is an essay called “I Just Want to Read,” by Ann Nichols, in Open Salon. In short, Nichols bemoans the overuse of formal literary theory, and pines for the days when, like the title says, she could read just for pleasure.

She makes some good points, especially about the ease with which you can fake hifalutin-sounding insights about literature (just learn and use a few words like “postcolonial” and “metafictional” and you’ll get a B in most lit classes). But for the most part, Nichols’s anti-criticism rant irks me, for several reasons. Here they are.

Nichols starts with an anecdote that immediately sets off my internal BS alarms. It’s the old when-I-was-a-kid bit, this time about a wide-eyed girl with a stack of books and a dream:

I was reading critically in the sense that I liked or disliked books, and knew what did and didn’t make sense or appeal to me, but there was not, at that blissful time in my life, any imposition of an external standard of quality or any requirement that I investigate the author’s prerogatives or background.

First of all, critical reading is not the imposition of an external standard of quality. I would define critical reading (I’m talking only about fiction here) as the formal analysis of writing in order to intellectually understand your emotional reaction to a certain work.

Secondly, nobody should be investigating any author’s background in relation to any work of fiction, ever. Once an author finishes a book, he is a completely different entity from his work. He cannot defend it, he cannot explain it, and nothing he says about it should be trusted. The author is a curiosity and nothing more. It’s interesting to hear what Michael Chabon has for breakfast, but it has nothing to do with his novels.

Nichols continues:

I didn’t have to delve deeply into the behind-the-scenes world of a book to understand or enjoy it.

This sounds an awful lot like: a) nostalgic blowhardery; and b) laziness. Let’s get this out of the way: everybody has nice memories of childhood. Even if it sucked, you had a couple things you liked that were uncomplicated and fun. And that’s nice. But it doesn’t mean those things in the grown-up world are still uncomplicated, nor should they be. And just because they’re complicated doesn’t mean they can’t still be fun.

Severe problem #1: Nichols isn’t interested in complexities. In college, she finds:

Studying literature involved what seemed to me to be a desecration of art based on bizarre and irrelevant external standards.

Again, critical reading should not be the application of external standards, it should be the use of intellectual tools to better understand a work of literature. Nichols maintains that the act of reading should instead be the equivalent of looking at a van Gogh and saying, “That’s pretty.”

I might need to understand how my car worked in order to fix it or maintain it properly, but I do not need to see, fix, repair or disassemble the “works” of a novel or poem in order to have the experience intended by the author. If I do, there is something wrong with one of us.

Jon Gruden is the James Wood of football.

Instead of mechanicry, I’m of the opinion that art criticism should be closer to something like football commentary. Great football analysts can discuss a game on several different levels. They can tell you simply that a team is good, or they can explain how West Coast offenses require quick-throwing QBs who don’t need strong arms, and exactly why Flozell Adams is worth 15 yards in penalties per game. Listening to knowledgeable sports analysts is no different than listening to knowledgeable, competent art critics. The major difference is that football never gets that anti-intellectual backlash (and also some some stuff about subjectivity/objectivity).

Even though I love great analysis I certainly don’t think that every book needs to be formally deconstructed, and I wholeheartedly agree that English lit classes can too easily devolve into mishmashes of gobbledygook. (My own nemesis was the “reader-response theory,” which states, basically, that you can say anything you want and it will be a valid point. I’m not sure if Nichols would love or hate it.) The solution to gobbledygook, though, is not to shut down all analysis, instead monosyllabically grunting and farting our responses to history’s greatest masterpieces. I think we can find a middle ground here; for starters, I want even the laziest reader to be able to answer the question, “Why did you like this?”

Even that seems to be too much for Nichols. She says that books, during her simple, idyllic childhood, “were ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for me” and she cringes at the thought of delving a molecule deeper. Implied in Nichols’s nostalgia is the idea that a suitable defense for anything, even drek like Twilight, should be “I liked it.” She seems to want those three words to end arguments and insulate her from further thought.

Of course, certain tools are appropriate for certain jobs. Nichols mentions a blog post that argued Twilight author Stephenie Meyer “‘wasn’t educated in critical perspectives on race, class and gender.’” That’s a bit like taking a Howitzer to a paintball fight. Meyer sucks for many, many reasons (even NPR ripped her to shreds), and her perspectives on race and class are pretty far down the list—at least below her failures at prose, dialogue, and character. But just because that kind of criticism outclasses a book you like (and should feel guilty for liking), does not mean that we should stop reading critically. I worry about this.

More broadly, I worry that a lack of continued critical thinking will lead to more formulaic narrative art. There are things that people historically like and don’t like, and it’s pretty easy to crap out the literary equivalent of Iron Man 2 and mildly amuse some people who don’t know the difference between quality and familiarity.

The job of great art, however, is to surprise and educate, and so answering the question, “Why didn’t you like this?” is every bit as important as answering its opposite. We don’t need to bring in postmodern ontological-schism theory to every piece of fiction in the world, but neither do we need to limit our criticism to a yes/no response.

In other words, he’s a terrible writer who’s arrogance and contempt for his own fans makes him a perfect target for mockery and ridicule. (Side note: Preston’s writing partner, Lincoln Child, didn’t disparage his own readers, but when you lie down with dogs…)

Preston’s upcoming novel comes out tomorrow so let’s have a little fun with him. Knowing only the cover pictured above at right, and the horrible, cliched title, Fever Dream, five of our contributors guessed the premise of the novel. One of the following is the book’s real premise, the others are scurrilous lies.

1) On his deathbed, Sandford Crow dreams of his father’s lost collection of antique birdcages, each one representing a distinctive moment in 20th century history and in Sanford’s own emotional search for meaning. From his peasant’s education as a naturalist to the collapse of the world’s largest taxidermy empire, this stunning dreamlike narrative follows the rise and fall of the American dream itself.

2) Sammy, a tropical parrot, has fevered and vivid dreams that, one day, … start coming true! When Sammy’s beloved owner appears in his latest dream as the victim of a terror plot, Sammy must race to stop the plot from happening. A challenge with global consequences. Psychic bird. Terrorism. Pulse-pounding action and nonstop suspense. Preston and Child have done it again.

3) An FBI agent discovers that his wife—who he thought had died in the jaws of a ferocious red-maned lion in Zambia—was actually … murdered! He goes to Africa (taking an NYPD cop, cause what the hell) and it turns out she was murdered because of a painting of a bird.

4) Canaries suddenly start mysteriously dying all over town. Is it a mysterious bird plague? Could it mutate and start a crippling pandemic? The female researcher heading the CDC investigation is baffled. Little does she know, her husband has multiple personalities and one is a furry who dresses as Sylvester the cat and kills all the “tweeties” he can find. Too bad he only remembers the truth in his delirious yet lucid dreams…

5) After an explosion traps John and Thom Johnson in the bowels of a West Virginia coal mine, the two must take extraordinary measures to ensure their survival. The situation becomes more complicated when their sentinel, a prized island canary, dies, signaling the presence of toxic gases. As the brothers begin to drift from reality, it will take all their strength not to turn on each other.

6) Terrorists release a supervirus that causes violent hallucinations so severe that an entire village can be wiped out by the murderous fit of a single sufferer. As a retired detective defends his rural home town against suspected sufferers of the disease, he must find out who released the virus and why. The secret is in the birds …

Answer—and who wrote which fakery—coming in the comments.

Seattle Public Library

On Wednesday, blogger Eric Hellman wrote this recap of an event at which Mamillan CEO John Sargent spoke (via). Sargent’s comments on libraries were quite distressing; he described borrowing library ebooks like this: “It’s like Netflix, but you don’t pay for it. How is that a good model for us?”

Yikes. Sargent’s anti-library-ebook argument is essentially that borrowing physical books from a library is a major drag, so people don’t do it so often. Borrowing ebooks is super easy, and that will bring the publishing industry to its knees.

Hellman, who actually asked Sargent the library question at the event, says this: “he has gaps in his knowledge of libraries.” I would put it in slightly stronger terms: it sounds like Sargent hasn’t borrowed a library book in 20 years, if ever.

Sargent doesn’t know about online card catalogs, which allow you to order physical books and have them waiting for you at the branch of your choosing. He thinks ten people reading a book will destroy it. He thinks anybody can get a card to any library in the country (in fact, you have to be at least a state resident, as I found out last year when I talked to Rachel Martin, a librarian at the Seattle Public Library). Basically, Sargent doesn’t know much about checking out books.

More troublingly, he seems to see libraries as foolhardy businesses that aren’t charging (and aren’t tithing out publishers) enough. Personally, I see free access to public libraries as a fundamental human right in an industrialized nation. It’s a sizable difference of opinion.

And I’m noticing something else: the more Sargent talks, the more dictatorial and greedy he sounds.

When Sargent led the charge against $9.99 ebooks, I thought it was a pretty silly move, given that the publisher will make less money on each Macmillan-priced ebook, and history tells us they will sell fewer books. It’s a lot to give up just to maintain price control, no?

But since he sold it as a move to protect his authors (and since Amazon catastrophically botched their response), Sargent won that round.

Now he’s making noise about libraries, and he’s shown us that he’s just crazy enough to act on his beliefs. Imagine being a Macmillan author and hearing that your books will no longer be available in libraries because John Sargent wants to get paid a rental fee every time somebody reads one.

The first problem I have with this is that Sargent wants the world to update its business models only in ways that directly benefit him. He wants everyone to change how they treat ebooks, because ebooks are completely different entities than paper books. Except for, you know, how much they should cost.

In a blog entry today, Sargent says that ebooks should cost about the same as paper books because “the physical cost of the book has never been the greatest component of cost” and also because “publishers still need warehouses, infrastructure, and all the other legacy costs of the business.”

Even in just those two comments, Sargent shows that he wants readers to forget some of publishing’s business tactics (like making a cheap, spiffy-looking hardcover to trick people into paying more), but not other ones (like the “legacy costs of the business”). It’s just flatly hypocritical, and whenever a salesman is that obviously contradictory, it means either he’s stupid or he thinks you are.

My bigger problem with Sargent’s anti-library comment is that it misconstrues the basic societal role of public libraries, and it grossly ignores the benefits of an ebook-driven library revival.

One surprising thing I learned in that interview with a librarian is that Seattle Public Library’s online division is its most popular “branch.” Instead of bemoaning the fact that more people are using the library because of ebooks, Sargent should be celebrating it. If more people read, that’s a good thing, especially for publishers.

To put it in half-assed business terms: the popularity of library ebooks increases the potential audience for the publishing industry, and also increases that audience’s enthusiasm and appetite for books.

To phrase it more eloquently, here’s a passage from the Seattle Public Library’s Mission Statement:

We strive to inform, enrich and empower every person in our community by creating and promoting easy access to a vast array of ideas and information, and by supporting an informed citizenry, lifelong learning and love of reading.

Sargent’s words again: “How is that a good model for us?”

What do these three have in common? They all have absolutely no business writing or "writing" books.

News about books and ebooks from around the web:

• Vapidity will continue to rule the bestseller list. Sarah Palin plans to “write” another book (get ready, Marcos), Lindsay Lohan has plans to hawk her crazed mutterings, and Hilary Duff just signed a contract to write a series of young-adult Da Vinci Code-style caper novels (I kid you not). Previously, we learned about reality star Lauren Conrad, who’s writing novels (plural) despite having never read a whole book in her life (which you should do, if you want to write one). Then there’s always Dan Brown, a terrible writer of stupid books (even his website wants to be a movie)… but he has 80,000,000 readers. And let’s never forget Douglas Preston, a horrible writer who’s so overprivileged and out of touch that he attacked his own readers for not paying exorbitant prices for his crappy books. Please help me solve this. If you like any of those writers, do me a personal favor: stop buying their books and watch TV instead. TV does mindless entertainment much better than books, and then books can go back to being carefully crafted works of the imagination, and not just paycheck tickets cranked out by illiterate uncaring morons and vapid celebrities trying to cash in on their fleeting fame. Publishing industry: I hate you. To wrap up this rant, here is a grossly unreadable article about nothing, written by an editor from Knopf. It’s a joke, right? Nobody’s that bad a writer, especially not a professional editor, right? Right?

• Borders is broke and starting heavy layoffs. Three months ago, while discussing the Nook, I noticed that Borders notably had no plans to release its own ereader/ebookstore. I said this about it: “Oh, and also… remember Borders? I’d say they have about 2 years of financial solvency left. It’s going to be like a brontosaurus dying.” Based on my understanding of the financial gobbledygook in the article in that first link, that timeline was just  slightly generous. Ebooks are the way of the future, bookstores. Don’t be shy.

• Two weeks ago, the NY Times published this article by Motoko Rich about the prices of ebooks vs. paper books. It included this chart, which got everybody in a huff because it claimed that ebooks selling for as low as $9.99 will provide as much profit to publishers (not authors) as full-price, $26 hardcover books. Among the respondents: Gizmodo, GalleyCat, John August, and almost everybody else in the world. I just have one thing to add. Rich estimates the costs of printing and shipping at $3.25. Since online hardcover prices max out at about $15, that means, logically, ebook prices should max out at about $12. Since some new, hardcover, guaranteed bestsellers go for even less (like Stieg Larsson’s next one, pre-selling at Amazon for $11.50), ebook editions of those should come in at sub-$10. Which means maybe readers asking for $9.99 ebooks wasn’t so astonishingly entitled after all. Maybe the Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle lost Macmillan more than it gained them. Maybe publishers should shut up about prices and windowing and all those other caveats, and just put their weight behind ebooks. Stop treating your customers like enemies, and maybe everything will turn out OK.

• The Millions has a list of newly released books. I’m most excited about Ron Rash’s story collection. His last novel was excellent.

• Quick takes: Yann Martel has been sending aliterate Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper a book every two weeks for three years; Charles Pellegrino is the newest James Frey (side note: this guy is the James Frey of photographers); TeleRead’s Paul Biba says he’s sold on the Alex reader; the Tournament of Books is live (via)—bookmark it; we’re smack in the middle of Read an eBook Week; the NY Times is making an ereader edition of their Book Review section—makes sense, right?

• Random of the week: Contrariwise is a great site featuring pictures of people’s literary-themed tattoos. Below is my favorite from their Alice in Wonderland series, coincidentally from the passage that gave Contrariwise its name.