Much moved today by the writer and scientist Eliza Blair's birthday post. At 25, Blair has already published award-winning science fiction while pursuing a dream to go to the moon.

Terrific and true and prettyful.

Amazon and Macmillan are a sideshow. If you miss it, don't worry: there will be another one just like it next month, or next week, or next year. I'm pretty sure it's safe to ignore, in favor of the other mysteries that are clamoring for your attention. Only you know what they are – and people like me are out here, enthusiastically anticipating your new work.

I’m sparked.

This affects me deeply. Not just because I've aspired to someday work for NASA since I was four years old, though let's observe a moment of silence for four-year-old Eliza's sobs of rage, but because it has the effect of dumping a few thousand rocket engineers on the market starting this summer, quite possibly clogging the employment pipeline for years to come and making it that much more difficult for me to find anyone, even the military, to pay for my grad school education. (Everything revolves around me, remember?) It's also crushing the hopes and dreams of many of those engineers, but who cares about them - they already got to live the dream, at least for a little while. >.> Jerks.

What we don’t see, interestingly, is the traditional scenario for the tablet computer: on the job, walking around, held like a clipboard. That’s what people have always assumed the tablet would be. It’s not.

Perhaps it’s a tricorder, the original Star Trek fashion accessory. I’m only half kidding here.

The tricorder was invented because, in 1966, television executives thought it looked strange for a young woman to be walking around without a purse, and so they needed to give Yeoman Rand something with a shoulder strap. We’re going to have the reverse problem: what are you going to do with the iPad when you just want to put it down for a moment?

I work for a small, nonprofit publisher of books about sexual abuse. For a recent meeting, I wanted to create a visual representation of our catalog of titles, showing how old our books are by the type of book. The first step was grabbing title, ISBN, price, author and other information on each of our publications which I already had in a spreadsheet on my work PC...

We had some success, especially at such forward-looking stores as Shaman Drum and Tattered Cover. We closed some chain sales, too.

But in the end, we learned a key reality of bookselling: no publisher can solve a bookstore’s problems (and booksellers always have terrible problems). And no publisher can really cause problems for a bookstore. There are always other books than yours.

Scholastic was able to cause some problems with the later volumes of Harry Potter. But that’s an exceptional case, and even then the problems were annoyances that seldom threatened the store’s existence.

This is the nub of what makes Amazon vs. Macmillan so interesting. Has Amazon become so large that it can make problems for a publisher? Perhaps. If so, we’re into monopoly territory. (This, incidentally, is why I’m so suspicious that the Sunday Forum Statement from Amazon was irregular; mentioning monopolies does Macmillan no harm but threatens Amazon, so it’s strange for Amazon to raise the subject.)

A further fascinating sideline: if Amazon is willing to risk legal sanctions and widespread hostility, then Amazon must think this part of the business is worth a fight. Is the book business really the core of Amazon? Amazon says its the world’s biggest bookstore, but they know their core business is fulfillment, not books. Books were a great place to start — prestigious, non-perishable, rectangular – but they were only practice.

I’ve always thought that the Kindle was, for Amazon, a nice little sideline, a speculation play that had a low but finite probability of a really big payoff in 5-10 years. That’s consistent with Amazon to date, but inconsistent with Macmillan: you don’t go to war over a side bet.