darn, just came to post that, and michael beat me to the punch. and, remarkably, notice how this is describing the last quarter? if memory serves me correctly, april was when the agency model was put into place. those stupid publishers. before that change, which they instigated, amazon was subsidizing its kindle e-books, taking a loss on many of 'em, just to get the business kick-started. since then, amazon makes a cool 30% on every e-book they sell -- from the agency5 anyway -- and they use that money to advertise the kindle. so their commercials are pervasive on t.v. these days. oh, and it also allowed amazon to drop the kindle price, to $189. thus, unsurprisingly, kindle hardware sales are steadily increasing. meanwhile, the agency5 publishers are making _less_ money on every e-book they sell these days, so as the consumer shifts from hard-backs (which was _the_ cash-cow for corporate publishers) to e-books, the agency5 publishers see they cut their own throat. and -- just to provide the ironic twist serving as poetic justice -- the absence of any price difference between e-bookstores means customers are _increasingly_ turning to amazon, because that is the only format they know they can read on any and all platforms. amazon sold _3_times_ as many e-books in the first half of 2010 than they sold in the first half of 2009. yes, three times as many! and of the 1.14 million _total_ e-books sold by james patterson, amazon sold 867,881 of 'em. that works out to a whopping 75%. three out of four e-books sold in the marketplace are by amazon. the corporate publishers thought they were cutting amazon down at the knees, when in actuality they have only boosted it higher... -bowerbird