It could change–and probably will when the first flurry is over–but, as I type, the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s latest thriller The Lost Symbol is outselling the hardback on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy’s True Compass, the other hot book release this week, can’t be bought via Kindle or Sony (NYSE: SNE) or as an e-book at all.

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Five months ago, a group of media executives including Steven Brill seemed to have the field to itself when it said it was building a system for newspapers to charge readers for access online.

Now, that group appears have a lot of company, like the News Corporation (NWS), led by Rupert Murdoch, and the technology giants Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and I.B.M. (IBM), whose interest was first reported this week.

But publishing executives and analysts caution against concluding that this proves there is a robust competition to develop such systems, or even that newspapers will rush to join any of the projects. The contributions of Google and some others are little more than a set of ideas, written up at the request of the Newspaper Association of America, which inadvertently made them public on its Web site.

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The printed word has always had an Achilles heel: factual mistakes. Can the electronic reader help? Anthony Gottlieb investigates …

Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trusted source, and misinformation will multiply.

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Hyperion is taking a stab at online publishing with the launch of Kernl, an “e-imprint” it will use to quickly release combinations of text and video.

Kernl looks like a Web video player, with standard viewing and sharing options, but also includes tabs with related text and links. It debuts Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America”–which, like Hyperion, is owned by Walt Disney (DIS)–with a segment on job-hunting. A more detailed article and links to sample resumes and other resources will be posted on the show’s Web site. It is the first in a 10-part Kernl series that will air weekly and reside on a section of ABCnews.com.

Ellen Archer, president and publisher of Hyperion, said the initiative is a way for the book publisher to take advantage of the Web’s immediacy. “With the evolving world of publishing, I think one of the things we can address so beautifully on the Internet is news that you need to know now. Print books just can’t get onto the shelves fast enough,” she said.

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Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Mark Twain’s advice was apt in its time but sounds downright quaint these days. The ink-stained publishing world is battling against companies like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) that sell ads via any Internet-friendly gadget. And we know how that fight is going: The buy-ink-by-the-barrel types are struggling.

Behind all the handwringing is the fact that the Internet has not yet become the moneymaker that the $300 billion global publishing industry had hoped. Online revenue is growing, but not fast enough to make up for falling print advertising. Even the New York Times, a paper that has turned its staff loose online more than most, needed a recent $250 million cash infusion from Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim to keep chugging along.

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It’s hard not to love Amazon’s (AMZN) new e-book reader. For starters, it’s gorgeous. Unlike its bulky predecessor, the redesigned $359 Kindle, which came out this week, is light, thin, and disappears in your hands. If you think there’s no way you could ever get used to curling up with an electronic reader, you haven’t given the Kindle a chance. Load up a good book and you’ll soon forget you’re reading plastic rather than paper. You’ll also wonder how you ever did without it. The Kindle makes buying, storing, and organizing your favorite books and magazines effortless. You can take your entire library with you wherever you go and switch from reading the latest New Yorker to the latest bestseller without rolling out of bed. In my few days using it, I was won over: The Kindle is the future of publishing.

And that’s what scares me. Amazon’s reader is a brilliant device that shanghais book buyers and the book industry into accepting a radically diminished marketplace for published works. If the Kindle succeeds on its current terms, and all signs suggest it’ll be a blockbuster (thanks Oprah!), Amazon will make a bundle. But everyone else with a stake in a vibrant book industry–authors, publishers, libraries, chain bookstores, indie bookstores, and, not least, readers–stands to lose out.

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They kept their Twitter feeds quiet and their iPhone cameras dormant. Most of them didn’t want their names to be used.

There was more than a little bit of paranoia in the air as the guests arrived at last weekend’s Summit Series event, formally the Young World Leaders Summit–not the most modest of names. It was a gathering of about five dozen under-35 entrepreneurs and executives at a beachfront luxury resort outside the glitzy vacation city of Cancun. Among those present at the retreat, which was fully paid for by sponsors, were a handful of executives from Facebook and other Silicon Valley start-ups, media and publishing entrepreneurs, young venture capitalists, edgy youth marketers, and jet-setting global issues advocates. As for an itinerary, there were snorkeling lessons, ample pool-and beachside chill time, and plenty of parties.

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I’ve got a few questions for American magazine publishers:

Are you in or are you out?

Do you still believe in the very act, the very business, of publishing?

And do you still believe in presenting carefully selected words and pictures–expertly produced information–for a targeted audience?

Lately, some companies seem to be answering yes–for instance, Ziff-Davis, which announced last week that it is discontinuing its PC Magazine as a print product but has been investing in its Internet strategy and is therefore ready and able to continue publishing the title on the Web.

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“On or about December, 1910,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, “the world changed.” Sometime during the early aughts of this century, it changed again. The Internet leveled our cultural landscape. There was an epistemological free-for-all, a paradigm shift. The pyramid of media hierarchy flipped–top down became bottom up–and people-powered content started to change the way we think.

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It’s funny how things change. Five years ago I wouldn’t have given second thought to producing print material with digital printing. No, only offset printing. The thought of a brochure, annual report or catalog printed as if it had come out of Kinko’s–excuse me, FedEx Office–was just unbearable, and even the much-hyped and pushed feature of individual customization–Dear Jon, from Chicago, IL 60660–didn’t seem to be much draw.

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The Boston Globe had a story about the travails of the Portland Press Herald last week, and it included a plaintive and intriguing question from a reader of the struggling, up-for-sale Maine paper: “Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?” We’re going to find out the answer to that before very long, I’m afraid. And it’s worth thinking about what such a city will look like.

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Ten years ago next month, in an innocuous suburban garage, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two geeky students at Stanford University, founded a company called Google. They would go on to create what is regularly voted the world’s top brand, earn accolades as the world’s best employers and become billionaires many times over. They would also, say their critics, cut a swath through the laws of copyright, threaten to devour media like a “digital Murdoch” and harvest more of our secrets than any totalitarian government …

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A recent edition of Science featured a worrying paper by University of Chicago sociologist James A. Evans titled “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.” Seeking to learn more about how research is conducted online, Evans scoured a database of 34 million articles from science journals. He discovered a paradox: As journals begin publishing online, making it easier for researchers to find and search their contents, research tends to become more superficial.

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Last week, computer book publisher SitePoint relayed a story about recent experiences with Digg that demonstrates that the Digg system is far from perfect. We’ve written recently on ReadWriteWeb about the decline and fall of quality on Digg, but SitePoint’s anecdote demonstrates that sometimes the wisdom of crowds approach is, well, kind of dumb. Now is probably a good time to revisit the rules for harnessing the wisdom of the crowds we published on this blog a year ago.

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It’s not easy to write a book. First you have to pick a title. And then there is the table of contents. … Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing. Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it.

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