So, while you lot were drinking Mojitos and fine wines and some of us were toiling over our third novels and editing our second ones and preparing to become a dad for the first time, August was quite a startler.

Amazon launched the Kindle 3, which is competitively-priced and sleek. At the same time, they launched the UK Kindle store and priced not just competitively but lethally, leading some people to wonder whether the Agency Model was dead in the water. I don't believe that it is, actually; it strikes me that what Amazon have done here, at least potentially, is generate the lowest tier of my proposed three levels of pricing for ebooks: these are unenhanced editions on a black and white screen, and to be honest some of the transpositions to ebook are still a bit rocky - botched type and so on. If we want to price ebooks higher than a fiver from now on, though, we have to make them worth it.

Andrew Wylie launched a full-on assault on Random House's insistence that ebook rights were not to be separated from paper, and then cut a deal. Homer's Odyssey was rather longer, but at least no one went to bed with the wrong person or sewed anybody up inside a live goat, or whatever it is that goes on in Greek tragedies. Somewhat bizarrely, a respected US news source said this was entirely appropriate for someone nicknamed "the Jaguar" [sic]. Er.... anyway...

All of which made me think, as I assembled a cot with one hand and tried with the other to make my third book feel taut, tight, and contained rather than explosively burlesque like the first two, that we really have to get a handle on discounting, and look at the Big Picture if we're to survive as an industry. I think people will make a distinction between the lowest level of ebook - text only - and the paper edition, and that the superlow pricing on the Kindle store will actually help with that. But not if we continue to send hardbacks to the supermarkets and so on with stickers on them which say "£7.99!!!"... It's not digital which presents a danger to the perceived natural price of a paper book...

And that's before we start talking about the PLR and the sometimes-maybe-never arrival of Google Books and the resolution to the GBS...

Oh, lest I forget: someone has started making rings out of books. That craving for contact with text is strong. Paper isn't down and out yet...

Welcome back. I hope you're feeling rested. We work in interesting times.