I hate it when I go out of my way to defend a product or a company and then regret it within a few days.

Y’all know I’m a huge fan of Amazon. Frank and I each get an allowance, and we both spend most of our allowance at Amazon. We buy Kindle books, real books, music, movies, TV shows on DVD, gluten-free groceries, coconut oil, Christmas gifts (toys, etc), jewelry, housewares, etc. If it can be bought on Amazon, we buy it on Amazon. We welcome Amazon gift certificates, because those suckers are like cash. We’re prime members–we pay $79 a year to get free 2-day shipping and cheap 1-day shipping. And UPS is at our house at least once a week with our Amazon purchases.

When the iPad [worst product name EVER] came out last week, I kept chiding people to stop comparing it to Kindle and Nook as a superior e-reader, because the iPad doesn’t have the e-ink display, which I think is the best thing about the Kindle. I don’t care if the iPad makes it easier to flip pages or buy books. Clicking a button is NOT harder than swiping your finger across a screen, especially when you rest your thumb on the “next page” button like I do. And buying books through Amazon for my Kindle is plenty easy. With the Whispernet and 3G wireless, I can download a book most anywhere within a minute. Or I can browse the store online, buy books there, and download them next time I turn on my Kindle wireless. And don’t forget the text-to-speech, which allows me to “read” when I’m cleaning or jogging–I would never spend the money on an audiobook, so that feature means I buy more books than I would normally. The iPad may be prettier, but in my world it doesn’t compare as an e-reader.

But we (Frank and I) both have a big problem with the hissy fit Amazon’s throwing over book publishers who want a better deal on Kindle books. We noticed it before we ever read anything about it, because we went to buy some Joseph Finder books in paperback as a gift yesterday, and neither of us could find any of his books available new and with Prime shipping. Then I looked in the Kindle store, and none of his books are available for Kindle anymore either. I have 3 of his books on my Kindle.

So not only is Amazon pulling Macmillan’s books from its Kindle store because Macmillan wants Amazon to pay more per book (meaning charge customers more per book, sell fewer Kindles because this would do away with the $9.99 new release price) because they’re able to get a much better deal from Apple for e-books sold through their store, but they’ve also pulled all physical Macmillan-published books. These books are now only available from outside sellers, without Prime shipping and in most cases used.

Joseph Finder tweeted this morning:

Amazon is bullying authors/publishers to accept lower prices on e-bks so they can sell more Kindles.

Yep, seems that way.

(Go here for John Sargent’s, Macmillan’s CEO, response and here for John Scalzi’s take.)

You know who does have the books I’m looking for? Barnes & Noble. So they will get my business for the above-mentioned purchase. No doubt this move hurts Macmillan, but it isn’t helping Amazon either.

And for the first time ever, I’m considering ditching the Kindle for the Nook. I’ll wait and see how this whole war with publishers plays out, but as fewer Kindle titles and paper books become available from Amazon, I’ll go with the e-ink e-reader that gives me the biggest selection of titles.

This is what I sent to Amazon this afternoon:

I’m very upset about your decision to ban Macmillan from Amazon–I understand if you don’t accept the e-book pay structure they want, but you’re only angering customers and sending us to Barnes & Noble by pulling paperbacks as well. I was going to order books as a gift today, but I’m a Prime member, so I should be able to buy NEW books with FREE shipping. Forget the used books, I’m hitting the bookstore. I’m also considering buying a Nook now, since your hissy fit will keep me from buying e-books by some of my favorite authors. I really hope you get over yourselves soon.

I’m cranky. Haven’t had lunch. Anyway, maybe they’ll listen if they hear from enough people. My history with Amazon is that they really want to keep their customers happy and go out of their way to do so. I get that they’re trying to keep their customers happy by pulling this negotiating stunt, but if it means I have to go somewhere less convenient to buy my books when I need them (today), they’re having the opposite effect of what they intended.

UPDATE: Amazon caves. Good for them, even if they get all “they’re a monopoly, so they’re bad!” in their statement. (Oh, and LOL at that, Amazon. As if you don’t have a monopoly on the online superstore biz.) And since this all happened over the weekend, people who aren’t online all weekend don’t have to get all upset over the inconvenience.

And yes, if you’re wondering, I take full credit for Amazon’s capitulation.

UPDATE 2: Amazon’s response to my email:

We are working with the publisher to make their titles available as soon as possible and at the lowest possible prices for our customers. We will e-mail you when these titles are available, which we hope will be soon.

Also, I have passed your message to the concerned department. We’ll consider your feedback as we plan further improvements.

Customer feedback like yours really helps us continue to improve our store and provide better service to our customers. Thanks for taking time to offer us your thoughts.

We hope to see you again soon.

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

This is my least favorite of the Twilight novels. Edward’s a total jerk, Bella’s even more emo than in the first one (I know, hard to believe), and the novel drags on and on while Edward’s gone. After Alice comes back, though, I love it. Team Edward.

Paranoia by Joseph Finder

Now this is the kind of free Kindle download I like. The kind where you discover a new author you’d never read before, he tells a good story, keeps you hooked, and makes you want to read all of his other books when you’re done. It was also nice to find that he tweets and interacts with his followers. And for buying his latest, Vanished, in pre-sale, he sent me an autographed paperback (I haven’t read it yet) in which he wrote (per my request, of course), “Thanks for being my favorite Twitter follower.” I was so pleased when he actually did it! He also sent me an unsolicited Christmas card. The dude knows how to create reader loyalty. Great writer, great guy, love him. Re: the book. Very twisty, fun read. I did figure out the big twist before it was revealed, but I didn’t mind. If you like thrillers, I recommend this book.

No surprise here: I missed my blogiversary AGAIN, like I do every year. Anyway, whoopee.

I Heart Bloomberg by Melody Carlson

This book couldn’t end fast enough for me, and frankly I’m surprised I finished it. I don’t read a lot of Christian fiction, because Christian authors are usually so careful to pretend that Christians are the only people in the world, there are no external influences, and Christians hardly ever mess up or succumb to temptation. That’s the big one. If your characters can’t mess up, then 1) they’re not realistic enough to pull me into your world and 2) the conflict is stupid. I kept waiting for the big conflict in this one, but seriously–the conflict was all about one girl not having the right attitude and annoying the other girls. Most of the rest of the book was about the Christian girl renovating the inside of an old house. Snooooooooorre. Sometimes those free Kindle downloads make you wish you were illiterate.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I obviously don’t need to tell y’all how I feel about this book. But I will! Compelling story, atrocious grammar, lackluster writing style, moany pissant heroine, but EDWARD. I adore the entire series, even watched the crappy movie obsessively. They hit my obsession button, and I never looked back. I don’t apologize. But I will say this: the sparkling thing is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. If not for the sparkling vampires, she’d probably sell twice as many books, and there wouldn’t be nearly as many “Edward is gay” memes going around. I really think it was idiotic and should have been killed in editing. But the grammatical errors weren’t even killed in editing, so there you go.

I was writing up a big post about the books I read in 2009 (copying Sheila’s tradition), and I started rambling on about all of the books on the list, so I decided to start a new series, in which I review books in 200 words or fewer. I’ll start with all the books I read last year, and as I finish new books, I’ll post those reviews too. I hope you enjoy…

You know, when I’m not blogging at Snark Raving Mad or Viral Footage. Or writing my novel, which I’m finally working on again. So when I’m not doing any of that or cleaning the house or slowly redoing the inside of this place or tweeting, this is what I’m reading:

*Vampire Academy. Enjoying so far.
*Pride and Prejudice. No real opinion on this so far.
*Boring medical book.
*Jane Eyre. No real opinion on this one either.
*The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Interesting, easy-to-read non-fiction, and I don’t read non-fic easily.
*Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Some of these may not have been touched since last summer when I retired. This is one of those, because I had Kindle reading it to me while I worked.
*Bartimaeus: The Amulet of Sakarand. Interesting so far.
*The Historian. I think I started this last February or March, not long after I got my Kindle. I was interested and read it a lot, very compelling, very good, and then after about the 4000th page, I got bored. I’m 70% of the way through this. I love the plot and concept, but it could have been pared down about 1000 pages.
*Anna Karenina. 22% in, and I’m hoping this doesn’t turn out to be as awful as Wuthering Heights. There’s one semi-likable character in the book so far, and I hate the title character. I hope she gets what’s coming to her.
*The Angel Experiment (Maximum Ride book 1). I started this and got about a chapter in. Boring. Don’t know when I’ll ever go back to it.
*Joshua. Love.
*Acts. Love.

Ah, so 12 of them. Have y’all read any of these? Opinions?

I am bashing Brandon Kiser. Brandon Kiser is a big dumb stoopidhead!

UPDATE: Here’s why I wrote this post. It was almost an invitation, really.

And here’s the reaction, a day later.
I was so tempted to ruin my joke several times over the past 24 hours. Man, I love teh Twitter.

This is my favorite American Idol audition of all TIME!

My recap of last night’s Atlanta auditions is over here.

My post on last night’s opening festivities is up over at Snark Raving Mad(!).

I love all these people who say “I don’t get Twitter” and then get all presumptuous and say “All people do is post that they’re in the car or looking at birds.”

Clearly, you do not get Twitter.

Tracey wrote a post asking people to tell her why she needs to be on Facebook or Twitter. For Facebook, I’ll just say: Twitter totally owns Facebook, and I have to make myself go to Facebook these days for anything other than playing Scrabble. But hey! Online Scrabble! So I do play Scrabble on Facebook. But I got so tired of everyone throwing sheep at me and asking me to feed their Farmtown cows and suggesting that I join their cause or become a fan of their hotel (no, really–someone suggested that I become a fan of some hotel in Dallas) or whatever that I stopped going there very much after I became obsessed with Twitter. Facebook is nice for sort of staying in touch with family and old friends and people whose names you recognize but you’re not sure where you know them from. It’s nice to see what people you’ve wondered about over the years are doing these days. And I used to like it because it was more private than my blog, so I could be more personal there, but Facebook’s new privacy policy makes it less private. But Twitter is better for news, politics, entertainment, hilarity, and conversation. And talking to all these bloggers I’ve been reading for years.

Yes, there are people who post only the “I just ate breakfast” types of updates. Unless I have a personal relationship with them, I don’t follow those people. See, you get to choose who you follow. You don’t have to read anyone’s tweets if you don’t want to.

The following is a sample of tweets currently in my tweetstream:

“Nothing good can come out of Obama, Holder, and Napolitano being in the same room… If Biden is there we’re definitely screwed.” — Informative about what’s going on in the world and also snarky.

“I know you need these shoes. Link” — These are shoes made out of bread, and I never would have known they existed if not for Twitter. (I retweeted this, and someone replied that they’re loafers. Get it?)

“By Valentine’s someone will come up with some edible Snuggie suit made of chocolate, I’m sure. Stay in. Hide.” — Funny. My main reason for being on Twitter is that there is so much funny on Twitter.

“You ever get drunk and buy something online but forget all about it until she shows up on your porch, yelling something in Russia-talk?” — Again. Funny.

“Michael Yon arrested for not revealing his income at the airport Link” — Information on how much our border security sucks.

“The tens digit changed so it’s a new decade. Get over it.” — This was a tweet by my husband which set off a squabble that turned into Twitter psychological abuse when I threatened to punch Frank in the face. Because he’s wrong about this.

“Gosh, but it’s cold! Throw another Global Warming Alarmist on the fire!” — these are the one-liners you don’t get on blogs. Very few people write blog posts that are just one-line zingers.

“BONG BONG BONG BONG” — This is a tweet by the Big Ben Clock, and it cracks me up every hour when it tweets the time in London.

Last night my tweetstream was dominated by 1) The Fiesta Bowl. I did much of the dominating here. 2) Erick Erickson’s (of RedState) appearance on the Colbert Report. 3) Brit Hume on O’Reilly. I ignored #2 and #3 because I was watching football, but I made note in my head that I would need to watch the clip of Brit Hume and DVR a later recording of the Colbert Report. I wouldn’t have known to watch either otherwise.

I follow a ton of people who only do politics or news. I follow a lot of people who only do random, funny thoughts. I follow a lot who do a number of things. Some sports people. A few authors. Paula Abdul. A few politicians. A few celebrities. Me? I tweet politics, news, football, hockey, pecan vs. pumpkin pie debates, my loathing of Elvis and “Blue Christmas”, my excitement over American Idol, Twilight, and I play a lot of hashtag games, which require their own explanation. I tweet a lot of the conversation snippets between Frank and myself. I also tweet when I burn myself or eat something exciting, but I try to make it interesting. Like “I simply DO NOT CARE how much I will suffer for eating this deviled egg” or “Tip: If you grab onto metal in the fireplace when the fire is blazing, you will burn the crap out of your finger.” See, much better than “Eating a deviled egg–yum!” or “Ow! I burned my finger in the fireplace!” Some people find me boring, so they don’t follow me, or they follow for a while and then unfollow. Some people think I tweet too much. They don’t have to follow me either.

And when you go look at someone’s Twitter profile, you’ll see a lot of @Bob @Mary, etc. That’s when the person you’re following tweets a reply at someone’s previous tweet. But when you follow someone on Twitter, you’re only going to see that reply in your tweetstream if you’re following both the replier and the original tweeter. You only see all of a person’s replies if you go to their profile page, which you usually don’t unless you’re going there to follow them or unfollow them. Or if you both follow all the same people, which would be rare.

You’ll see people throw out a question to all of their followers. I did this when I sparked the great pie debate of 2009. Another tweeter recently asked for fantasy book recommendations.

Hashtag games are my favorite part of Twitter. A hashtag game is where someone picks a topic and tweets it, and then it just spreads all over Twitter. For instance, I once picked the topic #GlobalWarmingMovies, where we took movie titles and changed them up to be about Global Warming or the religion of Climate Change (Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Science, etc.). So I tweeted a few, and people who followed me picked up on it and tweeted their own global warming movie titles, and then people that they followed did the same, and we all played along for a while. Those are fun comedy jam sessions where everyone tries to be as creative and funny as possible. I love them because they make me exercise my funny bone and creativity and keep me from going stale. And because I usually get several new followers during those games, because I’m fairly good at them, so I get a lot of retweets during those. A retweet happens when I tweet something, and one of my followers decides that all of their followers should see my tweet, so they copy it, put an RT and my name in front of it, and tweet it. So that tweets my comment to their followers, and their followers see that I’m funny (or lame), and sometimes they decide to follow me.

Twitter is not blogging. Twitter is tweeting lots of different thoughts in 140 characters or less. And a lot of thoughts only need 140 characters and not an entire blog post. I can write an entire post on how little I want to see the movie Avatar and why. Or I can just tweet, “I have less than zero interest in seeing Avatar because it’s leftist and the smurf people look stupid.”

On the aesthetically displeasing Twitter pages: You can customize your own page, and you only go to other people’s pages when you follow or unfollow. You go to your own page to see what people you follow are saying and you go to your own page to see your replies. And you install a desktop app like Tweetdeck or Twhirl, anyway, so you never actually go to Twitter on the web unless you want to check your follower count, see what lists you are on, or follow/unfollow someone.

One of Tracey’s commenters got it right, though–it’s very ego-centric. But it’s not only about egos and telling everyone what you ate for breakfast. It’s news sharing, riffing on each other, exchanging ideas, and going crazy over a football game with like-minded people (and a few token liberals). And no one sends you stupid little hearts and asks for your help in finding their lost turtles.

Not all of them, but most:

*Blog more.
*No, really.
*Stick to a schedule. I’m writing it today and tomorrow.
*Finish my novel. I’m 33K words in. I haven’t written anything since I got sick at the beginning of November. Stuff like that always knocks me off my game. I’m going, going, going, obsessed, and then wham. By the time I’m done being sick, I’m out of the mood. I’m starting again Monday or Tuesday. More likely Tuesday because of the Fiesta Bowl.
*Finally start tackling all these house projects. Right now, all of the decorations are in the guest room because of the Christmas decorations, so it would be a good time to peel some wallpaper or paint a room.
*Lose 30 pounds.
*Have company at least once a month. So far, we’re one for one!
*Hike somewhere new.
*Read three non-fiction books, not including Bible books. Last year I read one and a quarter (still working on The Case for Christ) (excluding Genesis through Deuteronomy, half of Acts, Colossians, Revelation, and Matthew).
*Start making all of my gluten-free things from scratch, no mixes. Also learn how to make GF Neiman Marcus Cake that tastes like the real thing.
*Live in my Snuggie.

I have more, but these are the ones I want to share.