So, there's crazy drama in the publishing world right now. Bestselling author Barry Eisler has walked away from a half-million dollar book deal to self-publish. Cue several hundred blog posts on this being a huge wake up / nail in the coffin / natural-disaster-of-your-choice for the publishing industry, including one very interesting though overlong (really overlong, guys. Nobody has time for a thesis on the internet. But most of the good stuff's in the first half or third) conversation between Eisler and self-pub-king Joe Konrath on the publishing industry and self-publishing. 

Barely two days later, news breaks that self-publishing-darling Amanda Hocking has been shopping one of her novel series around to traditional publishing, with bidding reaching over $2 million before she signed with St Martin's Press. And an avalanche of blog posts condemning, supporting, analysing and foretelling springs forth before Amanda posts her own reasons for her decision.

If that weren't enough, Google gets the smackdown on their settlement with authors for the opt-out publishing of out of print works, Zoe Winters (unintentionally) picks a fight with The Internet over not wanting to attract readers who don't value the work, and Jane Friedman brings up some great points about the increasingly irrelevant fee-based self-publishing companies like Author Solutions - the kind of services that are now being reviewed and indexed on the blog 'To Self Publish or Not to Self Publish?"

Okay, that last one wasn't exactly news, but things sound better in threes.

In the list of other interesting things that aren't news:

Joe Konrath's still selling ridiculous numbers of ebooks, and has some pretty good arguments for ebooks not being a bubble, and how to maximise your money-making with your intellectual property. David Alderman gives us his experience of Smashwords, making me wonder whether authors would be better off with the extra effort of going straight to the seller themselves.

Nathan Bransford discusses the often bizarre pricing of ebooks compared with their paper counterparts, with some good points also made in the Shatzkin Files, and Steve Saus looks at the completely meaningless use of statistics when discussing epublishing.

And just because it's awesome: an interactive laser harp sculpture.