Apparently Amazon is sending out letters to its Tennessee customers reminding them that, right now, under Tennessee law, they're obliged to pay taxes on Internet purchases. Judging by the response in my Twitter stream, many, many folks did not know this.

They thought they didn't have to pay taxes on Amazon purchases until Amazon begins collecting it.

But no:

Haslam spokesman David Smith said consumers have been required to pay "consumer use" tax to the Tennessee Department of Revenue when making an online purchase from any retailer that does not collect sales tax.

I set out to see how easy it was to be a good Tennessee citizen.

The City Paper is reporting that Tennessee has joined in the 15-state lawsuit against Apple, Macmillan Holdings, Penguin Group USA, and Simon & Schuster Digital Sales.

This story is big and convoluted, and while the spin seems to be, "Publishers colluded to make you pay too much for ebooks" — and while this spin would then firmly place most reasonable people on the side of the people trying to make sure you pay less — the truth is that this story is more like Hitler fights Stalin who fights Dracula who fights Alien who fights Predator who fights Hitler. You can root for whomever you want, but don't get too close to them, you know?

Here's the back story that will make this story make more sense.

You've got three chances to watch (all times listed are Central Standard Time):
9 a.m. today
1 p.m. today
Noon tomorrow

According to the press release:

Ann will talk about her new book store, Parnassus Books, and give her top 5 picks for books this holiday season. Each pick will be an audience giveaway, including her latest book, State of Wonder.

The TSLA has purchased an electronic cataloging program that will allow participating libraries across the state to share cataloging information and make inter-library loans much easier.

From The Chattanoogan's website:

“The electronic card catalog is another example of how we can use technology to deliver better service to Tennesseans more efficiently and cost effectively,” Secretary of State Tre Hargett said. “This service should make life better for patrons and library staff. It is the type of service that TSLA should be providing to libraries across our state.”

I'm convinced there are two types of genius ideas: One is the idea that is so weird you can't imagine how anyone thought it up; the other is the idea that seems so obvious once you hear about it that you can't imagine it hasn't always been in place.

The idea of the TSLA acting like a kind of hub for libraries across the state to share information is one of the latter. This is a great way for even very small public libraries to easily provide their patrons with a wealth of material. Kudos to the TSLA.

So, when I heard that the library was extending this deal to Nashville area teens through the Limitless Library program? I have to tell you, I cheered in delight. What an excellent idea! Middle and high schoolers aren't limited to the books in their individual schools' libraries but can have access to all of the books in the Nashville library system. They just get on the computer and request it and it's delivered to their school.

From the Tennessean:

“We are seeing overwhelming successes,” said Tricia Bengel, interim director at Nashville Public Library. “Kids are borrowing more books than they have ever borrowed, and they have access to different types of materials than they have even had before. It’s a good problem to have, but we are struggling a little bit to keep up with the increase in circulation.

“It benefits the library because we’ve added 15,000 patrons that we didn’t have before. We are building our patrons of tomorrow.”

Anyway. The typically reserved person who sent me Sullivan's link included the endorsement, "This motherfucker can write!" Maybe it's too late to slap this money quote on the jacket for Sullivan's highly lauded new essay collection Pulphead, but it fits. (Hey, there's always the paperback.) As proof, here's the first graph of Sullivan's piece, which restores the color to its subject's cheeks with each fresh detail:

From the article in this week's Scene by Michael Ray Taylor and Chapter16.org:

Since 1965, when he became a staff writer for The New Yorker, McPhee has published, on average, a book every 18 months; he is now up to 28. In Silk Parachute, published last year and now out in paperback, the 80-year-old author seems, in his usual quiet and self-deprecating way, to have noticed the fact of his age. In any case, he reveals more of himself in this essay collection than he ever has before. The title comes from a very short preface about McPhee's own childhood, his mother, and a favored toy: a black rubber ball, bought at LaGuardia airport in the 1930s, containing a silk parachute. "If you threw it high into the air, the string unwound and the parachute blossomed," McPhee explains. "If you sent it up with a tennis racquet, you could put it into the clouds. Not until the development of the multi-megabyte hard disk would the world ever know such a fabulous toy."

Over the course of the eight fairly recent articles that make up the collection, McPhee investigates the usual eclectic mix of topics: English chalk, lacrosse, large-format photography and so on. But for the first time, the characters through which he introduces these topics are McPhee himself, members of his immediately family, and a couple of longtime personal friends. Progressing through the book, you realize that McPhee is finally sharing his own life, the life of a man whose marvelous talent has always been his fabulous toy. "Folded just so, the parachute never failed," he writes in the preface. "Always, it floated back to you — silkily, beautifully — to start over and float back again. Even if you abused it, whacked it really hard — gracefully, lightly, it floated back to you."

As book titles go, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City certainly catches the ear — vulgar and funny at the same time, kind of like its subject matter. And it says something about Nick Flynn that he chose this not as the title of some complaining, dystopian novel, but rather, as the title of his memoir.

Like the best writers, Flynn — whether telling the story of his father’s years as a homeless transient, or in sturdy, contemplative poems — can keep both the garish and the mundane in a constant dance with each other. Literate but unpretentious, well-crafted without being cumbersome or writerly, Flynn’s writing intensifies the things it describes, extracting meaning from even the simplest moments and making them indelible. At this event, sponsored by the Vandy creative writing program, Flynn will read from his poetry.

• HarperCollins may soon corner the Bible market

This makes a lot of sense. HarperCollins already owns Zondervan and has the HarperOne imprint. Speaking in very, very broad terms, Zondervan's focus is on religious books that go into Christian bookstores or are used as church curricula. HarperOne is aimed more at the secular bookstore market. And Thomas Nelson really hits that sweet spot right down the middle — doing some very successful titles that appeal to the secular bookstore model and being a mainstay of the Christian bookstore.

The other thing that Thomas Nelson has a reputation for is its engagement with the electronic realm — its embrace of blogging and digital communication as well as its ability to produce ebooks, without the whole press getting sucked into a vortex of painful ridiculousness where various staffers run around having increasingly public breakdowns where they give maudlin recitations of the good old days when a book was a book (which is how most other publishers are handling the arrival of the digital age). Just having that expertise is probably worth whatever the cost of acquiring them is.