How low will e-reader pricing go? That’s the inevitable question quite a number of reporters and analysts have been asking since Amazon announced its new $139 Kindle.

In all probability, it will be $99 - the retail price point that triggers impulse buys and drives mainstream adoption consumer electronics devices.

Clever marketing from Amazon announcing that Steig Larsson was the first author to sell one million books on the Kindle. This certainly helps reinforce the message that while the Apple iPhone and iPad may be all about apps, the Amazon Kindle is all about books.

Having read all thee books in Steig Larsson trilogy, I can’t say I was too surprised that he was the first writer to reach the one million eBook sales club; they have a vitality and vigor that is sorely lacking in so many contemporary thrillers.

Now that the initial hoopla about the iPad has died down a little, it’s good to see some serious analyses of the tablet market being published.

Earlier this month investment bank Goldman Sachs came out with some thought-provoking research on the market, including the results of a survey conducted on their behalf by Synovate.

There once was a time not so long ago that $100 was the magic cost point for driving the proliferation of computers for the next billion users. Now India’s human resources development minister, Kapil Sibal, has upped (or is that lowered?) the ante by announcing plans to bring a $35 tablet into production by 2011 and offer it to the country’s university and college students at prices as low as $10.

While achieving such a cost point by next year will be extremely challenging ($50 might be a more realistic target), the real significance of this announcement is that India is the first country in the world to recognize the potential of the tablet as an educational device and to put some money behind promoting it through the planned subsidies to the students that purchase the device.

A discontented middle-aged writer has a passionate affair with an attractive woman he meets at the Venice Art Festival. A discontented middle-aged writer goes to Varanasi to write a travel piece and surrenders to the mystical power of the city.

This précis just about sums up the two stories in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, but like the book itself it opens up far more questions than it answers. Is the main character in the first story in the book the same person as the one in the second story? We think so, but can’t be absolutely sure. And what is the connection between Venice and Varanasi in any case, apart from the fact that their names begin with the letter “v”?

I have to admit I was more than a little skeptical when I saw critics hailing Paolo Bacigalupi as a worthy successor to William Gibson. But it only took a few pages of The Windup Girl for me to forget the old master as I was hurled into a chillingly realistic new world of chronic energy and food shortages, rampant plagues and environmental disasters, and an evil cartel of Midwestern seed companies brutally imposing their biotech IP monopoly throughout the globe.

Add in a small but hardy band of gene rippers fighting to resist this monopoly, a corrupt but independent Thai bureaucracy determined to protect its sovereignty, and a supporting cast of genetically modified elephants and cats, and you have all the elements of a brilliant story.

Having just taken receipt of this shipment containing my daughters’ summer reading list, I can all too easily understand why Amazon is reporting that eBook sales are now outstripping hard cover book sales.

With the amount of money I spent on shipping alone, I could just about have bought a Kindle or low cost Android tablet. And I don’t want to think about the number of times I had to respond to repeated enquiries from my wife and daughters asking whether the books had arrived yet.

Writing a second novel is a tough enough challenge, but how do you approach your twentieth one – especially if it is part of the same series?

Do you risk the ire of your readers by revealing an unexpected side of your main characters or do you keep steering them along the same familiar path with only incremental changes to their personalities?

In her first novel, Who Moved My BlackBerry?, the FT’s popular management columnist Lucy Kellaway did a brilliant job of satirizing the absurdities of modern-day corporate life with her hilarious account of Martin Lukes’ frantic attempts to save his family and career. No management cliché is left unturned as Lukes spews out his “learnings” in a raging torrent of emails and messages laced with new age gibberish.

In her latest novel In Office Hours Kellaway delves even deeper into the corporate hothouse, this time exploring the murky world of office affairs. Set in the London HQ of a global oil major called Atlantic Energy, the book recounts the exploits of exploits of two female protagonists at opposite ends of the career pole as they unwisely throw themselves into liaisons with totally unsuitable colleagues.