The current big phase of the technology revolution, startlingly taking place while the country is in the grip of a major recession, is once again cutting the heads off the print industry.

The American Booksellers Association is pleading with the Justice Department to probe the price war among Amazon, Target, and Wal-Mart that has resulted in dirt-cheap hardcover prices.

Too late. Kindle itself is the No. 1 bestseller in all categories at Amazon, which just reported an astounding 69 percent increase in profit for the third quarter.

Bestseller hardcover books by John Grisham and Stephen King, among others, are being sold on those sites for about $9; they typically retail, Bloomberg says, for $25 to $35. The industry group calls it "illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and is harmful to consumers."

At 247wallst.com, Douglas A. McIntyre more accurately describes it merely a price war: "The sale of hardcovers is essentially just a 'loss leader' to pick up customers who may also buy consumer electronics. clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, and gardening supplies to put under the Christmas tree as gifts."

Newspapers are on their way to becoming loss leaders for their websites, Kindles and E-Readers are jostling for position, and the new generation of smartphones may even replace laptops, let alone drive the final nail in the coffin of major print outlets.

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Saturn to Close After Sale Falls Through (WSJ)

About 13,000 workers will be shit out of luck, but impact on nation's unemployment rate will be miniscule. Meanwhile, bad news in New York for jobless: "Mayor Bloomberg vows to snuff out smoking in parks, beaches." No job, no hope, and now no cigarettes. Stop, you're killing us.

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Dow, Up 15%, Has Best Quarter Since '98 (WSJ)

Bubble news: "Many of the riskiest stocks" led the charge. What happens when the Fed starts to dismantle its supports propping up the whole thing? You think this is a real bull market? Story doesn't judge that, but it does paint the most rosy picture of the turbulent market: "Corporate profits have come in above reduced expectations, in large part due to cost cutting." So what happens to profits after the cost-cutting slows down, which it inevitably has to?

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Google Wave Invites for Sale on eBay (WSJ)

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Zuckerberg Now Worth $2 Billion, Says Forbes (Silicon Valley Insider)

Facebook CEO is the richest American who primarily wears T-shirts.

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The Balance Sheet: Interview with Joseph Stiglitz (New Yorker, James Surowiecki)

Click above video or here.

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Wall Street Wizardry Reworks Mortgages (WSJ)

"A new wave of financial alchemy" to "make soured securities look better." A test for regulators. Matthew Goldstein of Reuters warns, "Beware the bull market in derivatives."

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Swiss Health Care Thrives Without Public Option (NYT)

Highly misleading propaganda piece against the "public option." Switzerland offers strong, immediate public subsidies of health care to its citizenry, and that could have been the story's spin just as easily as this one conjured up by the Times.

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A Dealmaker Out of Time: And With Lewis, an Earlier Era on Wall Street Fades (WSJ)

"Ken Lewis was shot with his own gun." David Weidner asks: "Exactly who pulled the trigger?" (And in a nation that's running short of bullets, who was lucky enough to buy the ammo?) For speculation on the next Bank of America outlaw, see the NY Post's "He's not even cold: Top dealmakers already being eyed for Lewis job."

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Even geezers get it. Books are history — and not just history books, but history. E.L. Doctorow and ex-longtime Random House editor Jason Epstein are huckstering the Espresso Book Machine this week.

The author and editor, buddies from the print days, gathered at Harvard Book Store for the book machine's formal debut. It prints, binds, and trims a book at the goddamn bookstore — on demand, like ordering a Big Mac.

This is shaping up as a momentous week in the tech/money universe: Google's Wave is finally rolling, and now the book readers get a formal unveiling of a cool tool.

Oh, what to do, what to do?! HarperCollins is delaying its e-book release of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life, hoping against hope that it will sell enough hardcover copies first.

Earlier this month, the Hachette subsidiary Twelve took the same tack: delaying the e-version of Ted Kennedy's memoir to try to pump up hardcover sales.

Dying sounds from a desperate industry? Well, it's a bipartisan problem, at least. But how bad off is the book-publishing industry that it's relying on Palin's book to help rescue it during the holiday-shopping season? She's not even a smart conservative.