If you’re in a rush, the takeaway is that he’s not very impressed with Amazon’s (AMZN) device, and that all things being equal, he thinks Apple’s e-reader is at least as good. He’s not talking about the yet-to-appear iTablet, of course. Like a lot of other people, he’s fond of  Apple’s (AAPL) current iPhone/iPod touch line:

Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it.

Oddly, Baker doesn’t make a reference to Kindlegate, even though the story broke a couple of weeks ago. If you’re looking for a summary of where things stand on that one and have five minutes to spare, you can listen in to the chat I had with NPR’s “On the Media,” which aired over the weekend. You can hear the full show here.

One last note: I’m stepping out for a couple weeks and going semi-off the grid, so if all goes well you won’t be hearing from me till the second week of August. If all goes really well, I may even read an ink-and-paper book. Meantime there will be plenty of fresh new stuff from Walt, Kara, John and Katie over at the mothership. See you soonish.

The New York Times turned down a chance to borrow money from Hollywood mogul David Geffen last winter, and went with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim instead.

So says he New Yorker, which has an extensive profile of Slim in this issue. Writer Lawrence Wright says that when Geffen learned that the Times was working on a deal to borrow $250 million from Slim, he offered to make the loan on the same terms, but was rebuffed by  Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

The Times chairman, Wright says, told Geffen’s people he preferred to work with Slim because the telco billionaire already owned Times shares and because “he was reportedly also worried about Geffen’s ambition to take over the company.”

Where would Sulzberger have gotten that idea? From Geffen, of course.

Wright also reports that Geffen offered to buy the publisher outright last September; he says Geffen made the offer via Steve Rattner, the media banker turned Obama adviser who is one of Sulzberger’s closest confidants.

The pitch: Sulzberger would oversee the New York Times’s (NYT) editorial operations, Geffen would handle the business side, and eventually the entire business would be handed over to a nonprofit foundation. Obviously, Sulzberger turned that one down.

Wright’s piece–which is behind a pay wall, so it will be interesting to see how much of the story gets circulated via the Web–is first and foremost a profile of Slim, and secondarily about the Times. So it doesn’t spend much more time on Geffen or the notion of other white knights for the paper, a la Google (GOOG).

But in just a few paragraphs, the article does seem to sketch out Geffen’s desire to associate himself with the Times in whatever way he can: Buying it outright, lending it much-needed money or buying some of its stock (via Harbinger Capital).

For now, the Times is controlled by Sulzberger and his extended family, who have repeatedly insisted that they’re not interested in parting with it. Then again, that’s what the Bancroft family always said about Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. And those properties are now a part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS)–as is this Web site.

If the Times ever does need a deep-pocketed buyer, Geffen has made it very clear he’s available.

To wit: The video below, which depicts how artist Jorge Columbo created this week’s cover art in an hour, using an Apple (AAPL) iPhone. Columbo used an iPhone app called Brushes, and he’s been using it for a while to create some interesting stuff. If you like this piece, check out his collection of  “iSketches.”

And here’s the same technique with another sketch:

Last fall, a small but vocal group of Twitterers managed to shame Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) into apologizing for one of its Motrin ads.

This weekend’s replay: a howl of outrage, amplified and directed via Twitter at Amazon (AMZN), which may or may not have instituted a boneheaded policy  regarding “adult” books on its site. Or “adult” books aimed at gay and lesbian readers. Or something.

What happened? It’s not clear. But search for “#amazonfail” on Twitter and you’ll find that many Twitterers believe that Amazon has stripped the sales rankings from all manner of books that deal with gay and lesbian, and/or “adult” topics, making them less likely to appear on the site. In essence, the Twittersphere charges Amazon with trying to hide material it finds distasteful or that it thinks some customers will find distasteful.

Example: Amazon’s listing for Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” doesn’t have a sales rank. But the author’s newest book does have one.

From what I can tell, the meme started up on Saturday, but didn’t start building steam until Sunday afternoon, when I noticed mild-mannered types like New Yorker writer Susan Orlean railing about Amazon on Twitter.

And it’s still going. As I type this, after 10 p.m. Eastern on Sunday night, the “amazonfail” keyword is generating a dozen hits on Twitter’s search page every couple of seconds.

Amazon hasn’t helped its case by remaining more or less mute throughout the weekend. But, by Sunday evening, the retailer had issued the same line to me and several other reporters: “We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We’re working to correct the problem as quickly as possible.”

Not a terribly illuminating response, and I’ve asked for more information. But no matter what really happened, Amazon now has a real problem on its hands: A vocal group of people believe the retailer has discriminated in some way against gays and lesbians.

When Johnson & Johnson got caught in the Twitterstorm last fall, it had a relatively easy way out: A profuse apology to people it had offended. But Motrin has a very specific customer base and Amazon has a much broader one, and anything it says or does regarding gays, lesbians and “adult” material of any stripe is bound to upset some people.

But the company should do the right thing and clear the air anyway.

UPDATE: Here’s an apology from Amazon, which doesn’t really explain what happened, but says the problem didn’t just affect books aimed at gays and lesbians.

Sell ads that look exactly like the content itself.

That’s the strategy that Condé Nast is taking–cautiously–with Reddit, the Digg-like news aggregator it bought a couple of years ago. And it might be working.

So says Josh Stinchcomb, who runs sales and marketing for the “business” group of Condé’s digital properties, which also includes Wired.com, Ars Technica, and Web sites for the likes of The New Yorker and Portfolio. About three months ago, Stinchcomb began running ads that look exactly like the story headlines Reddit users submit and vote on.

The only difference: They sit at the top of the site’s homepage and carry a “sponsored link” tag. Like this (click to enlarge):

The results have made Condé “cautiously optimistic,” says Stinchcomb. You can measure that two ways: Click-through rates for the ads are running at about five percent, which is several times more than the industry average. And readers haven’t revolted.

The latter is a real possibility at a site like Reddit, whose users are fiercely protective of the community they’ve built, and antagonistic toward advertising in general. Stinchcomb says about 20 percent of Reddit’s users have installed ad-blocking software on their Web browsers.

If Condé keeps using the ads–they’ve run them from three sponsors so far and are tinkering with a self-service version that would allow marketers to submit ads on their own–it won’t create a torrent of cash. Right now the ads are priced at a $7 CPM (that’s $7 for every 1,000 eyeballs Condé gets in front of the ads), and Stinchcomb says he’ll probably have to knock that rate down. (He says he may also consider changing ad pricing to a cost-per-click/performance model, which would be a first for Condé).

But even a little bit of money would be a plus for Reddit, which has remained more or less a revenue-free property for Condé, even though traffic has shot up since the acquisition. Stinchcomb says Reddit now attracts five million uniques visitors a month, up from 1.5 million when the publisher bought the site (per usual, third-party traffic meausurements are much smaller).

Just as important, if it works for Reddit, it could have big implications for Digg, which has a significantly bigger audience, but faces the same problems selling ads.

Digg has raised $40 million so far, at a very high valuation, but revenues have been paltry. The site is reportedly planning to start selling ads that will look and feel a lot like the ones Reddit is already trying. High time to start experimenting.

[Note to Techmeme's Gabe Rivera: Yup, you have sponsored content, too. In fact, we've seen versions of this model for as long as we've had mass media. I think this iteration is particularly interesting, though.]

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming: I’m seeing more and more evidence that Apple (AAPL) notwithstanding, the industry’s last few months were bad even by the industry’s own terrible standards.

Earlier this week, a music industry exec told me he thinks that the CD sales decline, which started nearly a decade ago, accelerated at the end of 2008: “[Retail] floor space shrank even more, [unsold CDs] came back even faster, everything got worse, faster,” he told me.

The newest data point: Awful results from Sony’s (SNE) third-quarter earnings report, which covers the last three months of 2008. The company’s Sony Music Entertainment label saw sales shrink 22 percent compared to the previous year due to the “accelerated decline in the worldwide physical music market resulting from the worldwide economic slowdown.”

It’s possible that we’ll see a bit of variation in results from the other big music labels–EMI Music Group, Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group (WMG)–based on the makeup of their artist rosters, etc. But the worrisome thing is that Sony’s arsenal included three of last year’s biggest stars: AC/DC, Beyoncé and Britney Spears.

So while it’s possible that Warner Music, which reports next Thursday, won’t have equally brutal results, it’s a fair bet that it will.

Sort-of-related point: If you have a couple minutes and are interested at all about what the music business might look like in the near future, check out this New Yorker interview with Muxtape creator Justin Ouellette.

Ouellette achieved a brief bit of Internet celebrity last year when his free music-streaming site caught on with the the Web cognoscenti, but then folded after receiving complaints from the music labels’ trade group. Now he’s back with a legal version of the site, which will have much smaller ambitions.

But you don’t care about that. You’d like to know about the relationship between the former presidential candidate and his 42-year-old daughter from his first marriage, who works in rock and roll. OK. We can oblige. Neither EMI nor the McCain campaign spent much time talking about the link during the campaign, for what I imagine are sensible reasons. But it wasn’t a secret, either.

A quick Google search, for instance, will get you write-ups in the New Yorker (circa 2000) and the New York Times (2007):

New Yorker:

In recent weeks, while John McCain has been defending himself against accusations of ill temper, Sid, who is a senior publicity director at Capitol Records, has been overseeing the winter press campaign for the rock band Megadeth. ‘If I ever have to have Secret Service,’ she said the other day, they’d better be ready for a lot of late nights.’… ‘We’ve all experienced his “quick” temper,’ she continued. ‘He’ll snap at you, but it never lasts more than a minute. And he’s much better than he used to be. Now he softens it with humor. When I was a kid, it would be “Damn it, if I have to tell you to sweep that driveway one more time!”’… John McCain recently got a taste of his daughter’s professional life when she escorted him to the MTV Video Music Awards…. The Senator returned for an interview at the music network the other day. He avoided the boxers-or-briefs issue, but he did say he would consider inviting Nine Inch Nails to his inaugural.”

NYT:

His relationship with Sidney…is perhaps the most politically interesting. Sidney, a registered Democrat until recently, has worked in the music business for years, and was the child who challenged Mr. McCain’s authority the most. She continues to debate him on a wide variety of issues.

‘Sidney is a character,’ [former McCain staffer Grants Woods] said. ‘I think she stretched him a lot. When I was hanging around John, his favorite movie was “Gigi.” Sidney has been very involved in the entertainment industry and taken him to the award shows even though her interests have been quite divergent from his. He is very close to her as well.’

By many accounts, Mr. McCain’s daughters were the most resistant to his authority. ‘I was the boundary pusher,’ Sidney said. ‘In high school I was very rebellious. I needed to look at all sides. At least he would hear me out.’”

Here’s the promotion email from EMI, which doesn’t happen to mention Sid’s father:

Sid McCain has been appointed as Vice President, Label Services, North America, EMI Music, part of EMI’s Music Services unit. In this role, Sid will report to Dominic Pandiscia, GM, Label Services. She will draw upon her significant music industry experience and relationships to work with the labels within Caroline and a growing roster of EMI’s distributed independent labels. She will also drive our effort to offer EMI’s unique one-stop global capabilities for distribution, marketing, promotion and digital resources to new independent label partners and artists who want to reach a worldwide marketplace.

Most recently, Sid was a marketing consultant at EMI Music Canada, where she oversaw campaigns for EMI’s distributed labels in that territory, which included Curb, Labworks SideOne Dummy, Stereo Dynamite and Century Media. She also liaised with EMI’s territories on behalf of EMI Music Canada artists including Pride Tiger, Skye Sweetnam, Alpha Galates and Jesse Cook.

Prior to EMI, Sid held a number of senior posts at V2 Records, including as General Manager of V2 Records in Canada from 2003-2007 and as Head of Media for V2 Records in America from 1999-2003. While there, she worked closely with artists including The White Stripes, Raconteurs, Moby, Stereophonics, Ray Davies and Paul Weller. She also worked in media positions at EMI’s Capitol Records, Arista and Columbia Records.”