Written off?

Why the course correction? I love books, I buy books, and I just can’t make the case for paying double for a product that is, after all, ephemeral. Case in point: About two weeks ago I read a selling review of Vladimir Sorokin’s brilliant anti-Putin satire, “Day of the Oprichnik.’’ My library didn’t have the book. So I made an extremely irrational decision: I wandered into a bookstore and paid the cover price of $23.

What was I thinking? Amazon would have shipped me the book for $19.63. Or, had I mustered the energy to climb one flight of stairs to my son’s room, I could have activated his unused Kindle and bought the book for $10.99. With no carbon footprint! Bill McKibben would be so pleased.

I bought two other books in the same week, a paperback copy of Justin Cronin’s vampire-free novel “The Summer Guest,’’ mainly because I felt sorry for the one benighted bookseller in Wolfeboro, N.H. I also bought Randy Shilts’s classic, “And the Band Played On,’’ in Boston, because I wanted to read and own it. The minute I fire up my son’s Kindle, or borrow my wife’s, which is rarely available, the book trade loses beaucoup cash.

Don’t take my word for it. Borders, which had lovely bookstores, is in bankruptcy. Fast-buck vultures are circling Barnes & Noble, primarily interested in its revamped Nook e-book reader, which may end up playing Avis to the Kindle’s Hertz in the fast-growing electronic book biz. “You look at all this data, and it’s difficult to say with any certainty where the book business is going,’’ says former Washington Post journalist Bradley Graham. “It’s nerve-wracking, but it’s also kind of exciting.’’