Recently I was given just 24 hours to explore a first production build of the Apple iTablet — and here are my first impressions and discoveries. First, it’s more like an iPhone than a MacBook. The operating system depends on gestures, and expands the vocabulary. Your hand is going to be dancing.

Second big news: it’s not just an application platform and full-color reader and media player. It’s also a dual camera and, yes, read this twice, a phone. And therein lies a tale. For those whose habits have been formed around their iPhones, be very, very careful when your iTablet rings for the first time. That urge to whip the thing with its ginormous 10 inch screen up to your ear is going to play havoc with your eye. In the small group of folks I ran into who were returning their demo versions, most of us had nasty shiners.

Apple assures us that final production versions will come with training corners — foam wedgies that will soften the blow until the user gets used to answering the giant device. And the second mod will be a catcher’s mitt-like webbing on the back of the iTablet so you can one hand it.

Killer apps? Try this — for those who will want to mount the iTablet high on their dashboard, this thing is going to block your view. So Apple has come up with the brilliant iDrive. The camera on the back side stays live and you basically can see right through your iTablet, like a virtual window. A second camera, imbedded invisibly in the screen, can provide help in backing up.

When you’re not in your car, the embedded cameras creates iMirror, and one of the coolest apps we’ve seen so far is iTrim. Male or female, select your hairstyle from dozens of possibilities, and then iTrim gives you cut by cut directions so you can do it yourself. You might need a little help for the back and top, or you can sync up two iTablets and put them on the Infinite Barbershop Mirror setting.

Now with all that extra screen area to dance your hand on, Apple has greatly expanded the gestures it understands. First, there’s the Full Palm Down. Just spread out your hand and plant it on the screen. Whatever program that’s currently running will screech to a halt. Flip your hand over and give it the Brush Off, and the program will go away. Do it several times and the screen will clear. Then there’s the Fist Bump. Closed fist means ‘Yes.’ Or Agree, or Continue, Install, or ‘Can I have some more, please?’

Finally, all of publishing has been praying that the iTablet will be a Kindle killer and free the publishing world from the threat of world domination by Amazon. Success may depend on whether people will want the reading part of their life to be as easily interrupted as everything else in their world. When your book can hurl e-mails at you, ring your phone, cut your hair and even show you who’s sneaking up behind you, some may not find that to be the ideal reading environment.

Then there’s the concern about the infantilism that permeates Steve Job’s attitude toward culture. “People don’t read anymore,” is one of his brilliant observations. On iTunes, all music has become a “song.” Verdi’s Requiem Mass is downloadable as a bunch of songs. For an entire generation, a Beethoven symphony is now four songs. This is surely a crime against humanity of some sort.

So take the same attitude and apply it to books. And guess what? You aren’t going to be buying a ‘book’ on the iTunes store. You’re going to be buying a ’story’ one chapter at a time, whether it’s Wind in the Willows or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, everything is going to be just a chapter in a story.

The good news is the color is great. You can zoom in for spectacular detail. And when you check in to that “mirror” function you’ll be able to track the progress of your shiner.

If you read the N.Y.Times in its coverage of the disruption of the Kindle, you might think that publishers are losing a fortune from the sudden rise in Kindle sales.

Actually, the opposite is true. Amazon is buying Kindle rights from publishers at the same price they’re paying for physical books. And Amazon is sticking with its policy to sell Kindle books at no more than $9.99. So take your average $20 list price hardcover book (if I were a shameless self-promoter, I would use my book The Genius Machine as an example, since it also has a list price of $20. But I will resist the temptation.) The publisher sells it to Amazon for 50% off, or $10. Amazon could sell my the book for $20, but they discount it down to $13.57, and make a profit of $3.57, or maybe a little less if Amazon is paying for shipping.

Now take the same book sold as a Kindle. Amazon pays $10 for those rights, too. And Amazon sells the download for $9.99, thereby earning a gross profit of 1¢ on each copy. On books that wholesale for more than $9.99, Amazon seems to be locked into a loss with every sale.

And what about the publisher? On a $20 retail book they get the same $10 for the Kindle edition as they did for the actual hardcover that cost them some $2.00 to manufacture, ship, and even keep a reserve for returns of unsold books. So who is making a killing on the Kindle? The publishers. And Publishers, please, if I’m wrong about these numbers, share the facts with us in the comments below.

Publishers are worried that Amazon will choose to stop losing money on Kindle sales at some point. They are just waiting for that shoe to drop. Hence the cheering for Barnes & Noble’s new reader, Nook. (Nook. Interesting name. Just asking, but what would you call a diminuitive version of the Nook?) Publishers are beyond eager for someone, anyone, to stop Amazon from completely owning ebooks!

Now let’s talk about those ten books that Wal-Mart and Target are offering for pre-orders at $8.99 and Amazon at $9.00. These are for hardcover books ranging in list price from Linda Howard’s Ice at $22 all the way up to Stephen King’s 1088 page monster Under the Dome that lists for a mighty $35. What is the meaning, if any, in these door-busting discounts?

Comes now (“Comes now” is a locution reserved for columnists who can’t find a better way to introduce a new character into a story. But I digress.) Motoko “Cassandra” Rich of the N.Y. Times in her “Price War” story in last Saturday’s paper, wherein she worries that Wal-Mart selling some pro-orders for books as a loss-leader will somehow “fundamentally damage the industry and the ability of future authors to write or publish books.” And, once more, end publishing as we know it.

To tell her story, Ms. Rich interviews bestselling author James Patterson, who she was apparently grateful to reach before her deadline, since she quotes him at length no matter how little light he has to shed upon the subject. Frankly, interviewing an author about retail price discounting is akin to interviewing a tuna about the price of a Salade Niçoise.

The fact is, publishers don’t really care what a retailer sells a book for. Retailers want to take a loss? No problem. What everyone needs to be concerned about, though, is when a Wal-Mart or Amazon pressures a publisher to sell at what is known as a “deep-discount.” That should set off alarms for authors and agents, since most author agreements call for author royalties to take a severe hit when the publisher sells at a deep discount.

Authors: Read your contracts! Find that “Deep Discount” clause. Does it say something to the effect that when the publisher sells your book for more than a 50% discount, the author royalty suddenly gets cut in half? Think about that. The publisher gives Barnes & Noble an extra 1% discount and you lose half your royalties on every book sold.

The big take-away here is that nine of the ten books being hacked down in price by Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart are fiction titles. Only one calls itself non-fiction. And this is the clue to smart book pricing. Fiction is generally sold as entertainment. Entertainment tends to be more fungible. Non-fiction is generally sold on the value of the information it contains. So pricing the two in the same way seems crazy.

How much would you pay for information that can change your life? Heal a child? Save your business? Is that information worth only $20? Is that all you’d pay for it?

We haven’t begun to touch value pricing for non-fiction. That is the real gold mine just waiting for publishers. We’ll write more about the potential and the theory of value pricing soon.

In the meantime, you have to wonder about the one non-fiction title that’s being treated just like all those other nine fiction titles being deep discounted. Yes, it’s Sarah Palin’s memoir. Now, if what she were about to disclose had great value, say information that could, in some way, save the Union, it certainly would be worth a lot. Some of us would pay real money for that kind of knowledge.

But Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon say we can have it all for just $8.99. Maybe they know something.