Presumably, Google (GOOG) will use it to keep energy costs down by hedging power consumption against market movements. But as I’ve noted here before, the authorization also gives Google the ability to “act as a power marketer, purchasing electricity and reselling it to wholesale customers.” And the company has established a subsidiary called Google Energy. But Google insists its ambitions don’t extend beyond its own energy needs. As spokesperson Niki Fenwick told me in January, “[this] does not signal our intent to operate as a retail provider of electricity.”

I suppose not. After all, while Google doesn’t operate any power generation or transmission facilities. Well, not yet, anyway.

Translated into more practical terms, this means Hachette will demand that Amazon (AMZN) and other retailers–but really, this is aimed at Amazon–raise the prices on their e-books from the $9.99 standard they’ve adopted. Instead, the publisher will want them to use the $12.99-$14.99 standard for new books, which Apple (AAPL) introduced last week along with its iPad.

Hachette is one of five publishers that participated in Apple’s iPad launch event last week. Macmillan, one of the other five, has spent the past week engaged in a public battle with Amazon over the pricing model. On Sunday, Amazon said it would capitulate to Macmillan’s demands.

Macmillan and Amazon have yet to actually resolve their dispute, though, and as of Thursday night, Amazon was still not selling Macmillan’s books on its electronic shelves.

In Thursday’s New York Times, Macmillan advertised one of its titles by noting that it is available “at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.” Macmillan CEO John Sargent also defended his position, again, in an open letter to his book agents.

Meanwhile, look for the other three publishers that have allied with Apple–Pearson’s Penguin Group, News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins and CBS’s (CBS) Simon & Schuster–to fall in line. On Tuesday, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said he expected to renegotiate his publisher’s deal with Amazon soon.

Again, it’s important to remember that by embracing the agency model, the publishers will actually make less per book than they do with the current version, whereby they sell the books at a wholesale price. But the publishers think this is their only chance to keep the prices of e-books from plummeting and undercutting sales of their ink-and-paper books.

The publishers hope this strategy will help them escape the fate of the music labels, which saw their $15 CDs replaced by $1 singles. To hear a (mostly) persuasive argument about why they’re wrong, check out this blog post from David Pakman, a digital music veteran now working as a venture capitalist with Venrock.

Less than two days after pulling books published by Macmillan in a dispute over e-book pricing, Amazon has conceded.

The world’s dominant e-commerce company says it has agreed to Macmillan’s demands to sell its e-books at a higher price–and in doing so, has made a tacit admission that e-book prices will rise across the board.

That’s because most of the industry’s big players have embraced a similar plan, advanced by Apple (AAPL) to support its iPad launch, to sell e-books for $12.99 and $14.99 instead of the $9.99 Amazon (AMZN) had been pushing.

In an extraordinary statement published on Amazon’s site, the retailer says that it “will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”

No word yet from the other big publishers that have sided with Apple in the e-book pricing war–Pearson’s Penguin Group, News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and CBS’s (CBS) Simon & Schuster. But keep in mind Steve Jobs’s all-knowing pronouncement about Amazon and Apple e-books: “The prices will be the same.”

Also bear in mind that publishers will actually make less money with the Apple pricing plan. Under the old plan, they sold books to Amazon for around $15 wholesale, and Amazon took a loss in order to retail them for $9.99. Under the new plan, the publishers will get closer to $10 per book.

But the publishers are so freaked out by the parable of the music labels, in which Apple replaced $15 CDs with $1 songs, that they are willing to take the hit in order to maintain some control of their digital pricing.

Odd as this sounds, there’s logic to it, since e-book sales will be small for some time and publishers think that this strategy will help keep the prices up when buyers really do embrace digital.

(Aside: The notion that digital pricing should be dirt cheap simply because it doesn’t cost publishers–or music labels, or Hollywood studios, or whatever–very much to distribute bits, is facile. If you don’t believe me, try ordering a vegetarian entree the next time you go out to dinner, and then tell your waiter you refuse to pay full price because you know that vegetables cost much less than meat. It may be dumb for publishers to try to keep digital prices high, but it’s equally stupid to demand that they lower them on principle.)

It will be interesting to see what Kindle buyers make of the impending price hike, particularly since so many of them are price-conscious consumers who prefer to pay nothing at all for their books.

Quite a change from the profit of $1.24 billion, or 43 cents a share, the carrier reported in the quarter a year ago.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters (TRI) had been expecting earnings of 54 cents a share on $27.33 billion in revenue.

Revenue from Verizon’s (VZ) wireline services declined 3.9 percent to $11.5 billion. But data revenue rose 31 percent, to $16 billion. And wireless data revenue accounted for 32 percent of all service revenue, up from 26.5 percent a year earlier.

“Today’s 4Q results were eye-opening, if only because of the magnitude of the divergence,” Bernstein analyst Craig Moffet said in a research note issued after earnings. “Amidst an aggressive campaign to reinforce their positioning as the best-in-class network, and no doubt aided by AT&T’s well-publicized network travails, Verizon Wireless pulled away, with a solid 1.15M subscriber gain in post-paid and, more surprisingly, a huge opportunistic 1.0M subscriber gain in wholesale.”

But, Moffett cautioned, “…Wireline results were at least as weak as Wireless was strong, and Wireline remains the company’s center of gravity. Notable in the Wireline results were a worsening of trends in the legacy copper business and–perhaps worse–a serious miss in the growth of their FiOS business as well….Overall, we think the results must be judged as something of a disappointment.”

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, December 2006

“Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that’s the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.”

– Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, January 2007

At 37.9 percent, Nokia’s share of the global handset market is the largest in the industry. Odd then to learn that it is not the most profitable. And odder still to learn that that honor belongs to Apple, which has been in the handset market for just two years.

According to Strategy Analytics, Apple’s third-quarter iPhone operating profit was $1.6 billion, while Nokia’s was $1.1 billion. Driving Apple’s profits: Strong sales, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls.

“We have identified at least 4 key factors underlying Apple’s success,” Strategy Analytics analyst Alexander Spektor explains. “First, Apple created a simple sub-brand–the iPhone–which was memorable and easy to remember. Second, the firm developed an attractive family of models with standout usability that enabled Apple to charge way-above-average prices to operators and consumers. Third, Apple distributed and co-marketed its handsets through top-tier carriers in numerous high-value countries. And fourth, the vendor has kept a solid grip on production costs by working with Foxconn, the world’s largest contract handset manufacturer.”

Quite an achievement for Apple (AAPL) and a major humiliation for Nokia (NOK), which has seen its dominance eroded by the likes of Apple and Research in Motion (RIMM), and not just in North America, but in Europe. Indeed, in its latest quarter Nokia’s smart-phone market share dropped by six points.

As Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston noted at the time, “[Nokia has] no iPhone killer to drive a major revival in its smartphone volumes. [It] is still struggling in the U.S. smartphone market, and with competition intensifying in China as well, Nokia’s battles can only get tougher in 2010.”

Squires has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet.

The idea: The new company, which will operate independently from the publishers that invest in it, will create a digital storefront where consumers can purchase and manage their subscriptions, which can be delivered to any device. The pitch: Control a direct relationship with consumers while gaining leverage with heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN).

Industry executives briefed on Squires’s plan say it has been well received by Time Inc.’s peers and that several major publishers, including Hearst and Condé Nast, are expected to sign on for the JV, which isn’t scheduled to debut until 2010. No comment from Hearst, Condé Nast or Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner (TWX).

Many of the venture’s big details have yet to be hammered down. At one point, for instance, Time Inc. had explored the idea of including newspapers in the new company’s offering, sources say. The JV may also want to include a noncontent partner as an investor, as Hulu did with Providence Equity and as Vevo, the “Hulu for music” JV that Universal Music is creating with Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, plans to do. That approach is supposed to appease antitrust regulators’ worries about a group of content companies banding together.

But the rough outlines of Squires’s plan are attractive enough to publishers, who are hopeful that mobile devices like the Kindle will create a new market for them. And if that market does show up, they want to make sure they’re the ones in charge of sales and distribution. That’s been a huge problem for the music industry, whose digital sales are essentially controlled by Apple. And it has already cropped up as a point of contention with Amazon, which currently handles sales for all content delivered via its Kindle reader.

Other selling points for the JV: The ability to set standards for mobile content and the ability to integrate advertising into the publications. One thing the company isn’t supposed to do: Create an e-reader itself.

The takeaway, via a Time Inc. presentation that has circulated among publishers: “our destiny with readers, advertisers and distributors … [is] in our hands.”

Of course, there are plenty of hurdles facing the joint venture, starting with the fact that media joint ventures have a checkered record at best (though Hearst and Condé, for instance, have already partnered on Comag, a wholesale distribution company). But there are bigger problems for Squires and company. For instance:

• They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.
• They’ll  have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.
• They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

So what exactly will the JV be selling? That’s probably the most difficult question for publishers to answer, made even more difficult because they don’t know what capabilities the e-readers of the future will boast. Apple for instance, refuses to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device, let alone provide them with specs.

But publishers feel they’ve got nothing to lose by trying. “We know that traditional magazines are going away, and that magazines on the Web don’t work,” says a publishing executive working on the plan. “But this gives us a chance to serve the reader who will pay for content, and provide advertising that really works. Can you think of a better idea?”

This week I took a look at some options for people who want to get rid of old electronics, one way or another. The good news is that there are a handful of Web sites that make it easy to do this — and some of them may even pay you for your old products. The bad news is that you’ll likely receive only a fraction of what you originally paid, especially if you waited a while to get rid of it.

Some sites, like Gazelle.com and VenJuvo.com, offer cash for your items and/or will recycle products. Another site, TechForward.com, lets people pay a fee to “lock in” a value for how much the site promises to pay for the product in the future. MyBoneYard.com accepts only laptops, desktop PCs, cellphones and flat-panel monitors, and gives Visa (V) gift cards rather than cash.

I was surprised to receive significantly different value offers from Gazelle and VenJuvo when trying to sell the exact same products on each site. In one instance, VenJuvo offered me $30 more than Gazelle for a digital camera; another time, I got $15 more from Gazelle for an old Apple (AAPL) iPod. It’s worth the extra step to shop around at more than one of these sites before getting rid of something.

Both ask a few questions about the item, including its condition and whether or not it still has the accessories that originally came with it. Gazelle determines a product’s value using retail — think Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) — and wholesale channels; VenJuvo uses similar criteria and also looks at competitors’ prices.

If you worry about someone stealing your digital data, you’ll likely not feel comfortable dropping something in the mail that’s chock full of personal information, especially if it no longer powers on to allow the owner to wipe this information.

Both Gazelle and VenJuvo accept at least some types of digital cameras, laptops, MP3 players, GPS devices, camcorders and gaming consoles. Gazelle also accepts cellphones. But they don’t take everything. Gazelle doesn’t take LCD TVs and VenJuvo doesn’t accept satellite radios and portable hard drives or any smartphones or cellphones other than the iPhone; neither accepts desktop PCs.

I took the closest look at newly released Gazelle, owned by Second Rotation Inc., and walked through the simple start-to-finish process of selling a gadget and receiving money from the site. After pulling up the site, people can find their product and its value by choosing from a list of nine categories or by typing some part of the product’s name into a search box.

I sold Gazelle a first-generation iPod Mini with four gigabytes of memory for which my boss paid $249 in 2004. I answered a few questions about the product: Yes, it still powered on; no, I didn’t have the original AC adapter, manuals or software installation CD, and it was in “excellent” condition, according to my assessment. Gazelle placed its value at $25.

At this step, I opted to add the iPod to my box and check out, but users can also add other items to a box, including electronics for recycling. Gazelle’s policy is that it pays 100% of shipping costs for any box shipped to the company, so long as there’s at least one item in the box worth $1. Eighty percent of transactions qualify for a free box; the rest can be sent with printed-out prepaid shipping labels, but you must find packaging.

Gazelle lets users receive payments via a mailed, paper check or using PayPal; money is received either way within five business days. People can also donate their money to one of 23 causes, including the American Red Cross and World Vision. I opted for PayPal, and the $25 amount was deposited shortly after Gazelle received the iPod.

I sent the old iPod to Gazelle in a brightly colored, empty box that arrives at a customer’s door a few days after he or she sells the device to Gazelle. I secured the old iPod in the box using balled up paper, and sealed it with packing tape. A prepaid shipping label was already stuck to it, and I needed only drop it off at UPS.

If Gazelle receives a product and decides that it isn’t worth what you said it was — either more or less — and you’d rather not sell, the company will ship the product back, free of charge. But while Gazelle’s site guarantees users that they’ll receive their money, and that personal data are safe with the company, no money-back guarantee is offered.

Gazelle hopes to calm nerves by posting detailed instructions on the site about how to wipe a device of all private information. But the company hasn’t yet done this, and numerous users will remain skeptical even with such instructions.

I also poked around on VenJuvo Inc.’s Web site of the same name, www.VenJuvo.com, which is derived from two Greek words meaning “support, assist and delight sellers,” according to the company. This site, too, buys products back from people, though it pays via check, PayPal or Kmart (SHLD) gift card. Users fill out similarly simple questionnaires on each product to help assess value. Unlike Gazelle’s style of mailing boxes to users, VenJuvo gives users only prepaid shipping labels to print out and stick on a box that the customer must supply.

One notable difference between the sites is Gazelle’s broader range of products. In the case of digital cameras, for example, Gazelle accepts 80 brands while VenJuvo takes only Canon (CAJ), Sony (SNE), Olympus and Kodak (EK). Unlike with Gazelle, if you send VenJuvo a product that isn’t worth what you said it was, the company won’t return the product free-of-charge; instead, it will charge you for shipping.

If users choose to receive a gift card, they get a 10% added value. While VenJuvo doesn’t let people donate a product’s value to a cause, it will add this feature next week and will include different causes (like Ronald McDonald House and Big Brothers Big Sisters) than those found on Gazelle.

Unlike Gazelle, VenJuvo will always take items for recycling and will pay for the shipping, regardless of whether you traded something in for a value.

A useful resource for general electronics recycling is the Consumer Electronics Association Web site, www.MyGreenElectronics.org, which locates nearby electronics-recycling centers according to ZIP Code. And almost every computer manufacturer has a recycling program in place; some will even recycle computers that aren’t their own brand.

One way or another, it’s time to clean out the old junk drawer. Just be sure to do some comparison shopping if you want money for your old products.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com