Publishing types have been buzzing all week about Adam L. Penenberg‘s long Fast Company article about Amazon.com, Inc. and the future of the book.

The article explores the company’s $9.99 pricing structure for many Kindle books, an arrangement that reportedly creates a loss for Amazon as publishers are “earning between $12 and $13 per e-book.” Despite the Amazon-centric focus, this GalleyCat editor spotted a nugget of Apple intelligence, as Penenberg examined the company’s patent for a tablet device and an intriguing screen design–another of the fabled “Kindle-killers.”

Here’s more from the article: “a recent patent application, listing as lead inventors Steve Hotelling, the man behind Apple’s multitouch-screen patents for the iPhone, and Jonathan Ive, [Steve Jobs]‘s design guru, includes a multitouch e-book technology. U.S. patent application No. 20080204426 (‘Gestures for Touch Sensitive Input Devices’) describes a method to ‘simulate a finger turning the page in an actual paper-bound book.’”