Author: A.T.

Well, the last word you’ll hear from me, anyway. The true “last word” will apparently be rendered by the Florida Supreme Court at some point, and then, if the Court lets the company proceed with its offshore drilling, the last word will be rendered by the success of the wells — if any do get drilled (it ain’t cheap to drill offshore, and Coastal has little more than the $6.7 million raised in the “rights” offering I described yesterday).

But here’s what I alluded to yesterday about Coastal Caribbean and the S.E.C.

A few years ago, I remember reading that Coastal Caribbean had raised some cash by selling a good chunk of its offshore drilling interest to Lykes somebody-or-other (a steel company?). Part of me was pleased by this news, since it showed I wasn’t entirely crazy — a big company had decided to take a flier on this gamble, too. It also suggested that Coastal might now have the backing to “stay the course” and realize its value (if any).

But another part of me was ticked. I don’t remember the exact terms, but what a sweetheart deal this seemed to be. How come they didn’t offer it to us poor lowly existing shareholders?

Well, the answer I was told last week, when I called the company for the first time ever to find out a little about it (“buy first, research 20 years later” has all too often been my motto) is that apparently the S.E.C. wouldn’t let them issue any more securities. The company’s situation seemed so precarious (and that article in The Wall Street Journal making fun of it may not have helped) that the S.E.C. wouldn’t approve any offerings. This despite the fact that the S.E.C. isn’t supposed to pass on the value or safety of securities offerings, merely on full disclosure of the risks.

I am not an S.E.C. basher, and wish they had more staff, not less. But here was one case where it seems to have hurt, not helped, the little guy. Lykes was able to get shares and options in a private, unregulated transaction that may well turn out to be a small bonanza. (Or may not, but so far so good.)

Anyway, please forget Coastal Caribbean. But don’t forget yesterday’s lessons about “rights offerings” should you ever encounter one. Real money could be involved.

Tomorrow: Bagels

Yesterday I went on endlessly about a ridiculous speculation I’ve long owned called Coastal Caribbean — CCO on the Boston Exchange (CCO BF is the symbol some quote systems use). I didn’t do so to recommend the stock, which is now a good deal higher than I paid for it. (I’ve been selling, not buying, recently, myself.) And I didn’t do it to brag that it had gone up. (Sure it had jumped from three-eighths to over two bucks a share. But I had first bought it 20 years ago, whereas you kids have gotten used to stocks jumping that much in the first three hours of their going public.)

No, I made you wade through all that so as to have a real life example to describe the joys of oversubscription. But first I have to explain “rights.”

Sometimes, a company you own will issue rights. You will get a notice that, say, for each six shares of Safeguard Scientific you own, you have been issued the right to buy one share of some new company it is spinning off for $5. (That’s an actual example. The rights were perceived as valuable, because Safeguard has a history of spinning off companies at $5 that quickly rise to $20.) Or you’ll get a notice that for each ten shares in a closed-end mutual fund that you own, you are getting the right to buy an additional one for a 5% discount. (That, too, is an actual example — and far less appealing.)

Rights offerings vary greatly. Some are irresistible, some not. And this is reflected in the market value of the rights themselves. If they are perceived as valuable, there will often — not always — be a market for them in the several weeks between the time they’re issued and the deadline for exercising them. You can either sell your rights to someone else, or exercise them. What you should not do, if they have any value, is just let them lapse. But inevitably some people will, either because they didn’t know about the rights offering or understand it, or because it wasn’t worth the effort. (There are those of us who’d spend 20 minutes haggling about a disputed $35 phone bill, but wouldn’t think twice about letting 1,000 rights expire if they were only worth three cents each.)

I’d guess rights often sell for less than their worth, because exercising them requires capital that not everyone can come up with. So some will just let them expire, while others will sell them but not care too much about the price — whatever they get is just a nice little bonus, like a dividend.

On the other side of the transaction, if the stock isn’t widely followed, there may not be a huge demand for the rights, whatever their theoretical value. Say a closed-end fund is selling for $10 and one right allows you to buy a share at $9.50. You might say that right is “worth” 50 cents and 100,000 of them should be worth $50,000 — except that the buyer is going to have to pay commissions to buy the rights, and then is going to have to come up with $950,000 to buy the shares, and then is going to have to pay another commission if he wants to sell those shares and realize his profit — and may have a heck of a time selling 100,000 shares without driving the price down. All of which would explain why a large institution wouldn’t want to scoop up everybody’s rights for 50 cents, even if they’re “worth” that in this example . . . and why, if you go to sell yours, you might get just a few pennies.

Anyway, that’s a little about rights. I guess they fall into two categories, for the most part: those that are really pretty trivial, like the closed-end fund offering I just described (meant mainly to expand the assets of the fund and the management fee of the fund manager); and the ones that are clearly valuable, like the Safeguard Scientific rights for which people have paid upwards of ten bucks each.

Clearly, when you receive rights, it pays to determine just what they’re worth, and — if they do have some value — not allow them to expire without selling or exercising them.

So now you know about rights. Let me tell you specifically about the recent Coastal Caribbean rights offering, because it’s a way to explain “oversubscription.”

Periodically, in order to finance its preposterous lawsuits and the president’s canoe trip, Coastal Caribbean needs to raise some money. Most recently, with the stock trading around 2-1/2 (and its main lawsuit, for the right to drill on its leaseholding actually going pretty well), it issued each of us holders one right for every 5 shares outstanding — so if you owned 1,000 shares, you received 200 rights — and these rights entitled you to buy an additional share for just $1.

On its face, you might conclude that each right was therefore worth $1.50. Certainly the right to “buy” 10 quarters for a dollar bill would fetch pretty close to $1.50 on almost any street corner (especially because we so frequently need quarters for the parking meter or the pay phone — but I digress).

But the first thing to note with Coastal Caribbean is that if the stock was worth $2.50 before the rights were exercised, it should be worth only $2.25 afterwards. Why? Well, look at it this way. Say the entire company had been divided into only 5 shares. (Actually, there were many millions.) Each was worth $2.50, for a total market valuation of $12.50. Now this rights offering, that allows you to buy another share of stock for $1 instead of $2.50, is completed and the only thing about the company’s value that has changed is that it has an extra $1 in cash — the money you paid to buy the new share. So now instead of being worth $12.50 divided among five shares, the company is worth $13.50 divided among six — $2.25 each.

So in that sense the rights were worth $1.25. They let you buy for $1 a share that would be worth $2.25 after you did.

But a right is worth only what someone’s willing to pay for it, and in any event, the stock had begun to fall sharply after the rights offering was announced, to around 1-5/8 — in part, perhaps, because people were telling their brokers, “Well, listen. I’m sure as heck not going to come up with $2,000 to exercise my 2,000 rights. So why don’t you just sell $2,000 worth of the stock now, and then use that money to exercise the rights. In fact, while you’re at it, why not sell $3,000 of the stock now. That’ll give me enough extra to pay tax on my gain and take the kids to Red Lobster.”

That would create selling pressure on the stock, and may be one reason it fell back from $2.50 to $1.625. Which made the rights far less valuable still.

Note that anyone who “just did nothing” would lose out because of “dilution.” When a company issues new shares, all the old shares are diluted. Each one now represents a slightly slimmer slice of the pie. Maybe this should be called “slimming” but it’s called dilution.

Anyway, I didn’t pay any attention to what the rights were trading for, because I knew no one would be dumb enough to pay me enough to make them worth selling (and paying tax on the sale). In fact, far from selling my rights to buy Coastal Caribbean at $1, I should probably have considered buying them — except that, as it turned out, these particular rights were “nontransferable.” Use ‘em or lose ‘em.

What I did do was to instruct my broker to “oversubscribe” for the maximum number of shares allowable. Here’s what that means. Each right allowed you to buy one additional share for $1, for sure, but also to “oversubscribe” for additional shares in case not all the rights were exercised.

In other words, the company wanted to be sure to raise the amount of money they had targeted, at $1 a share. If everybody exercised her rights, they would. But in the real world, some people are inevitably asleep at the switch. They will just let them expire. So in this particular deal, each right-holder could oversubscribe for up to 3 more shares per right. That is, if you had 1,000 rights, you could put in to buy your guaranteed allotment of 1,000 shares at $1 each, plus ask to buy up to 3,000 more. Chances are you wouldn’t get anything remotely like 3,000. But any leftover shares would be parceled out to people like you on a pro-rata basis.

This is a clear case of the rich getting richer, because not everyone can afford to come up with the full oversubscription price (which your broker will require, against the theoretical possibility that you would actually get the full number of shares you oversubscribed for). So lots of people don’t oversubscribe at all, or else oversubscribe for relatively few shares. You, who oversubscribed for the maximum, will get a disproportionate allotment of any such “left over” shares.

Am I making any sense?

It was possible, of course, that by the time the dust settled the stock would be down to 1, or even below. But at $2.50 or so when the rights offering was first announced, and even at $1.625, which is the lowest point it reached, it was unlikely it would plummet all the way to $1 and beyond. So the “oversubscription” aspect of this particular rights offering was about as close to free money as I can recall. I oversubscribed for the maximum and got, to my amazement, 42% of what I asked for. In other words, for each right, I got not just 1 share at $1 each but 1.42 shares at $1 each.

The rights offering expired in early June; the stock bounced back up to 2 5/8 almost immediately; and I was able to sell 10,000 shares for $2.625 that I had gotten for $1. (I just sold some more a few days ago at $2.25.)

Lessons:

• Not all rights offerings are this dramatic by any means, but whenever you get rights you should at least take the time to discover whether the deal is trivial or one you’d be a fool to ignore. Many of the Coastal Caribbean owners, judging from my success with the oversubscription, just didn’t bother to do this.

• When it’s a rights offering designed to be irresistible (either to reward shareholders and/or to be sure people exercise so the company raises the money it needs), consider oversubscribing to the max!

• Remember that if you don’t at least exercise your rights, you will be “diluted” — you’ll own the same number of shares, but a slimmer piece of the pie.

• Remember that if the rights have value and you don’t want to (or can’t afford to) exercise them, you may be able to sell them — but will likely get for them less than they’re worth (and have taxes to pay).

• And remember, finally, that in order to come up with the cash needed to exercise the rights, you can always sell some of your existing shares first (although that may expose you to capital gains tax).

Tomorrow I’ll tell you one more thing about Coast Caribbean I learned in checking out this comment. It shows that the S.E.C., in its efforts to protect us (which I applaud) is not infallible.

A long, long time ago, when you were very young, I began buying shares of Coastal Caribbean Corp., traded — no less — on the Boston Stock Exchange. (I know. You didn’t realize Boston had a stock exchange. Well it does. And unlike the Cincinnati exchange, which is in Chicago, the Boston exchange is in Boston.)

These purchases fell under the rubric of “do as I say, not as I do,” since the last thing any sane person would have done then (or would be doing now) is to buy shares of Coastal Caribbean. It is a company that doesn’t do anything. All it has is leases to drill for oil and gas under about a billion acres of land off the West Coast of Florida, where you’re not allowed to drill, and under things like the Everglades, where you’re not allowed to drill, either. And it has a couple of big lawsuits, one against the State of Florida for not allowing it to drill, another against some giant companies for an ancient dispute over something or other I vaguely recall relates to fertilizer. (Oops—I just checked. They lost that one.)

So this is basically me violating all my rules of sensible investing. It’s a pure speculation, a gamble that one day . . . one day . . . ONE GLORIOUS DAY! . . . my ship will come in. It’s kind of like a rich man’s lottery ticket, except I’m not so rich (and certainly wasn’t when I started buying this junk), and the odds aren’t necessarily bad, as they are in the lottery. They may be bad, but that’s not a clear mathematical fact.

The stock does have two things going for it. First, no one follows it, and the only story I remember seeing about it was an A-head a few years back in The Wall Street Journal making fun of it. (The A-head is what the Journal calls that middle column reserved for stories about animals and people who can twist their noses into funny shapes.) I forget how long ago this story was, maybe five years, but it featured the company’s president (one of a total of two employees, if I remember right, the other being his secretary) canoeing down some nearly-dry mosquito-plagued Florida “river” trying to establish, for the purposes of one of its lawsuits, that it was “navigable.” Because if it was, then that would prove . . . something. And the Journal sent a guy to record the folly. I just remember that it was a funny story, the basic slant of which was that, even at whatever lofty price it had by then climbed to — possibly even a dollar — the stock was a joke.

I had begun buying it at 37.5 cents about 20 years ago. Sure, it wasn’t General Electric. But with the money I had 20 years ago, I could only buy 7 shares of General Electric. I could buy 1,000 shares of Coastal Caribbean. At some point Coastal Caribbean got up to 75 cents and I cashed out.

Then in 1991 I noticed it back around 37.5 cents and, now a little less poor, bought 10,000 shares. And then 25,000 more in 1992 at fifty cents. And 20,000 more in 1993 at 43.75 cents (“seven-sixteenths”). I know you’re not supposed to fall in love with your stock (“because it doesn’t know you love it,” as Adam Smith long ago explained). But imagine being able to say you own 55,000 shares of something! Picture Treat Williams in The Phantom when he gets to hold that third magic skull. “I LOVE THIS,” he roars with exultation.

And the thing was, while I knew it was a wild speculation, there was a second thing Coastal had going for it. The first, as I say, was that no one paid any attention to it (or else laughed). The second was impatience. Most people are impatient. If you tell them that there’s some stock that’s 50 cents now and has almost no prospect of going anywhere soon . . . but that in ten years a lawsuit might finally be resolved that could make the stock $8 . . . they will (perhaps quite sensibly) roll their eyes and buy something else. “Remind me in nine years,” they will say. Never mind that if the stock actually were $8 a share ten years later, that would have represented a 32% compounded annual rate of return.

So where logic or math might ascribe a higher value, the demand for stocks that require great patience falls short of their supply. Hence, it might be argued, those stocks are sometimes cheap.

Not for a minute, of course, am I suggesting this stock is headed for $8, let alone in 10 years. Sure, the Alaskan Indians got their billion-dollar settlement, or whatever it was; but wasn’t it like 100 years in the making? It’s been 20 years since I first bought Coastal Caribbean, and after the first 17 of those 20, as I say, it was about the same three-eighths or seven-sixteenths of a dollar as when I first stumbled onto it.

In a sense, the market was valuing the stock higher and higher, because over those years the company would periodically sell more shares to raise the money to pay the president and buy him that canoe and, mainly, to pay the lawyers. So the company was divided into more and more shares (currently 40 million or so) each of which was still commanding nearly half a buck apiece.

Now may be a great time to sell, because it’s over two bucks a share. Indeed, last year for a minute it got up over three, and on the way up (or was it down?) I unloaded some at 2-5/8.

But this long, long story is just a set-up to tell you about “rights” and “rights offerings.” Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you how they work and describe the joys of oversubscription.

Yesterday I described a $5,000 life insurance policy from Mutual of Omaha that might appeal to an ailing senior citizen of limited financial means. It was hardly the “great news” the letter proclaimed had befallen me (I had been pre-approved!), but neither was it the worst mail-order insurance deal I’ve seen.

(Flight insurance offers, for example, are geared to pay out something under a dime in benefits for each dollar of premium collected. And flight insurance is normally superfluous anyway. You’ve got your regular life insurance, I hope; you may have additional insurance from the credit card with which you purchased the ticket; and you’ve got a big lawsuit against the airline or aircraft manufacturer for allowing the unscheduled landing. Why buy even more coverage, especially when it costs a dollar for each nickel’s-worth of expected benefits?)

Anyway, that was yesterday. Today I want to describe the other Mutual of Omaha offer I received. This one, which arrived the same day, was billed merely as “good news,” not great — namely, that I’d been pre-approved for a policy guaranteeing my heirs of $60,000 if I should die as the result of a “covered accident.”

Heck. Sounded pretty great to me!

Granted, it wasn’t really $60,000. It was $25,000 at death plus $500 a month for five years plus a final $5,000. To Mutual of Omaha, if they can earn 10% a year on their investments, that makes their true pay-out more like $52,000. But what do you want for $4.95 a month?

(And that rate is GUARANTEED not to rise. Unless it rises. They make a big deal out of the fact that they can’t single you out and raise YOUR rate. But they can raise EVERYBODY’S rates any time they need to.)

Granted, too, the policy excludes suicide and death in the military or a declared or undeclared war, or while piloting a plane or committing a felony — stuff like that.

But what impressed me, especially if it’s fairly calculated, is that right there in the fine print is a disclosure of “the odds.” According to the offer, they expect to pay out in benefits 59% of the money they collect in premiums. Well, 59.02% to be misleadingly precise.

My guess is that this does not take into account “the time value of money” — i.e., gives no weight to the important notion that they will have use of the premiums for quite a while, on average, before they have to pay the money out. I’d also guess they’re being conservative in the assumptions underlying this calculation (since they have no incentive not to). So maybe the true odds are for a pay-out more like 40% or 50% of collected premiums.

Still, their disclosure tells you more or less what you need to know, and they should be applauded for making it (or the regulators should be applauded for requiring it). First, it tells you that this policy is far better than those flight-insurance policies geared to pay out less than ten cents for every dollar in premiums. Second that the pay-out’s no worse than the lottery (except that to get your money you have to be dead). Third, that you’d be far better off putting your money in the bank, where the pay-out is more than $1 for every dollar you put in.

If you need life insurance, you’ll do better buying a policy that covers any kind of death, not just accidental death.

If you do buy a policy like this, be sure to let your heirs KNOW, so they can collect. And from then on, when they serve you food, have them taste it first.

Monday: Easy Money: The Right to Oversubscribe – Part I

Most of my days are pretty good, knock wood. I am a lucky man. But imagine what a good day it was recently when I got not one but two “Pre-Approved” offers from Mutual of Omaha.

The first was described as “good news!” and concerned an accidental death policy for which I had been preapproved. (Anyone who does not subscribe to Modern Motorcycle or Skydiving!, I suspect, is pre-approved.) I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

The second, for which I had also been approved, was described as “great news!” To wit:

“Here’s great news! If you’re a woman age 50 to 75 [I am not] or a man age 50 to 72 [nope] you can choose from four valuable life insurance plans.”

What makes this such good news is that no matter how ill you are, you qualify for this insurance — up to $5,000.

Granted, like most life insurance policies, it doesn’t cover suicide for the first two years (lest, realizing how little $5,000 is really going to mean to your heirs, you become depressed and shoot yourself). And granted, there are no benefits if you should die of natural causes during the first two years (lest this offer be a magnet to the terminally ill). Your heirs would simply get a refund of the premiums you paid (plus 25% the first year, 100% the second).

But beyond that, if you keel, they pay.

And all it costs you is $336 a year if you’re a 62-year-old male (to take one example) or $186 if you’re a 52-year-old woman (to take another).

Not to be patronizing about this. There clearly are people for whom $5,000 (or even the $2,000 minimum policy, which costs a 75-year-old woman $232.80 a year) really matters. It could be the difference between a “proper” burial and something less.

But according to the Life Expectancy module in Managing Your Money (DOS V12), a 62-year-old male who smokes and never exercises and is in “fair” health with “worrisome” finances (or else why would he even be considering this offer?), with “mixed” family longevity, who never wears seat belts when driving, is still likely to live another 15 years.

So if he pays $336 a year that could otherwise earn him, say, 6% in some long-term CD, he would after 15 years have forfeited what could otherwise have grown to be $7,820.

In truth, it’s not a bad deal for such a pint-size policy. But it’s not bad for Mutual of Omaha, either. While YOU might be able to earn only 6%, Mutual of Omaha might expect to earn 9% or more — meaning that to them, after 15 years (but before marketing costs and overhead), your premiums would have swelled not just to $7,820 but to $9,865.

And yes, some of the people who sign up for this stuff will NOT be smokers, and WILL wear their seat belts and take daily walks. Managing Your Money puts the life expectancy of a 62-year-old male like that at 24 years, which means $25,800 for Mutual of Omaha (less marketing costs and overhead), of which they’d pay your heirs $5,000.

Bottom line: if you feel you need life insurance and can’t afford to buy in larger, more economical amounts, this life policy is actually not too bad for someone in poor health or with a family history of dying young.

Otherwise, you should be able to get more coverage for the same money. Or you might simply want to take your chances and just set aside the same money every month in a savings account. Odds are, your heirs will wind up with a lot more when you’re gone . . . and you retain the flexibility of being able to spend that money on yourself, if they should predecease you or wear out their welcome.

Tomorrow: More Good News

CONSUMERWORLD! Just click here and you’re at a wonderfully simple, well-organized jumping-off point to just about everything. Eleven hundred websites, linking to thousands more.

I have made this my new “Home Page,” for when AT&T Worldnet first logs me on to the Internet, because from here I can get so many places so easily.

Want to buy some ballpoint pens? Click SHOP TIL YOU DROP, as I just did, then select Office Max (the Staples site is there, too, but currently “under construction”) . . . I found exactly the brand I wanted. UPS delivered them a few days later.

Want to list your house for sale, or take a look at others’ listings? You’ll find a link to the For Sale By Owner site in the SHOP TIL YOU DROP section, also. So far, there aren’t many listings. But heck, Century 21 is still four years off!

While I was writing this I remembered a novel someone urged me to buy. Corelli something-or-other. Don’t know the author or publisher or title. A few clicks, Corelli’s Mandolin! A few more clicks and a credit card and I’ll have it next week (or overnight if I want to pay extra).

Want to select a CD? Buy a car? Browse the L.L. Bean or Sharper Image or Computer Express or International Male catalogs? Brookstone? FAO Schwartz? North Carolina Furniture? Tupperware? It’s all here. And that’s just SHOP TIL YOU DROP!

The CONSUMER AGENCIES button opens a gateway to everything from the +Better Business Bureau to the Environmental Protection Agency to your own state’s consumer protection agency to the U.S. Postal Service . . . but organized in a very friendly, not-overwhelming way.

The CONSUMER RESOURCES button takes you to a zillion interesting things . . . which take you to a zillion more. For example, one of the many CONSUMER RESOURCES “directories” is the Advertising directory from the University of Texas. Click that and you get an index of dozens of topics, from +Actors and Models to Outdoor Signs (click to find a company that will make or display one for you) to Consumer Psychology to Tobacco Advertising to dozens of others. And this is just one tiny piece of the CONSUMER RESOURCES button of CONSUMERWORLD.

The COMPANY CONNECTION takes you to an alphabetical list from American Airlines and Burpee (“answers all your gardening questions”) on through Walgreens, Weight Watchers and Whirlpool. Some sites, needless to say, are more exciting or useful than others. But what a handy way to shoot to whichever one you want.

And that still leaves three or four other buttons to explore — TRAVEL AND LEISURE, MONEY AND CREDIT, BARGAINS, INTERNET WONDERS (including, from New Zealand, the world’s first automatic wedding speech writer).

Really, the thing is misnamed. It’s not CONSUMERWORLD. It’s: THE WHOLE WORLD. And my new home page.

I was re-reading 30 Simple Things You Can Do to Save Energy, by the Earth-Works Group, authors, also, of 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth.

Did you know:

• A microwave is a lot more energy efficient than a regular oven at cooking small things, but less efficient for big things like a turkey? So just forget about that old-fashioned microwave Thanksgiving you had planned.

• “Long-life” incandescent bulbs are actually less efficient than regular ones. It’s the newer, much more expensive compact fluourescents that are so great for the environment. And they really do work. I use them in places that don’t need bright light but are left on a lot. (No point putting one in a closet. The $15 cost of the bulb, which will last three centuries if you only use it a few minutes a day, is wasted.) I have one outside my door, left on all night every night. A low wattage is plenty bright at night. The bulbs use only about 25% as much energy as regular ones of the same brightness, and last 10 times as long.

• You don’t need to leave your air conditioner on all day to have a cool house when you get home.” Just have it switch on half an hour ahead of time. “Put a timer on your room air conditioner,” advises 30 Simple Things, “or use a programmable thermostat on your central unit.

• A full refrigerator is more efficient, because food retains cold better than air does. (If you plan to defrost something for tomorrow, stick it in the refrigerator now, rather than on the counter tomorrow . . . the frozen item will help cool the refrigerator as it thaws.)

• There are 20 million waterbeds in the U.S. (No! could that be true? and 20 million pairs of bell bottom pants?). Heating them takes a lot of energy (as does bouncing around on them, if I recall correctly). If you have one of these things, make your bed! Leaving them uncovered, says the book, lets the heat dissipate.

• Pool blankets cut pool-heater energy consumption by 40% to 70%.

• Spark-ignition gas stoves can save 40% over the ones where the pilot light runs all the time. I got the handyman to turn off the pilot-light valve in my old stove, and, lacking “spark ignition,” resort to what’s known in pyrotechnical circles as “a match.” Of course, I suppose it takes some energy to manufacture a match . . .

• Reversible ceiling fans provide a “wind chill” in the summer and recycle hot air back down toward your toes in the winter. Just don’t install them in low-ceilinged rooms. Thwock. Thwock. Thwock.

Why didn’t I think of that!

I was probably one of the very first to buy a book via the Internet and an outfit called “Amazon.com.” And the minute I did, I just knew this one would be a keeper.

It’s annoying, because when I have an insight like that (which is rare), I’d like to profit from it. Buy the stock or something. (Sorry. It’s a private company.)

But at least it became a convenient way for me to buy books . . . and also, in my job, a convenient reference tool even if I had nothing to buy. (Such and such author going to be at dinner tonight? Hmm — check out the books she’s written by looking them up on Amazon.com.)

Then a couple of months ago the Wall Street Journal wrote all this up and their Internet server has been scuttling around the dance floor like a whirling dervish (this is the sum total of my understanding of how these things work).

But my guess is, even if you read the Journal story, you may not have tried it.

Well, click here and, if you are a book-buyer, go through the process of setting up an account. Thereafter, if you choose to buy anything, it’s really easy — and often discounted by more than enough to cover the shipping cost.

The “search” options are flexible and easy to get the hang of. You’ll get your choice of hardcover or paperback when both are available, your choice of shipping methods, free gift wrap — I mean, they are really doing this thing right.

You won’t be able to sit and read, and maybe meet a fellow book lover, as you can at Barnes & Noble superstores. But for many purposes, Amazon.com is really handy.

So how DO we profit from this? I’m not sure we can. (Well, we can always enjoy the books, of course.)

I guess Amazon.com is good for the book publishing industry, who will sell more books and bad for the traditional bookstores. But I don’t think the effect on any of them is reason enough to go long or short.

I do own some FedEx stock, because I think the Internet means millions and millions of extra shipments of books and everything else that you current carry home from a store but one day will arrive at your door via FedEx. I’d own UPS too, if it were public.

I wouldn’t short the bookstore chains because I’m not sure it’s a zero-sum game. Yes, people have only so much time to read books. But buying a book doesn’t mean you have to read it. I don’t get to read even a fraction of all the books I buy. So to a certain extent, Amazon.com will surely steal business from the chains. But lounging around a Barnes & Noble superstore is becoming quite a popular form of entertainment of a Friday evening, too, so I wouldn’t bet against them any time soon.

I predict a new word. I should probably try to trademark it or something and not just predict it, or get the 800 rights (1-800-CLICKLE), but here it is anyway:

Clickle.

Because isn’t that what everyone’s working to come up with on the Internet — some way to charge a dime or a nickel or perhaps even just a penny or two for access to a particular page? You’d come to a page, which would show a dialog “access costs a penny” and you could either click to proceed, to go back — or to proceed and “don’t slow me down with this message again unless you raise your price.”

What does it cost to see one of these pages? Just a clickle. Sort of a high-tech cross between trifle and nickel. The universal monetary unit of the Internet.

And although to any given user a clickle’d be just a few cents or a nickel, the accumulated clickle trickle could become a flood. For it would come not just from U.S. nickels, but from Russian rubles, Arabian rials, Israeli shekels and Polynesian pickles (or whatever the Balinese call their loose change).

I know an access charge will make people stickle. But you watch. When a simple click’ll get them where they want to go, they’ll soon be dropping clickles without a second thought. You mark my word.

(The implications are not all bad, incidentally. Say its five years from now, when TV and the Internet are all integrated somehow. There’s a show like Fox’s Profit you really enjoy, but that has to be dropped for insufficient ratings. Aha! What if they could keep it going by supplementing ad dollars with clickles? I, for one, would gladly have dropped a few clickles to see another episode.)