Summer bargain alert! Come Friday, you can treat yourself to 24,199 pages of electronic messages sent between Sarah Palin, her husband/snowmobile maintenance man, Todd, and various Alaska state officials, for the low, low price of $725.97. (Sorry, no Palin-to-English dictionary included.)

The emails date back to the 21-month stretch that Palin spent as an actual governor, not just someone who calls herself a governor. Like other popular Palin works, P-Mails: Palin Goes Up on the Internet has been marked down quite a bit from its original asking price:

The state at first quoted prices as high as $15 million for the records, but the price is now down to 3 cents a page, or $725.97 for a set of the records. The state plans to release the documents at the door to the governor's office, and to provide handtrucks to help the reporters and citizens get the documents to the car. Other copies are being shipped to requesters in Anchorage and elsewhere.

Three cents is a pretty good deal. Of course, Alaska could make the set totally free for everyone by producing an electronic copy of all the emails and sending the set to people over the Internet, but they said no to that plan (gratuitous tree death makes liberals mad). MSNBC, Pro Publica, and Mother Jones will digitally scan all the pages, because they're pro-labor. And Tina Fey will do the audio book (possibly).

[MSNBC]