Making Nod offs available as downloads

Many thanks for your replies to the competition. For those of you who didn't enter, but would like to know the answer, it is La Ciociara (the literal translation is 'the woman from Ciociara' - a region of Lazio near Rome, see more image). The winners have been their prizes.

This week we are working on making the Nod offs available as downloads - both the CD and the booklet. It will make it easier for people to put them straight onto their ipods, mp3 players and phones. We may also make the booklet for sale as an actual physical item. Although an e-book is fine for reading from a screen, nothing beats the ease of a booklet that you can slip into your pocket or bag and dip in and out of when you want.

The great e-debate rumbles on in the background and how you make money from the Web. The Murdoch dynasty are planning to charge people for accessing their newspaper websites and are annoyed at the BBC whose own website is free (courtesy of public money). But nobody seems to expect to pay for information from the Web, so who knows if it will work.

And then again, if the average someone stays at a website is 60 seconds, who wants to waste time having to log in, etc. The pay-for-news will have to be very attractive for people to bother.

Until publishers forget about flogging what they have and finding out what customers wish they had (the tricky bit as the customer itself doesn't know what this might be), then there won't be much money to be made. Apple are probably the company that does this best.

Time for a competition and to win a prize

The first three people to email me (see website for address) with the Italian name of Alberto Moravia's book that was made into a film starring Sophia Loren will get a copy of Nod off in Italian.

When you email, remember to include your mailing address. The competition is open to the whole wide world.

Good luck!

ps Sophia Loren must be one of my all time favourite actors. I even kept a scrapbook of her pictures as a child.

nearly forgot ...

The Nod offs are now published in America under the McGraw-Hill imprint and called Relax and Learn. You can find them on Amazon.com. So welcome to any visitors from over the Pond.

Back to School

Not my marketing campaign, but my daughters. Here in Scotland schools went back today. It seems obscenely early given that the Italians have just celebrated Ferragosto' (an Italian holiday celebrated on August 15. Originally, it was related to a celebration of the middle of the summer and the end of the hard labour in the fields - Wikipedia).

Bagpipes under the bridges

It is pouring today in Glasgow. I was cycling home along the Clyde getting absolutely drenched when I came across two bagpipers practising for the World Pipe Band Championship currently been held here. It was the perfect dry spot under one of the bridges and lovely to hear.

I have lived in Glasgow coming up for 18 years. I had only meant to stay for 2 years. Each year I find that Glasgow just gets better. When my Italian mother wailed on news of my departure from the Big Smoke 'But darleeeng, Glasgow eez for Glaswegians', she was partly right. But it is definitely a city that opens its arms wide to the world.

We have migrated

While I was away in Italy trying to stay clear of all things e-mail and internet, the website was effectively ejected from our old host. How thankful I wasn't around to deal with it and showed delegating skills that I thought I didn't possess. In other words I left Chris to deal with it.

I fear it was a stressful time for him. In webbing terms we don't move, we migrate. And Chris successfully engineered our migration to JSweb hosting. If one could understand what was happening, I am sure it would be much less stressful. For me it is the language of the web that adds an extra layer of befuddlement to the whole process. Words like 'migrating' and servers 'pointing' mean that it all sounds much more complicated than it could be.

But we are now hanging happily off our new host and things are looking good. So welcome back to The Cupboard and a big thanks to Chris for managing the migration.

Back to rainy old Glasgow

We touched down in Prestwick yesterday after five gloriously hot weeks in Italy. There was just one day of cloudy wet weather and otherwise it was wall to wall sunshine. So much so that I heard my two daughters saying how much they were looking forward to some good old-fashioned Scottish rain.

The Publishing Cupboard is now back in St Vincent Crescent having been looked after by Christopher Crawford. (I make it sound like some sort of Tardis-type object). Poor Chris had to cope with the migration of the website (or soon to migrate website). I was only too glad to be away from that side of things.

Five weeks without a TV or computer has been great fun. Instead of watching soaps we watched the bats venturing out at night and the doormice scuttling down the electricity wire to forage in some nearby hazlenut trees.

But now it is time to step back on the Information Super Highway. Only this time I plan to take it at a nice steady pace.