Apple unveils iPad

Lord give me strength. Looks like we are reverting to slates! Who on earth is going to carry that around with them for a quick read on the tube? It's not exactly something you can slip into your back pocket or handbag. Now if it folded into 4, you may have something. Otherwise it looks like i-madness to me. It's people trying to show how clever they are. Somehow they seem to have forgotten common sense and what people will actually cart around with them.

A gigantic thumbs down from me. Admittedly it is a thing of amazing beauty, but to what end? To find out more about this 21st century slate, visit the bookseller.

Between a rock and a hard place

That is the way I feel on the Amazon front. Anyone wondering whether to purchase a Nod off in French will certainly be put off by the barrage of one star reviews that land right in their face because someone is playing silly buggers by making sure that all the bad reviews are clicked as helpful and all the good reviews are clicked as unhelpful.

Not only that, they seem to attract reviewers that review at least 2 titles.

See for yourselves:
Nod off in French
Nod off in Spanish
Nod off in Italian
Nod off in Portuguese

Amazon seem powerless to do anything, and I suspect these reviews will linger on their website forever. I wonder if one can ask to get the products completely removed. May be that is the answer.

Any suggestions would be most helpful.

What he thinks is what I think

Although it is over year old, this article expresses exactly my feelings. Right down to the comment about the bicycle.

Read and enjoy. Many thanks to James Gleick.

The return of the cyberstalker

Now and again I moan about my cyberstalker. Harry reckons its a figment of my oversensitive imagination. But a gut feeling is a gut feeling and I have learned to trust them.

Anyway he/she is back. Not only did they not like Nod off in French, they actually decided to give Nod off in Portuguese a go. How lucky am I!

Anyway, he/she brings in his/her trail the sinister clickings. Any good review gets 'not helpful' clicks. Any one-star reviews get lots of 'helpful' ticks. In fact they are quite high up in the review stakes because of the amount of helpful clicking.

Unfortunately Amazon hasn't proved much help sorting it out.

Such is life at the blunt end of publishing.

what I think - what I really really really think

Many thanks to Val at CMI who commented that she would only use an e-device if she was travelling.

And thanks to Catdownunder who commented that her 87 year old father wouldn't touch an e-device with a barge pole, never mind a finger.

She also made an interesting comment about finding information in an e-reference book a pain because of all the scrolling back and forth.

Anyway, with only 2 predictions under my blog, I have come to a conclusion. Whether I am right or not, only the years will tell.

• E-reading will never be the first choice of book lovers. It will be the choice of convenience for people who travel or who live abroad and cannot get their hands on books.


• Anything you can see on a screen can be hacked. Therefore it is no use publishers spending huge amounts of money trying to protect e-books. One must assume that they will be accessed and shared freely amongst the e-community.


• The price of e-books will end up around a fiver for new novels. Any publisher hoping to charge near enough the full hardback price will sell mighty few.
  

Not very encouraging for the e-reader, but I think developers are trying to create something that few people actually want or will use. The idea looks good on paper (forgive the irony) but whether it is something people can really be bothered with is another matter. People will, however, use their phones for pretty much e-everything.

Naturellement, I could be way off the mark.

My Cadbury's Story

It will be interesting to see if Cadbury's gets sold.

I have my own Cadbury's story so it seems an apt time to share it with you.

As readers know, my mother is Italian. Because my father taught in a university we could spend long summer holidays with my grandmother on the shores of Lake Como. We would drive to Italy stopping in France en route. Every year we would stay at the Hotel Doux Apotres in Contrexeville, an elegant spa town on edge of the Vosges forest.

The Hotel was run by a dapper Sicilian called Pippo. He had married the daughter of the establishment and had become a major figure in the town's chamber of commerce. He also spoke perfect English. When my mum asked how come his English was so good, we found out his story.

As a young boy in Sicily he had keen to learn English and somehow came under the radar of a philanthropic Mrs Cadbury who was on holiday with a friend. On finding out about him, she offered him the chance of returning to England to live with her family and learn English. He jumped at the chance. Hence his English was so good.

Fast forward at least 30 years to a recording studio in West London. There you find me and the producer Peter Rinne listening to Dik and Benedicte recording a Collins French phrase book. Dik had just read out 'Where is Hotel Contrexeville?' and stopped. So we broke for a moment and he asked me why I had mentioned Contrexeville (I used to make up the phrases). I told him how when going to Italy each year we had stopped there and I asked him why he had asked.

He said he knew the Hotel Doux Apotres and Pippo. I had only ever known Dik as Dik or Richard. It turns out his surname was Cadbury. As a young boy his mother turned up one summer with a Sicilian boy Pippo with whom Dik had had to share his room. Pippo had become one of the family.

I always feel that there are threads woven into the background of our lives. Like cobwebs they link us one to another and now and again we get a glimpse of the links.

It would be a pity if Cadbury's is sold. It was obviously founded by good strong people who cared about one another.

Prediction 2

I reckon 2010 will see some publishing houses topple. As we know, the routes to market are dwindling. Probably most at risk are the larger corporate houses with huge overheads and pensions to fund. They also appear to suffer from the creative vision of an earthworm.

Which could be doing a disservice to earthworms. As Darwin discovered, they are the cornerstone of life churning up old leaves, trees and the like and turning it into rich soil. In fact, the corpororate houses should turn themselves into wormeries, burrowing into their archives and seeing what they can transform into rich reading matter.

One of the books that had a great influence on me as a late 70s teenager was Richard Mabey's Food for Free. I even used it to gather rose hips and make rose hip syrup. But I found it rather difficult to use as the plants were listed more for the botanist than the amateur forager. When I was at Collins I suggested making it into a Collins Gem (ideal for backpacks) and Richard Mabey was most gracious in allowing us to reorder it alphabetically according to the common names of the plants. We then combined photos and the beautiful illustrations by the equally gracious Marjorie Blamey and included recipes and a few other useful items. The result has been a resounding success for all parties concerned - Collins have another bestseller that continues to sell and Richard receives another source of royalties for essentially a book he had written over 20 years previously.

So for the big publishers to flourish, they should keep one eye out for the next bestseller, and the other foraging through what they already have with fresh creative eyes. After all, what could be more profitable then a bit of creative recycling?

Prediction 1

I was pondering the question of e-readers and came to a startling conclusion.

I don't think they will make all that impact except for one growing sector - the old. If they can perfect a lightweight reader that is legible to older eyes and allows the font to be increased, then I think this is the market it will work in.

I think for the above market, the e-readers should be leased from libraries, etc.

The reason why I don't think they will take off for future generations (I'm talking of my daughters' - the 12+ group) is that this generation is developing a butterfly mind. They lack the ability to keep their attention focused. And if they are using their i-device to read, they won't be able to help themselves from checking for texts, on facebook, etc.

I think publishers are looking at how people read physical books now and assuming they will do the same on an electronic device. I would say that this group of people is a dwindling market.

That is it for now.

Predictions for 2010

I see that the Bookseller is serving up predictions from the Industry high and mighty.
I am afraid I found the CEO utterances positively depressing.

The female CEOs used the opportunity for their own purposes, as:
1) a publicity tool (see Gail R's offering) for forthcoming Random titles.
2) a pat on the back and not so subliminal reminder to the publishing world by Victoria B of her involvement with Fourth Estate (see comment re Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall published by Fourth Estate, the clever publisher founded by Ms Barnsley as opposed to cumbersome corporate HarperCollins).

As for Peter Field of Penguin, he looks like he is bobbing in an e-sea waiting to see where he will wash up. His statement:
'Digital printing will also make an impact, allowing smaller print runs, which will be important as physical books are replaced by e-books. Although initially they may be a bit incremental, in the long run e-books will be substitional.'

I can't quite figure out how e-books will allow smaller print runs? Does he mean that the e-book will be published before the physical book? As consumers are telling us that they would only pay around £5 for an e-book, how will this fund the smaller (and therefore more expensive) printruns?

Anyway, I am pondering my own predictions and will post them in a wee while.

Meanwhile, here is an interesting account of e-readers by a guest blogger on Scott Pack's Blog Me and My Big Mouth.

Welcome to Twenty Ten

I hope you all had a restful festive season. Here in Scotland it has been dominated by snow and ice. And bitter cold weather. Usually we don't get snow until March or April (just when you think Spring is just around the corner) but it seems more fitting to get it in December.

So we step into a New Year and a New Decade. I reckon it takes well over 20 years to get a feel of a decade. 2008 and 2009 seemed to be aping the Eighties. I spent my formative years in the Eighties and only in 2008 and 2009 did I see what the Eighties had all been about.

For the life of me, I don't know what the Noughties will look like in 20 years' time. I haven't noticed any fashion trends or hairstyles. No doubt time will tell. Unfortunately I will be too far into my dotage to notice.