http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Fry-Chronicles/dp/B0042JTA56

Oh, come on! This just smacks of blatant profiteering. There is NO reason for this, other than greed. Once the paper versions have been published, the cost of producing, selling and distributing electronic equivalents is almost nothing at all.

I had a similar argument with Waterstone’s recently, and it seems I’m just farting against thunder.

It would be nice if the esteemed Mr. Fry did manage to respond, but to tell the truth I doubt he’ll actually even read this. More a rant to get it out of my system than anything else. [/sulk]

Unfortunately it seems as if AzizKhan is a bit of a secret. Now I don’t mind having my favourite restaurant all to myself, but that can’t be good for business. So spread the word, folks! If you enjoy a good curry, give them a try. Then tell your friends how great it was.

Waterstone’s recently started promoting thier own eReader product as well, and I was sorely tempted. But in the end I walked away.

So how could I possibly not want eBooks?

It’s quite simple really. As an example, Waterstone’s are selling the new release, hardcover printed copy of Lee Child’s latest thriller for £9.59. This is a thick, heavy book. Trees were cut down to make it. It had to be printed, glued, bound, primped & preened, have glossy colour covers made up, transported from the printer to the distributors to the wholesalers to the central-purchase stores and eventually to the retail outlets, who need to find bulk-space to store it and shelf-space to display it, and lights and water and toilets and staff and and and… the list is endless. All of these things cost money. Fair enough. Just under a tenner for a new-release hardcover isn’t bad value, all things considered.

Now, the electronic version of the same book is £12.99. Selling and distributing the eBook carries NONE of the costs described above. Sure, there are some costs, such as getting the damn thing written in the first place, proofing, editing, and so on. But those are already incurred for the paper version. There’s the trivial cost of hosting the eBook, granted. Pennies per month, if anything. Other than that, every single copy sold is basically free money. Whether they sell one copy or one million copies, the cost of supply and distribution is static.

Why charge £3.40 more for the version that’s obviously a lot cheaper, Waterstone’s?

For purely common-sense economic reasons as outlined above, eBooks should be significantly cheaper than printed copies.

For environmental reasons, they should be significantly cheaper – if we use less paper, we kill less trees.

For convenience reasons, they should be cheaper! eBooks are understandbly DRM-protected, meaning that once I’ve bought a book, it can only be read on my reader. My wife and I have similar tastes in reading material, and I’ll often pass my latest book on to her once I’m finished with it. eBooks make this difficult – I’d have to pass over my eReader as well. As I said, this is understandable. But it’s a pain in the arse. I could put up with that pain if the electronic version was a lot cheaper than the paper one.

Waterstone’s will doubtless claim it’s not their fault, they are at the mercy of thier suppliers who dictate pricing policies. Sorry, guys, that’s not acceptable. You are HUGE in the UK literary market, big enough to dictate terms to THEM. If you want people to buy your eBooks (and eReaders), take a firm stand and correct this ridiculous policy right away.

And please note: I’m not specifically picking on Waterstone’s. I don’t hate them. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m sure other retailers have similarly stupid policies. Also: this is not a hand-picked example I went searching out to emphasise the problem, it’s a book I’m genuinely interested in.

References:
61 Hours – Hardcover
61 Hours – eBook

It’s so difficult to make new friends these days.

1. Get my name right
2. Know what you are talking about
3. LISTEN to what I say, I hate repeating myself
4. and most importantly, have the call made by somebody who speaks English fluently

Surely this is just basic courtesy and common sense? AAAAAAAARGH!

If you have excess time on your hands, or you really want a bigger penis, perhaps you don’t mind dealing with SPAM. Personally, I hate it. And I hate the fact that a lot of it is caused by well-intentioned but uninformed people. That’s what this post is all about. With a little tweak to the way you do things, you can make a difference.

SPAM is a big-money industry. If you send a million emails, some of them will generate the desired action – a sale, perhaps. Or the harvesting of credit card data. Or managing to infect your computer and turn it into a zombie that quietly sends out yet more of this rubbish and attacks other computers. But in order for it to work at all, it needs a list of email addresses. Where are these collected from? There are several sources, but any time an email address travels across the net, it’s at risk. The most common point of harvest is emails themselves, as they arrive on malware-infected computers. And this is where it gets nasty. As a tech-savvy user, YOU may well have protected YOUR computer from this sort of thing. And your old friend in Greenland has probably protected his. But what about everybody else he shared that joke with?

For example, John sends something funny, or cute, or profound, to his friends Jim, Jonas, Jane, Jeanette and Jerry. As it happens, Jerry was a little careless at some time in the past and his PC has been infected with address-harvesting malware. This malware has already sucked all the known contacts out of Jerry’s Outlook address book, and is now in a watch-and-learn mode. When John’s email arrives, the malware scans it and says “ah-ha! I’ve never seen Jonas or Jeanette before, so I’ll grab those addresses too.” – Jim, Jonas and Jame are already known to it. Once a day, the malware connects to a central server and dumps all new addresses. Now the SPAM senders have two new targets. They were harvested by malware on Jerry’s PC, all without the knowledge of the victims Jeanette and Jonas, who don’t even know Jerry.

So a big contributor is the careless user. You want to send something to ten people, but don’t want to send ten individual emails (what a pain), and should not list everybody in the TO or CC fields because as we’ve seen above, that’s almost a guarantee that all ten recipients will end up as SPAM targets. What can be done about this? Luckily there is a solution: undisclosed recipients. This lets you send that mail to all those people at once without letting them see each other’s email address. It’ll take you a few moments to set up, and a little discipline to remember to use it. But please do use it! If everybody did this, we would never have had a SPAM problem in the first place.

How you can help:

Add a Contact to your mail program, with the name of undisclosed recipients. Give it YOUR email address.

Now, when you send one of these emails, always send it TO undisclosed recipients. Ignore the CC destinations, and list the actual intended recipients as BCC destinations. BCC is “blind carbon copy”, and is a convention honoured by mailservers around the world, causing them to remove the recipient-list from the message before delivering it. If this had happened in our scenario above, Jerry’s malware would have been impotent – there would be no data for it to harvest. It’ll be very easy to see what the effect is, as you will also receive a copy of the email.

And finally:

PLEASE don’t forget to tidy up that email you’re forwarding. REMOVE all the other headers – the only people interested in seeing who it was last sent to (and who sent it to you) are spammers. It’s unnecesary, annoying and bandwidth-wasteful. Your message should be all about the content, anything else is just noise.

Then he asked “nhooyootoodaysir?” which I eventually figured out was “and how are you today, sir?”. Why do they even bother having that in the script? Does anybody ever think they care? Or even listen? Since I was already in a foul mood from an almighty cock-up at work, I told him that was none of his business and asked why he was bothering me. A little rude, admittedly, I could have been more polite. But he was bothering me! I didn’t invite him to call me. Anyway, it turns out to be a mistake to give a reply that’s not on their script. Utter confusion until the dimwit decided just to pass on to the next paragraph written in front of him.

Now I think this was about how happy I was with their service. But it might have been about if I was getting the most out of it, or even if I wanted more of it. In fact, he could have been offering me a free tea-service. The only thing I’m reasonably confident about was that the word “service” was probably in there somewhere. By now I was a good few minutes into the call, and all we’d established was that he was probably representing Virgin, and that I wasn’t going to tell him how I was feeling. I’m afraid I didn’t have the stamina for any more, and hung up. Rude again, I know. But I couldn’t face five minutes of getting him to understand “goodbye”. Or possibly even “piss off”.

So, a message to all call centres, but tele-sales in particular: if you are going to call me, have the courtesy to do it in such a way that I’ve got some chance of understanding what you’re on about. Otherwise, just follow my more general advice to all tele-sales organisations: “piss off, I’m TPS listed”.