You can get rich selling e-books. While Rich Jerk quantities of money is not realistic or guaranteed, you can earn yourself a very nice income selling e-books online.
This can be full time or even just part time to pay all your bills and have some play money left over.
E-books are electric versions of printed material that can contain teShoppingMallt, sound, and images. While it is necessary to remember that leads and buyers are looking for teShoppingMallt content, that is, what eShoppingMallactly is your message.
Always remember that frills will distract, irritate and turn off your reader leads. The profit margin and potential from selling them is high because start up and operating eShoppingMallpenses are very low. Sound good?
The biggest eShoppingMallpense is purchasing for sale. If you are a content writer you can just accumulate your good quality related articles and make e-books out of them. However, the articles must be content quality worthy, no junk allowed or your market will dry up very fast. It unfortunately happens often on the internet.
You can make even more money if you write some of your own e-books. Your writing skills do not have to be stellar. Remember the above though, you must seriously increase your writing skills and knowledge to be taken seriously by the buying market for e-commerce.
There are online sources that will do your research and even make quality e-books for you. Some of these companies will even take care of marketing, payments, and shipping. See what a powerful source good service from companies can be for you?
Buy Your e-books for Sale online
You can buy e-books from authors online. eBay is a surprisingly good source for e-book buying. Purchase e-books with resell rights.
Never take them and use them without clearly defined permission. This type of act will only get you in serious legal and lawsuit trouble. This allows customers to sell the e-books they buy from you themselves thus providing an incentive for them to do business with you.
It also opens the door for them to buy more of your products in the future.
Make sure the e-books you buy (or write on your own) are full of useful information and resources. No junk. Many e-books are little more than ads and sales pitches for the original writer products. These ad will turn off customers and decrease repeat business. They will also cost you quality future affiliate partners. News you do not need to get.
Do your research to determine what types of information people are seeking. Go to Google and put in, popular information to get good ideas for this step. More sources for this are listed below.
Getting rich selling e-books will depend on critical factors such as the topics covered, customer base, and marketing campaign.
Before you buy an e-book for resale, do an online search for the title. If lots of web sites are selling the book, it is probably a popular title and will be a good seller. It also helps to sell e-literature that targets a specific market niche.
Search online forums and other group sites to locate potential target markets for niche titles. Contact these groups with a short email and invite them to visit your web site. Offer an incentive such as twenty percent
off their first purchase to increase your site traffic and sales.
E-books about current trends or hot topics will generate more income. Your income will really get a boost if you are always anticipating the neShoppingMallt big topic and write or purchase these electric publications to sell before the competition saturates the market.
Many of us have paid lots of thousands of dollars for courses and training that simply taught us to test the markets for these and any other products we want to sell to sort the good one from the bad ones. The clear message here is to test often and forever.
Your skills will increase sharply at this if you do it regularly and can dramatically increase your online income. Then you will truly earn easy money selling e-books online.
Review: The Numerati by Stephen Baker
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/50947?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+They%27ve+got+us+all+figured+out&ch=Books&c3=The+Observer&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CSociety+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2CObserver&c5=Not+commercially+useful&c6=Marcus+du+Sautoy&c7=2008_11_23&c8=1122345&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>Can you predict what the next numbers will be in each of these strings of digits? </p><p>123454321234543212... </p><p>11235813213455... </p><p>993751058209749... </p><p>The first sequence has a clear rhythm to it. The second is a little more tricky, but look closely and you might notice that it uses the previous numbers in the string to build the next one. This is the Fibonacci sequence, nature's favourite set of numbers and the first code to be cracked in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The third sequence is much trickier. At first it looks random but if you come at it armed with the right knowledge you might recognise that it is part of the decimal expansion of pi, starting at the 44th decimal place. Once you know this you have total control over the sequence and can predict every twist as it speeds off to infinity. </p><p>Mathematics is all about spotting patterns, finding the underlying logic in the seemingly random and chaotic world around us; and using this information to predict future behaviour. Traditionally maths has been used to make predictions about inanimate objects, like the orbit of planets or the weather. But as Stephen Baker explains in The Numerati, mathematicians are increasingly turning their attention to human behaviour. What if those strings of numbers are records of the things you've bought, places you've travelled to, websites you've visited, parties you've voted for? Find the pattern in the numbers and mathematicians will be able to predict - with surprising accuracy - what your next move will be. The 'numerati' is the name Baker gives to the group of latterday fortune-tellers whose job it is to decode our behaviour. His book explores the lives of such people and attempts to analyse how powerful they have become.</p><p>Until recently, the abstract language of mathematics seemed to have no relevance to the murky worlds of consumer trends, political preferences and dating. The change that has made the rise of the numerati possible is digitisation. All of us today leave an extensive trail of numbers wherever we go. Almost everything we do - from visiting a website to texting a friend - is translated into ones and zeros, which are stored somewhere and available to those who know how to access them. For example, every time we enter a search into Google, a simple code called ASCI translates each letter we type into a string of 0s and 1s, which are sent out across the internet. </p><p>When we unload our shopping trolleys at the checkout, the bar codes of our purchases are stored by our loyalty cards, providing a record of our eating habits. When we walk down the road, our movements are likely to be tracked by CCTV, converted into digital code and stored on computer mainframes. Even our moods and thoughts get translated into zeros and ones by the technology we love and rely on, as thousands of us pour our states of minds on to blogs. Forget astrology and the stars; your future is encoded within the trail of numbers that you leave behind you.</p><p>For those with the ability to interpret it, this data trail is a goldmine. Advertisers and politicians have long dreamed of being able to target their messages - or products - at individuals on the basis of highly detailed information about them. Now this dream is becoming reality. By analysing the geometry of our mathematical pathways, mathematicians can cluster people with shared interests and passions, creating ever smaller, more specific groups to target. </p><p>For example, Baker talks to one of the numerati, Dave Morgan of AOL, who picked up a correlation between people visiting the Alamo Rent A Car website and surfing romantic movie sites. It isn't an obvious match; only in retrospect could it be traced to an escapist tendency. But once the pattern was identified, advertisers could find all sorts of clever ways to exploit it - for example, by bombarding this particular group with offers for weekend breaks in country hotels.</p><p>Baker argues that the numerati have become incredibly powerful in a range of fields, from the workplace to the voting booth, from health care to counter-terrorism. He even puts the maths to the test to see if a dating agency can pair him with his wife; when he eventually unchecks the box requesting someone several decades too young, Mrs Baker pops up top of the list. There is no denying that the digital revolution has opened up exciting new territory for mathematicians. The numerati are no fantasy; they exist. Baker is telling us about a phenomenon that is important and often overlooked. That makes his book urgent and exciting.</p><p>But there are also significant flaws. Baker's slick journalistic style grates after a while - especially when we are forced to hear about him supping yet another coffee in a cafe as he waits for his next interviewee. And maybe it's because I'm a maths nerd, but I hoped for more detail about the maths involved. Baker's mathematical descriptions are often superficial, and indeed he seems to regard the maths as little more than magic. His numerati come across as sorcerers armed with mysterious, secret knowledge, not as scientists with tools that can be rationally analysed. This has the effect of making them seem more sinister than they are. </p><p>The book becomes more interesting when Baker turns his attention to the political implications of the numerati's activities. There are clear issues of civil liberties at stake, as well as of consent. Most of us have no idea how much of our lives are being tracked. If we did, we would probably be horrified. At the same time, it is hard to deny that the numerati do much that is good. Baker's analysis is pretty balanced, and he spells out why we should be grateful to the numerati, as well as concerned in some areas. Increasingly, for example, the numerati use their skills to monitor health care; homes for the elderly are being wired with technology that can record fluctuations in weight or a decrease in mobility, triggering a hasty visit from a doctor. If you're joining a dating agency, you want to exploit the skills of mathematicians to find the perfect partner. And, as Baker points out in his chapter on the use of the numerati by pollsters, anything that helps politicians target individuals on issues that they care about, rather than simply trotting out bland platitudes, is a good thing. </p><p>There is a tendency within our society to view science with suspicion, whether it is stories of nano-robots infiltrating our body and messing with our DNA, black holes appearing in the Large Hadron Collider in Cern that will swallow up the universe, or genetically modified crops sweeping the world and destroying all in their path. All scientific progress involves steps into the unknown, and that inevitably entails risk. That is why books like this are valuable. Once you know about the science and its implications, you are in a much better position to distinguish sinister developments from mere hype.</p><p>So when it comes to Baker's numerati, all of us have a responsibility to understand how much companies and government can or cannot use or abuse the maths. This book won't make you an expert on how the mathematicians do their tricks, but it will make you more aware of the the implications. Read it and you'll have a much better idea of who has got your number. </p><p>? Marcus du Sautoy is the new Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and author of Finding Moonshine (Fourth Estate).</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/society">Society</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584195010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584195010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Review: Planet Google by Randall Stross
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/8236?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+That+interminable+0.9+seconds&ch=Books&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Books%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CCulture+section&c5=Not+commercially+useful&c6=Andy+Beckett&c7=2008_11_01&c8=1110079&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>Three years ago, when Google and its products were not quite so potent and ubiquitous, a reporter for the technology website CNET News did a quick experiment with the company's internet search tools. For half an hour she would find out as much personal information as possible about a revered Silicon Valley business executive. In a few dozen predictable clicks and keystrokes, she had his home address, his hobbies, the level of his wealth and his political affiliations. As a case study of how Google has eroded the privacy of even the most powerful it was a useful and justifiable exercise, especially as she did not include the most sensitive material in the story she wrote.</p><p>The executive did not see it like that. His corporation informed CNET that its use of "private information" had been highly inappropriate. As a punishment, the corporation would not speak to CNET reporters for a year. After a few weeks, the ban was quietly lifted, but among those who follow the computer industry the incident has not been forgotten, for one reason. The prickly executive involved was Eric Schmidt, the CEO and public face of Google.</p><p>This sharp-eyed book, written by a business professor who teaches in Silicon Valley and has been publishing volumes on related topics since the mid-90s, is full of such telling revelations about one of the world's most important companies. Despite the subtitle, this is not really a study of the social effects of Google's unprecedented attempt to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible", as the firm's first press release put it in 1999. Instead, it is a restless examination of Google's strengths and weaknesses, and contradictions. Stross is not a hatchet man or a frustrated outsider: his thank-yous to Google staff from Schmidt downwards take up three paragraphs of the acknowledgments. But the company that emerges from this book is a more rickety and interesting enterprise than non-geeks might imagine.</p><p>For a start, Google is still quite small. At the end of 2007, despite almost a decade of feverish growth and handling two-thirds of all internet searches in the US, it had fewer than 17,000 employees, only twice as many as the London borough of Camden. Visiting the Googleplex, the company's main compound, Stross finds that "the signature buildings are not much bigger than those of a single suburban high school". Similarly, for all Google's proliferating, seemingly all-pervading desktop services, from Google Maps to Google Apps, from Google Book Search to Google Earth, from Gmail to YouTube, which it bought in 2006 for almost £1bn, Google still only has one business in the traditional, profit-driven sense: the selling of modest text-only advertisements next to its internet search results.</p><p>Stross describes lucidly how the company came up with and refined its search business. He points out that Google's ingenious strategy - making billions by matching ads to content it does not own - is reliant on much of the internet remaining an open, under-commercialised environment. "If even a small number of owners of [popular] websites were to exclude Google ... demanding, perhaps, that Google share revenue earned by indexing their sites ... then Google's ability to operate as it has would end," he writes.</p><p>The book also deals properly with the physical side of building a digital empire. Early on, Google chose as its hardware "a system cobbled together with inexpensive PC components" rather than more costly specialist equipment. This was a clever, counter-intuitive decision, the first of many. Google's racks of cheap servers could easily be expanded or others added. The company then set about placing them as close to its potential customers as possible. Stross explains: "As fast as electrons travel, physical distance still affects [online] response speed ... Reducing [it] by even a fraction of a second mattered to users, as Google discovered when it ran experiments to see if users noticed a difference between [a wait of] 0.9 seconds [and one of] 0.4 seconds ... Users were conspicuously more likely to grow bored and leave the Google site after waiting that interminable 0.9 seconds."</p><p>As quick and pragmatic as its customers, Google spent the early years of this decade securing premises across America for its servers: first in commercial spaces desperate for tenants after the 2001 dotcom crash, then in its own purpose-built "data centres". Such was the surging demand for its services, and the amount of power the company was consuming as a result, the first such facility was established in a town with its own hydro-electric power station.</p><p>Google's data centres function with almost no human intervention; their interiors are kept dark to save power, and research visits are not allowed. For some of Google's critics, these places are the perfect symbol of an enigmatic, over-mighty company. But Stross, for all his scepticism, does not see Google as a sinister monolith. Instead, he portrays it as an eccentric corporate environment, where teams of young Californians with PhDs work obsessively and autonomously, where grand company projects rise and fall, or are left half-completed, depending on the level of interest in the cubicles, and where an impatience to conquer the next digital frontier coexists with a deep conservatism that has kept Google wedded to the same basic internet search concept for 10 years.</p><p>Whether web users will remain satisfied for many more years with the long shaggy lists of online sources that Google offers them is a question, frustratingly, that Stross does not properly answer. He does outline the menace to the company posed by the highly successful social networking site Facebook, "a miniature web universe - behind a wall, inaccessible to Google". And he lists other threats. Google's copyright dispute with publishers over its desire to make all books electronically searchable remains unresolved. Google's ad revenue may shrink, and no longer be sufficient to subsidise all its other, more experimental activities. Like most of today's swaggering web businesses, Google may have come through the dotcom crash but it has never experienced a broader recession. Finally, there are the discouraging precedents offered by industry history. "No computer company," writes Stross, "has ever been able to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two successive technological eras." </p><p>This is a slightly dry book, the prose compact rather than elegant. But when so much of what is written about Silicon Valley and the web generally is still either self-servingly evangelical or sour and conspiratorial, agnostics about the whole enterprise have to find insight where they can. And Stross does include at least one rare piece of reassurance for journalists or fans of old media. According to him, Google News, the company's online attempt at sifting and presenting news stories by purely electronic means, has not been a great success. Its competitor Yahoo News gets three times as much traffic. The Yahoo site's secret? It is edited by humans. </p><p>? Andy Beckett is writing a book about British politics in the 1970s</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584253010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584253010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Review: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/51664?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+The+Cult+of+the+Amateur&ch=Books&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CRoundup+review+%28Books%29%2CCulture+section&c5=Not+commercially+useful&c6=John+Dugdale&c7=2008_10_18&c8=1102322&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>Keen was once a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but has since undergone a Damascene conversion and now views the so-called Web 2.0 of YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia and millions of blogs as culturally corrosive. This is a celebration of traditional media and the experienced professionals who provide reliable information and classy entertainment. By dispensing with these elite experts, creators and gatekeepers in pursuit of "democratisation", Keen argues, Web 2.0 licenses the talentless to show off and the unqualified to give their views; forcing bookshops, record stores or newspapers to close as sales decline or advertising is switched. Keen does overpolarise - he only grudgingly concedes that not everything served up by new media is trashy, paints an over-rosy picture of mainstream news providers and includes Hollywood studios in his list of threatened pillars of civilisation. But most of his points are well made, and he comes up with thought-provoking solutions, including government intervention to curb excesses.</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/roundupreviews">Roundup reviews</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584347010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584347010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Review: From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner
Review: From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred TurnerAn enjoyably deep cultural history
Review: Coming of Age in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff
Review: Coming of Age in Second Life by Tom BoellstorffThe movement from techno-idealism to disillusion is recapitulated here in accelerated mode
Das Wikipedia - online resource goes into print
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/98033?ns=guardian&pageName=Technology%3A+Das+Wikipedia+-+online+resource+goes+into+print&ch=Technology&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Wikipedia%2CInternet%2CReference+and+languages+%28Books+genre%29%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2CPress+and+publishing%2CMedia%2CGermany%2CWorld+news%2CTechnology&c5=Press+Media%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CMedia+Weekly%2CTechnology+Gadgets%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Jess+Smee&c7=2008_07_22&c8=1009759&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Technology&c12=Wikipedia&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FTechnology%2FWikipedia" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>Sometimes a book spine just isn't long enough - especially when its list of authors runs to 90,000. Due to hit the shelves in September, a published encyclopedia of German Wikipedia entries, the first of its kind, will list in a single volume the 50,000 most commonly searched terms on the German Wikipedia website over the past two years. </p><p>That means France's first lady, Carla Bruni, Playstation3 or trivia about the US television series House, starring British actor Hugh Laurie, have earned their place among more typical encyclopedia fodder such as politics and geography.</p><p>The Wikipedia Lexikon has turned into something of "a document of the zeitgeist", said Beate Varnhorn, a director at its publisher Bertelsmann Lexicon.</p><p>All entries, which include high-profile events such as the 2007 G8 summit in Heiligendamm, have been shortened and checked factually. Dotted with images and photographs, its creators aim to reach people who do not use Wikipedia online.</p><p>Each Wikipedia entry has a number of contributors, who tweak and add to the information left by other site users, which means an unprecedented list of authors, Varnhorn said. The extensive list of contributors, compressed and separated by commas, will stretch over 30 pages of the 1,000-page tome.</p><p>With a price tag of €19.95 (£16), €1 from every Wikipedia Lexikon sold will be given to the German chapter of Wikimedia, the non-profit group behind Wikipedia, for the use of its name.</p><p>The publication reverses the industry trend towards the internet and away from traditional print. Earlier this year, Brockhaus Encyclopedia, the German equivalent of the Encyclopedia Britannica, announced plans to make its 30-volume leather-bound set accessible online.</p><p>Publishers of the Wikipedia Lexikon insist it is too soon to say farewell to the book format. </p><p>"Unlike Brockhaus, we think the market for print reference books remains positive," said Varnhorn. "The book is highly flexible, I can use it on the sofa while watching television, at the desk, in the garden or in bed, without having to turn on the computer."</p><p>German Wikipedia, Germany's sixth-most-visited website, is the second largest in size after its English-version equivalent. It has been estimated it would take at least 750 thick volumes to print all the articles in the English-language version.</p><p>The sheer size of the articles on the German Wikipedia site proved too daunting for a publisher who planned to convert it into print a few years ago. </p><p>"It turned out that even on very thin paper, the German Wikipedia would fill an [Ikea] shelving unit," said Arne Klempert, the director of Wikipedia Germany. "In the end it didn't happen."</p><p>He said the launch of the Lexikon would be closely watched and might inspire similar tomes in other languages - with similarly lengthy lists of authors.</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/wikipedia">Wikipedia</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet">Internet</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/referenceandlanguages">Reference and languages</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pressandpublishing">Newspapers & magazines</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/germany">Germany</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Technology&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584669010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Technology&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584669010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Leader: In praise of... the $100 laptop
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/3926?ns=guardian&pageName=Comment+is+free%3A+Leader%3A+In+praise+of...+the+%24100+laptop&ch=Comment+is+free&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29&c5=Not+commercially+useful&c6=Leader&c7=2008_01_12&c8=476713&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Comment+is+free&c12=blog&c13=&c14=Comment+is+free&h2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free" width="1" height="1" /></div>Everyone wins from the decision of the organisation behind the admirable One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) scheme to let consumers in the US buy one of its machines - designed to bridge the digital divide in poor countries - as long as they also buy one for a deprived child. OLPC, the best known of a number of projects to get cheap computers and mobiles to developing countries, eventually hopes to sell them for $100 each when production runs are large enough. For a limited period American consumers can buy two for $188 each as long as one goes to an impoverished child. This not only plugs what hopefully will prove a temporary shortfall in orders from governments of developing countries, but also meets a genuine demand from early adopters in the US to get their hands on a gizmo that might command a premium price anyway. It fulfils a basic human need to do something for a good cause - with the added kudos that anyone who sees a buyer in the US with one of these mean machines will know they have given to charity without having to say so. The OLPC is a good example of what CK Prahalad argued in his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: that the best way to help the very poorest - the four billion people living on $2 or less a day - is to treat them as potential entrepreneurs and customers rather than just recipients of aid. Maybe the OLPC's selling technique could be applied elsewhere. What about one drug for poor countries for every proprietary one you buy?<div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Commentisfree&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584696010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Commentisfree&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584696010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Review: Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/3297?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+Review%3A+Wikinomics+by+Don+Tapscott+and+Anthony+D+Williams&ch=Books&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Books%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CTechnology%2CMicro+Focus+International+%28Business%29%2CCulture+section&c5=Business+Markets%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Emily+Bell&c7=2007_09_21&c8=918298&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p><strong>Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything</strong><br /> by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams 336pp, Atlantic, £16.99</p><p>In the past 10 years something very frightening has happened to certain business managers who live outside the heady bubble of technological progress. They have been alarmed and oppressed by a rapidly proliferating series of developments to the internet and worldwide web that have transformed business models and altered consumer behaviour.</p><p>Suddenly their professional worlds have become populated by people who speak in their own language, who think in a different way, and who have in some cases achieved immense success and gained colossal personal wealth in a matter of months - rather than the years it would have taken to build traditional businesses. The key to this rapid shift has been the advent of something called Web 2.0, whereby websites changed from being about "flat content" (words and pictures with the occasional form to fill in) to a model where anyone could edit or add to content from any web browser from any location.</p><p>Anyone who uses YouTube or Facebook, MySpace or photo-sharing sites such as Flickr or Photobucket has dipped their toes into Web 2.0, probably even without knowing it. This dazzlingly timely book is a pretty accurate and comprehensive account of how the technological trend is translating into a business trend, and offers some ground-floor advice on how to apply "wiki" thinking to existing businesses. The authors, who run a rather expensive-sounding consultancy called New Paradigm, are anxious - perhaps sometimes too anxious - to sell the idea of a transparent and collaborative business model.</p><p>The heart of the idea is not at all newfangled, but as old as economics itself: that the labour of many is always better than the labour of one. This idea has, however slowly, been going out of fashion since the erection of Stonehenge - definitely a poster project for collaboration - as industrialisation was all about eliminating multiple human effort. Wikinomics describes a scenario where the post-industrial age is being transformed by allowing more people to put their intellectual muscle to the wheel. The web now not only allows this, but also provides the means by which one can filter and rate the ideas of the many. Wikipedia - the online collaborative encyclopaedia - is hailed as one such project which has been a resounding success, although in their hurry to evangelise the authors don't spend too much time on some of the complexities that have challenged the Wikipedia project.</p><p>Wikinomics opens with the legendary story of Gold Corp, a mining company that was struggling to turn up sufficient finds until it published all of its most sensitive data (maps and geological surveys) on the internet, offering a reward to anyone who could help them more accurately prospect for gold.</p><p>Helped by the collective power of geologists, prospectors and academics worldwide, Gold Corp massively increased its finds and therefore its share price. The authors argue that the "open source" model (born in Silicon Valley, where developers allowed others to access and improve their software) has multiple applications across many industries; although, as many of the examples in Wikinomics demonstrate, it is at its most powerful when applied to intellectual property (or at least partially applied, as the book confidently but somewhat controversially asserts that core intellectual property should always remain in the control of the company).</p><p>As a beginner's guide to the new Web 2.0 world, the book is an easy and engaging read, although occasionally the authors' penchant for breeding buzz-words like mice begins to grate: "prosumers" and "ideagoras", for example, are the kind of linguistic conflations that are enough to make the ears itch with irritation.</p><p>For the struggling middle manager it will come as manna from heaven, as it is rare for a business book that essentially combines description with advice to be as readable as Wikinomics; and there will no doubt be plenty of discussions prompted by its ideas on self-organising constructs, the power of peer production and, crucially, the need for businesses to arrange themselves to mirror this open-networked world instead of relying on heavily centralised control.</p><p>None of this is visionary. Kevin Kelly's Out of Control was an earlier and more prophetic insight into these possibilities some 13 years ago, and the more seminal The Cluetrain Manifesto by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger ("the end of business as usual") predates Wikinomics by eight years. However, Tapscott and Williams have the enormous advantage of being able to point to numerous projects showing their big idea in practice - although there is still room in the market for a more critical look at the opportunities and challenges of open-sourcing your business.</p><p>Maybe predictably given the fluid nature of its subject matter, the best thing about Wikinomics is the website it has spawned (<a href="http://www.wikinomics.com">wikinomics.com</a>), where a blog about collaboration and aspects of organisational change is an addendum more vibrant than the actual book. As yet the invitation to edit or re-author the text in true wiki style has only been partially taken up by its readership; but I suppose its existence is proof, if any were needed, that the first casualty of the open source, Web 2.0 revolution is the static format of business books.</p><p><strong>·</strong> To order Wikinomics for £15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop">guardian.co.uk/bookshop</a>.</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/microfocusinternational">Micro Focus International</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584751010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584751010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Tim Dowling talks to Andrew Keen 'the antichrist of Silicon Valley'
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/96094?ns=guardian&pageName=Technology%3A+Tim+Dowling+talks+to+Andrew+Keen+%27the+antichrist+of+Silicon+Valley%27&ch=Technology&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Technology%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks&c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Tim+Dowling&c7=2007_07_20&c8=47799&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Technology&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FTechnology%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>If your experience confined you to the virtual plains of the blogosphere, you could be forgiven for thinking that Andrew Keen was one of the most unpopular people on the planet. One blogger - on Keen's own website - recently described him as "a professional mental prostitute of the establishment". New media guru and Guardian columnist Jeff Jarvis has called him "a mastodon growling against the warm wind of change". Keen recently introduced himself on the Today programme as "the antichrist of Silicon Valley". So what has he done?</p><p>He's written a book, The Cult of the Amateur, with the no-messing-about subtitle "How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy". It may sound like a technophobe's bible, but Keen himself is no Luddite. He has his own blog and his own podcast programme, <a href="http://www.AfterTV.com">AfterTV.com</a>. He was one of the pioneering entrepreneurs of the first internet boom, with his own start-up, Audiocafe.com, and one of the first to go bust when the bubble burst (to hear him tell it, he actually went bust before the bubble burst). To internet enthusiasts Keen isn't just a heretic; he's an apostate.</p><p>The Cult of the Amateur is a broadside attack on Web 2.0, a term we may hastily define here as that growing sector of the internet which serves mainly as a platform for user-generated content, including sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Typepad, Blogger and YouTube. The main thrust of his argument is that all this home-made content - blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music - is an inadequate replacement for mainstream media. It may be a harmless, even occasionally enriching addition, but we can't have both, because the former is swiftly killing off the latter. Thanks to Web 2.0, newspapers, record companies, movie studios and traditional publishers are on the verge of extinction, he says. Along the way he also finds time to bash Second Life, online gambling, copyright theft and porn.</p><p>His attack even encompasses one of the web's more widely admired experiments - Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written and edited by anyone who wants to have a go, on the principle that the crowd possesses an aggregate wisdom all of its own. "To my mind Wikipedia is not wise," says Keen. "It's dumb. Not necessarily because all its contributors are dumb, but because if you don't have an editor in charge, and you don't have singular voices, then the intellectual quality of what the crowd produces is very low."</p><p>Until recently the Wikipedia entry for Andrew Keen informed readers that, in addition to coming from Golders Green, London, having an academic background and being an outspoken critic of Web 2.0, he was also "a child actor who found fame in a series of soup commercials". This isn't true; the sentence was inserted deliberately by the host of a Radio 3 show prior to an appearance by Keen, to show how easily the accuracy of Wikipedia can be undermined. This bit of factual vandalism remained for 12 days before it was removed - 11 days longer than an emendation from June 5, which replaced the entire first paragraph with the words "Andrew Keen IS a dumb motherfucker".</p><p>So it goes with Keen and the people he sometimes calls "the denizens of the cyberswamp"; he baits them and they rise. He belittles the contributions of Amazon reviewers, and they give his book one resentful star out of five. He compares bloggers to a million monkeys at a million typewriters, and they respond with reams of invective. He criticises Wikipedia for its vulnerability, for its excessive faith in the wisdom of the crowd, and some anonymous user - as if to prove the point - defaces his entry.</p><p>Keen has a particular knack for phrasing his criticisms in a way that allows every blogger to feel personally slighted. Part of this stems from his use of the word "amateur", which seems to dismiss the contribution of anyone who isn't getting paid for their trouble.</p><p>"I think that's probably a fair criticism," he says. "I'm sure there is some quite good writing on the internet, written by people who don't care about making money out of it, and who have something interesting to say."</p><p>At the same time he remains "very uncomfortable with the radical altruism - in some ways it's a legacy of the hippy culture - that lies at the heart of Web 2.0; the idea that we're all happy to give it away. I don't think that's the case. I think the majority of us need to work for money."</p><p>Keen claims he isn't really going after the bloggers so much as the influential idealists who actually run Web 2.0. "My real targets are what I would call the libertarians on the right and the left," he says. To Keen, the "democratised" web is actually a form of oligarchy, the product of an unholy alliance between old counterculturalists ("fat guys with beards, basically") and free-market fundamentalists (he offers Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, as an example). The former group, he says, reject "all forms of external authority"; the latter believe "that if you just leave everything alone it will work itself out".</p><p>One inviolable tenet of this twin-track libertarian ethos, according to Keen, is a misplaced faith in the integrity of the amateur - the citizen journalist, the self-published author, the mash-up musician - and a generic distrust of expertise. One does indeed find this attitude mirrored all over the net, where people frequently post sayings such as "Amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic". Mainstream media is seen as corrupt, compromised, lazy and fearful, while Web 2.0's army of amateur content-generators is dynamic, honest, worthy and wise. In Keen's estimation this idea isn't just absurd - it's dangerous. "For these Generation Y utopians," he writes, "every posting is just another person's version of the truth; every fiction is just another person's version of the facts."</p><p>Keen's argument strikes a chord with certain professions, particularly librarians, editors and educators. Keen's critics, on the other hand, see him as defending a largely abandoned redoubt: old media, with its outmoded "gatekeepers" and structural hierarchies. Others see him as a man embittered by the failure of his start-up company, who resents the subsequent success of the Web 2.0 pioneers. When he gave a talk at the ICA last month, someone stood up and accused him of writing "an extended whine about why people like you are no longer in charge of this culture". This remark drew applause, but Keen says the hostile reception was nothing like as bad as he gets in America.</p><p>Is he surprised by the strength of feeling?</p><p>"No, I expect it."</p><p>Does it ever bother him?</p><p>"Everybody, I guess, wants to be loved," he says, laughing. But Keen is so ready to make provocative statements, even when they might undermine his overall argument, that his blogger-baiting begins to look like a marketing strategy. "I don't know if it necessarily sells books," he says, "because I don't think bloggers read." Another statement, you might think, to launch a thousand outraged paragraphs.</p><p>In fact, the book, he insists, isn't really about the internet. It's more about personal responsibility: "It's not against technology. It's simply saying that we make technology and we need to control it. When we look at the internet we're looking at ourselves."</p><p>Keen concedes that he made some mistakes in setting out his case which probably haven't helped win over the opposition. "I think I idealised mainstream media ... I concentrated on the good things. I didn't write about the Sun newspaper. I didn't write about Fox." His opponents have been able to pick holes in his arguments - indeed there is a website devoted to doing so - but he says the book is a polemic primarily designed to start the conversation, and in that respect it has been a success. "Even my biggest enemies agree that there is a need to have this discussion."</p><p>He also accepts that the clock cannot be turned back, that user-generated content will continue to dominate the web, not because it's noble or truthful or authentic, but because it's free. "No one pays for content any more," he says. And if no one is willing to pay for content, then it simply becomes a publicity tool, another form of promotional giveaway. "That's what's going to happen with books," says Keen, "and even with movies. In a funny kind of way you could argue that that's what my book is. It's a way to build my brand so that people will pay me to make speeches."</p><p>And with that he goes off to tell an audience of internet advertisers that they've got it all wrong. His talk is entitled "The message is dead: how Web 2.0 is reducing all marketing to spam".</p><p><strong> · The Cult Of The Amateur </strong>by Andrew Keen is published by Nicholas Brealey, price £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop">guardian.co.uk/bookshop</a> or call 0870 836 0875</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Technology&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584774010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Technology&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584774010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Review: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/1959?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+Review%3A+The+Cult+of+the+Amateur+by+Andrew+Keen&ch=Books&c3=The+Observer&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CTechnology%2CObserver%2CCulture+section%2CSociety+%28Books+genre%29&c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Killian+Fox&c7=2007_07_08&c8=913201&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p><strong>The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy </strong></p><p>by Andrew Keen </p><p>Nicholas Brealey Publishing £12.99, pp240</p><p>Bloggers are notoriously touchy so it's unlikely they'll respond with restraint to the comparison that opens Andrew Keen's polemic. Adapting the 'infinite monkey theorem', Keen, a British media commentator based in California, updates the typewriting primates to internet users. These 'monkeys' are not producing Shakespeare, they're deluging us with 'everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels'.</p><p>It's not a fashionable statement in this super-connected Web 2.0 age, when Goliaths in every sector of the media are groaning and creaking before a billion interconnected young Davids. We are in thrall to Google and Wikipedia, addicted to Facebook and YouTube, but Keen, who was a bright-eyed Silicon Valley prospector before the dotcom crash, is making no apologies for his loss of faith. It isn't simply the flood of banality that worries him: it's the prospect of our cultural economies collapsing under the weight. He doom-mongers rather indulgently at times, but his horror story is still compelling.</p><p>A lot of Keen's fears are familiar and valid. The music industry is on its knees and fledgling bands do suffer when fans download their music for free. We can never be quite sure about what we read on Wikipedia. We worry about Google abusing our confidences.</p><p>It's the way Keen ties these concerns together that makes this book worth taking seriously, and even if you'd like to punch the man in the nose for calling you a monkey, few can dispute the need to critique this enormously powerful tool which we like to believe is fully in our control. In many cases that control is a two-way circuit, and no matter how democratic Web 2.0 appears, its lawless landscape leaves us, the users, exposed to all kinds of manipulations and abuses.</p><p>Unscrupulous corporations, scam artists and smut peddlers rank high on Keen's offenders list. It's when he takes a moral standpoint that his grip on the argument loosens. Many complaints are valid - stronger regulations should exist to protect children from adult content and sexual predators - but the screechiness of tone begins to grate.</p><p>As a polemicist, Keen is committed to the worst-case scenario, but what's absent is an acknowledgement of the many wonders of Web 2.0. Not every blogger is a high-school dropout and not every YouTube video is devoid of cultural value. There is well-informed, well-written discourse out there if you know where to find it.</p><p>Keen, who maintains a blog himself, refers to the web's noisy chorus as 'digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated'. He need not worry about his own voice being drowned out. The Cult of the Amateur will certainly hit a nerve, and hopefully some of its right-headed solutions will be acted upon, but the babble, we can be certain, is only going to increase.</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/society">Society</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584802010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584802010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Review: Send by David Shipley & Will Schwalbe
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/53136?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+Review%3A+Send+by+David+Shipley+%26+Will+Schwalbe&ch=Books&c3=The+Observer&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CTechnology%2CObserver%2CCulture+section&c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Rowland+Manthorpe&c7=2007_06_10&c8=911338&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p><strong>Send: The How, Why, When and When Not of Email </strong></p><p>by David Shipley & Will Schwalbe </p><p>Canongate £9.99, pp241</p><p>Communication by email has become an essential part of our lives. It is a shift of some magnitude, yet like all revolutions it is marked more by continuity than change. But while our messages have taken on novel forms, they are still uncomfortably wedded to old formats.</p><p>There are any number of interesting questions raised by this intersection of old and new, and Send raises many of them briefly. Unfortunately, its authors prefer to stick to the safe ground of '10 things' and 'five ways'. The trouble is, these don't really work.</p><p>Shipley and Schwalbe claim to have written a definitive guide to the use of email. As one would expect from experts on the written word - Shipley is op-ed editor of the New York Times and Schwalbe senior vice-president of a publishing house - the book is clear and well-structured. The pair are also aware of the most interesting new research in this field. They refer to Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's study of Darwin's and Einstein's letter-writing habits, for example, an analysis that prompted the great theorist of networks to suggest that there was no difference between emails and letters.</p><p>But they keep returning to the crude business of lists: Barabasi is followed swiftly by 'five ways to apologise for an inexcusable tardy email reply'. Some of these pointers are helpful, but in the main they fail to enlighten.</p><p>Shipley and Schwalbe wisely make use of private emails that have become public property, starting with Jo Moore's disastrous 9/11 suggestion that 'now is a very good day to get out anything we want to bury'. These real-life pearls shine through: I am happier knowing that ~(_8^(|) is Homer Simpson's emoticon. Unfortunately, these moments are few and far between.</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584821010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584821010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
John Crace: Safety first on the shelves
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/91709?ns=guardian&pageName=Comment+is+free%3A+John+Crace%3A+Safety+first+on+the+shelves&ch=Comment+is+free&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CTechnology%2CCulture+section&c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CCorporate+IT&c6=John+Crace&c7=2008_01_12&c8=403600&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Comment+is+free&c12=blog&c13=&c14=Comment+is+free&h2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free" width="1" height="1" /></div>With the right amount of money and hype you can still force almost any old turkey into the pop charts. Just ask Simon Cowell. But the internet has shifted the balance of power - just about every band now has a MySpace site and a YouTube presence and can reach a global online audience without the backing of a major record label. They don't all make it big, of course, as most are still a bit rubbish, and the ones that do almost always end up in the arms of the conglomerates; but there's no getting away from the fact that there's a process of democratisation going on. If you've got some talent, it's never been so easy to make yourself heard.<P>You might have imagined that much the same thing was going on in the publishing industry. After all, the internet provides much the same platform for writers as it does for musicians. Just create a website and start blogging. Belle de Jour started life as the blog of a high-class call girl, and Judith O'Reilly received a £70,000 advance from Viking for her six-week-old blog of moving to the countryside. Next month sees the publication of blogger Catherine Townsend's Sleeping Around: Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress.<P>But these are exceptions (two of which are no doubt bolstered by their titillating flavour). Take a look at the bestseller lists and you can see it's the same old, same old that dominate. Literary fiction is still lorded over by your Ian McEwans, Zadie Smiths, Graham Swifts and Sebastian Faulkses; crime and thrillers still come courtesy of Ian Rankin, PD James, Michael Connelly and Tom Clancy; and non-fiction is still in the hands of any celeb or politician who can fool a publisher into overpaying for their memoirs.<P>The picture is actually even bleaker than it looks. It's not just that publishers have been a bit slow on the new technology uptake and are playing catch-up with the music business; off the record - as it were - most publishers will now admit it's harder than ever to break new writers and are increasingly unwilling to give them a chance. There are exceptions, obviously. Zoe Margolis wrote on these pages last week in favour of the Blooker, a prize for books that began as blogs. But even she had to admit that the award attracted fewer than 100 entries. The musical equivalent would dwarf that number.<P>On the whole, the internet is far less user-friendly for those wanting to make money out of writing. Musicians can give away a few free downloads on their websites and still increase revenues by treating them as a plug for albums and live performances - one band, the Crimea, even made the whole of their most recent album available free as a download to broaden their fan base as much as possible.<P>There is little such incremental value for writers. Once something is up on a website it has almost no inherent financial value. Book readings and signings are hardly major revenue streams - even well-known authors sometimes find they are turning out for one man and a dog. Plus, no one is going to pay to get the same material in a different format. E-paper is still a rich person's toy and putting the first couple of chapters of a book (in any case hardly the same as songs from an album) on a website as a teaser can only really work if you've already got a publishing deal. Catch 22.<P>But if you really want to know where to point the finger, you don't have to look any further than the book trade itself - everyone from the publishers to booksellers. They just want to play safe. No one really believes that the next book by Ian McEwan or Zadie Smith will automatically be better than their last - or even necessarily better than that of a first-time novelist - but the fiction, in every sense of the word, is allowed to prevail because the numbers stack up. You don't have to spend a great deal of money selling these brands as the punters pretty much know what they're going to get and, given the incredibly tight margins on most books - very few books earn out their advance - it pays to be safe and reliable.<P>This way everyone makes money: publishers, booksellers and authors - at least the top 10% who scoop up more than 50% of the available pot. What's more, the bookseller chains get to make a nice little earner on top by charging publishers extra for displaying the books at the front of the store. In any other business this would be called a cartel. A medium that was once the springboard for radicalism is in danger of dying of conservatism.<P><a href="mailto:john.crace@guardian.co.uk">john.crace@guardian.co.uk</a><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Commentisfree&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584914010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Commentisfree&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584914010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Review: Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You by Sean Thomas
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/73189?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+Review%3A+Millions+of+Women+Are+Waiting+to+Meet+You+by+Sean+Thomas&ch=Books&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Books%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CTechnology%2CCulture+section&c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Nicholas+Lezard&c7=2007_05_05&c8=910631&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p><strong>Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You</strong><br /> by Sean Thomas<br /> (Bloomsbury, £7.99)</p><p>In a departure from this column's normal demanding standards, this book is not only very easy to read, but a bloke's book to boot. I think "bloke" is the mot juste here. It says on the back that Sean Thomas writes for the Guardian, but the prose reeks of testosterone; the kind that hums off magazines like Loaded.</p><p>And yet. One of the reasons Loaded became popular in the first place was that, despite the lumpen mentality, a few of its writers were capable of being quite funny. Nowadays it's different - one weeps for the trees that are killed to make it. But it was not always and invariably thus. And Thomas, who contributed to such magazines in their earlier days, has learned the art of comic writing. We should be almost always ready to forgive people if they can make us laugh. And this made me laugh, quite often.</p><p>Still, the book is off my usual beat. It's an expanded version of a commission Thomas must have received, if I am counting right, around 2000, from Men's Health magazine, to write about internet dating. Thomas, then 37, was single, and his editor thought that he would have nothing to lose. The writer was worried about meeting "women with sideburns", "mingers". When the editor said he'd pay for the first 12 dates, Thomas went ahead.</p><p>At which point we enter the mind of the modern man on the hunt for a girlfriend - or even a wife. It is quite a spectacle. Take, for example, his date with a girl from Smolensk who keeps bursting into tears from a combination of vodka and homesickness. (Bear in mind that this is on page 81, so we have had some time to get used to the workings of Thomas's mind and libido.) "I'm really not sure how to react to this weird Russian chiquita. Her life seems slightly tragic and she appears to be a little mixed up, but she's got ... a Pulitzer prize-winning bottom." (The ellipsis is Thomas's.) "I am aware that this is shallow, but I can't help it. This girl is confusing me. She is bonkers. She is weeping again. But what about that arse!?"</p><p>Do not judge too harshly. Thomas eventually acts like a gentleman. ("And, to be honest, I'm not totally convinced that she was that into me anyway.") More relevantly for our purposes, he does the comedy very well. Even if that "chiquita" isn't right, the "!?" conveys the tone of voice exactly.</p><p>For this is the book's saving grace, the real reason I'm recommending it: it's completely honest. Even if the facts are entirely made up, which I do not think is the case, he is certainly frank about his own inner state. We are not exactly getting a Saul Bellow-like insight into character here, but we are being given a reasonably accurate picture of what it is to be a common or garden heterosexual Englishman experiencing sexual hunger in the 21st century.</p><p>Like anything scrutinised closely, it can be pretty scary. There were many moments when I thought: what is his mum going to say when she reads this? Particularly the bit where he finds himself looking at internet porn so much that he actually, as he puts it, wanks himself into hospital.</p><p>There is something bracingly contemporary about the whole thing, though, and not just because of its larky confessional mode. The world he makes sense of, and immerses himself in, is full of people with online monickers such as Totaltease and Sally72 and Bongowoman. He wonders why men like looking at lesbian pornography, why he's so lazy and selfish, about men's insatiable sexual curiosity, about how much/how little fun you can have with promiscuity. He considers the ethics of going to prostitutes, pleasuring oneself before a date in order not to be thinking about sex to the exclusion of anything else, and what went wrong with his previous relationships. All these are things that the ordinary bloke talks about after a few drinks when there is no woman within five hundred yards. He's given the game away. In quite toe-curling detail. That's why it's such a hoot.</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584937010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584937010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Observer review: The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/65107?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+Observer+review%3A+The+Man+Who+Knew+Too+Much+by+David+Leavitt&ch=Books&c3=The+Observer&c4=Biography+%28Books+genre%29%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CObserver%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c5=Not+commercially+useful&c6=Peter+Conrad&c7=2006_06_18&c8=848233&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Biography&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FBiography" width="1" height="1" /></div><p><strong>The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer</strong><br />by David Leavitt<br />Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99, pp320</p><p>Every time I open the electronic book in which I'm writing this review, I feel grateful to Alan Turing and also sorry for him. On the screen, an apple with a chunk bitten out of it glimmers into view: the logo proudly recalls Turing's achievement and miserably commemorates his end.</p><p>Man, enticed by a woman, has always wanted to know too much, which is why Adam plucked the apple from the tree of knowledge. Turing's work on artificial intelligence, which enabled him to decrypt German military messages during the Second World War, then pressed him to design and help build a machine that could think for itself, advanced the intellectual rebellion that began in Eden. Mathematician David Hilbert, theorising about the infinite, insisted that the pure Platonic realm of numbers was safe from modern scepticism. 'No one shall be able to drive us from paradise,' he said. Turing, who led the voluntary exodus, proved him wrong.</p><p>He knew that he was defying the edicts of a jealous creator and bravely rebutted the objection that his computer interfered with God's plan by giving a machine a soul. Frankenstein was driven mad by Christian guilt. Turing, however, serenely reasoned that he was merely constructing a body for the spirit to live in. He did jokingly accuse himself of 'Promethean irreverence'. It was Prometheus, in the competing classical story of our origins, who moulded man from the mud of the riverbed and stole fire from the hearth of Zeus to animate his messy creature; we should remember that ennobling gift whenever we power up our computers, since the divine spark is now electronic. Turing's affinity with the Titan was all the closer because, lacking other relationships, he felt a parental solicitude for the cranky, bulky contraption he built in Manchester, which reproduced the neural network of the brain with rotors, valves, circuits and vacuum tubes. He called his computer 'Baby' and likened programming it to 'the training of the human child'.</p><p>The bite taken out of Apple's emblematic fruit advertises the mental audacity of our species. But it also, no doubt accidentally, laments Turing's death. The image splices together two myths, Genesis and Snow White. Turing, with a childishness typical of geeky genius, adored Disney's film, and often recited the spell that the Wicked Queen chants over the poisoned apple she offers to the simpering heroine. In 1954, he killed himself: he was in despair after his arrest for 'gross indecency' with a rent boy, for which his punishment had been chemical castration, a course of oestrogen injections that endowed him with breasts. A bitten apple was found beside his bed; before chomping, he had dipped it in a cyanide solution. Novelist David Leavitt, a specialist in the existential intricacy of gay relationships, concludes this short biography by remarking that no prince ever came to kiss Turing awake. Leavitt dispatches the mathematical preliminaries with impressive aplomb (at least I assume he does, since I am a man who knows too little about such matters). His interest, inevitably, is in Turing's character, and in the link between his mental wizardry and his social autism. His academic career faltered because he lacked what Leavitt calls 'schmoozing skills'; he held his trousers up with a length of twine and preferred long-distance runs to professional chit-chat.</p><p>Previous commentators have speculated that Turing's mastery of ciphers somehow derived from his undercover sexual identity. This was the view Alan Bennett took of Anthony Blunt in his play, A Question of Attribution, which connects homosexuality, espionage and the critical science of iconography as modes of subterfuge, arts that both conceal and expose a dangerous truth. But Turing, as Leavitt insists, was disarmingly frank about his desires, hungry for what EM Forster called 'connection'. He had little luck: a schoolboy crush, a few escapades on continental holidays and a fumbled rendezvous under the arches with the Manchester lad - his undoing.</p><p>He compensated for his disappointments by ensuring that his mechanical offspring had a perfect life. Frankenstein disowned the creature he made, called it a monster and refused to supply it with a bride. Turing, by contrast, treated his machine as an imaginary friend, argued that it must have 'human contact' and - leaping like an electrical charge from calculation to sensation - dreamed of teaching it to appreciate strawberries and cream. Frankenstein's fear of contradicting nature gave way to a brazen pride in outdoing nature; Leavitt turns Turing into a gay hero by declaring that he 'took up the cause of the man-made with an avidity to match Oscar Wilde's'.</p><p>It is a painful and slightly deranged story, a case history to illustrate Freud's notion that modern man is a 'prosthetic god', immortalised by his technological appliances. It is guaranteed to make you feel tenderly towards the martyred Turing, and it may even entice you to give your computer a kiss when you put it to sleep or wake it up in the morning. The machine, after all, has become, to use the trio of phrases Leavitt applies to his lover, Mark, in the book's dedication, 'friend, comrade, partner'.</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/biography">Biography</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584960010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584960010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
Observer review: 2005 - Blogged edited by Tim Worstall
<div><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/72051?ns=guardian&pageName=Books%3A+Observer+review%3A+2005+-+Blogged+edited+by+Tim+Worstall&ch=Books&c3=The+Observer&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CObserver%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c5=Not+commercially+useful&c6=Rafael+Behr&c7=2005_12_04&c8=854538&c9=article&c10=GU&c11=Books&c12=Computing+and+the+net&c13=&c14=&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p><strong>2005 - Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere</strong><br />edited by Tim Worstall<br />The Friday Project £8.99, pp224</p><p>On paper it is a terrible idea: let every have-a-go writer on the planet publish whatever they fancy and give it all away free. No editors, no agents, no fees, no quality control.</p><p>But a new generation of diarists, satirists, polemicists and poets have made the idea work precisely because they dispensed with paper. They are bloggers, their medium is the internet and there are around 19 million of them worldwide; 300,000 or so in the UK.</p><p>If you do not regularly read blogs it is probably for one of three reasons. First, you do not have access to the internet. Second, you do not personally know anyone who keeps a blog so you have not experienced the voyeuristic pleasure that is the medium's best recruiting sergeant. Third, you have taken a curious look at a few blogs and found them to be facile and illiterate.</p><p>In service to the unequipped, the uninitiated and the sceptical there is now 2005: Blogged, a paperback anthology of new British writing online. Tim Worstall, the collection's editor, has sifted vast swaths of web and picked out the gobbets that best capture the spirit of the UK blogosphere. Yes, that is a horrible geek neologism. But the internet has a persistent habit of creating concepts too quickly for language to keep up. Those who seek immersion in the new technology have to arm themselves quickly with a parallel vocabulary. Those who do not then find themselves doubly excluded.</p><p>The blog extracts compiled by Worstall are pleasingly free from arcana. They are documentary snapshots from the year that saw, among other things, hunting banned, Prince Charles married, London bombed and Tony Blair's nose bloodied in an election. Of course, these events were also covered by the nation's newspapers and TV stations. But professional journalists are bound by protocol. They are expected, for example, at least to try not to season every word with the sauce of personal experience. Whereas for bloggers that is the point.</p><p>'A friend of mine visits a strip pub once a week,' blogged Sean Thomas on 8 July, the day after the London bombings. 'Despite the bombs he went along this afternoon as usual and was the only guy with four strippers. But he told me he had to go "otherwise the terrorists would have won".' Short and darkly witty. Not many newspaper columnists managed that in their accounts of Londoners' reaction to an al-Qaeda intervention in their daily routine.</p><p>But on that July day, and every other day in 2005, there were millions of blog entries. Most were not so pithy. Most were overlong. Plenty were plain gaga. The internet may have made paper obsolete, but it has not banished the need for an editorial hand to corral what is worth reading into one place for the convenience of time-pressed readers. It is just such a service, the monthly Britblog round-up on Tim Worstall's site, that evolved into 2005: Blogged.</p><p>Worstall is an expat businessman based in Portugal. He is also a prolific blogger with a libertarian bent who is on a self-appointed mission to eviscerate every newspaper article that he judges guilty of economic illiteracy. He is not, however, exclusively hostile to old media, nor immune to the charms of ink on paper. He must be at least ambivalent about olde worlde recognition or he would not have published anything so Luddite as a book. But therein lies a contradiction in much political blogging: it rather depends on the very thing it likes ostentatiously to scorn.</p><p>So commonplace is the blogger's device of savaging something that has appeared in a newspaper that it has its own word, 'fisking', derived from the name of Robert Fisk, the Independent journalist on whose columns the art was first practised. Fisk was once asked whether he minded that his identity had been co-opted in this way. He replied: 'I don't waste my time with blogs, I don't use the internet, and I don't use email. I work.' His comments were promptly subjected to a brutal online fisking.</p><p>But journalists, when they do notice the existence of blogging, tend to give disproportionate attention to its political side. This is because they are first to feel the itch when the gadflies bite, and because anyone who is paid to do something gets anxious when they see a bunch of people doing the same thing for free.</p><p>In fact, the polemic brand of British blogging is a small segment of the whole. It is also a style that has been imported from the US, where there is much more animosity between new and old media (the former deride the latter as toothless lackeys of corporate greed); and between liberal and conservative bloggers (the latter excoriate the former as unpatriotic handmaidens of terror).</p><p>Vitriol on UK blogs is exchanged mostly in left-wing trench warfare over Iraq. More common and much more entertaining are the tens of thousands of journals in which ordinary folk document their lives with self-deprecating, deadpan irony. It is a tone that one day will be globally recognised as the house style of the British blogosphere. 'Dear My Colonoscopy,' starts an open letter on the blog, Chocolate Covered Bananas. 'Things you don't want to hear as you slip into sedation: "Is this the clean camera"?'</p><p>Ambulance drivers, traffic wardens, teachers, police officers - all have blogs. By some estimates a new one is created every few seconds, which means there should be a gradual erosion of the rump 70 per cent of the population that has still never even heard of blogging.</p><p>In the meantime, Worstall's book is a decent attempt to box the unruly new medium in the trusted packaging of an old one.</p><div style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="guRssAdvert"><a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584990010610430043023"><img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yes&site=Books&country=usa&spacedesc=rss&system=rss&transactionID=1231238584990010610430043023" border="0" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html">More Feeds</a>
