Whereto Publishing?

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"If you can see into the future, you're not looking ahead far enough," said the bloke that put the hole in the toilet seat that is the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee. Right now, that is particularly true in the world of publishing, where a great looming cloudy thing is gathering on the horizon.

Problem is, nobody knows quite what's in it.

I have long been fascinated with the question of where publishing's going. This is because I used to be in the publishing industry (before I fell into PR, insensibly, like a boiled frog) and also because I have a nasty book-writing habit. Harper Collins' experiment in online talent-spotting and stealth POD site, Authonomy, showed how book publishers were casting around for some way to use the Internet in their business models. At the same time, magazine and newspaper publishers have been watching revenues dwindle as all those bloodshot morning coffee eyeballs drifted onto the Internet.

The problem facing both categories of publisher is that they are wedded tightly to their business model - and it's a business model whose very existence is based on inefficiency. It's simply got to go.

This is not something I say because I want it to go. While I have long suffered from the whole 'carvers at the gates of Gormenghast' aspect of submitting to publishers, I am deeply attached to the papery wonderfulness that is a good book. It's just that it doesn't really work very well anymore.

Authors are paid a percentage of the cover price of a book. Publishers print lots of books, essentially speculatively, and depend on trying to sell a high percentage of the total number of books. They will never, ever sell all of the books. If you're doing very, very well you might sell 60%. The rest are returns and so the cost of any given book is actually a tad over 140% of its actual cost of production, print, shipping and so on. This is the first inefficiency - wastage on returns.

The total cost of the book will include something like 40% for the distributor (20% for the disty and 20% for the retailer). The author will make something around 8-10% of sales, although the percentage depends on who that author is.

Given that I can put a book in your hands for nothing using the Internet, the process of chopping down trees and squeezing them through printing presses, shipping them all over the world and then accepting the unsolds getting shipped back again (to be remaindered and then, if all hope is lost, pulped) seems to be terribly inefficient. And it is.

I have often said that the last refuge of the about-to-be-disintermediated is 'quality'. Never has it been so true of publishing the traditional way. You need professional editors to give a book quality. You can't replace the quality of a paper book. You'll lose all quality if you open up the publishing market to any Tom, Dick and Harry who thinks they can write a book.

In the time I was involved with Authonomy, you'd often hear me saying that I had found more books on the website that I wanted to read than I had found in my local bookshops. That was, and is, the case. There's a lot of great writing out there that could not be published not because it wasn't good or highly readable, but because it didn't fit into the commercial needs of a market that was based on focusing solely on the 'next big thing' precisely because of its inherent inefficiencies.

I have posted before about some interesting efforts to redefine book publishing that were born out of authonomy - and I think that life is about to get even more interesting for these fledgling attempts to find an alternative to the traditional publishing model.

At the same time, magazine and newspaper publishing (with many of the same inherent inefficiencies of sales and returns and the like) are both seeing declining sales and advertising revenue (see this guest post from writer pal and newspaper editor Robb Grindstaff). Early attempts to apply 'old fashioned' thinking to the Internet have racked up failure after failure - we ain't going to pay you for content we can get for free. This total disaster is the latest warning that newspaper 'paywalls' aren't the solution.

If Apple's announcement today is what I think it is going to be, a smart, usable tablet 'multi-reader' supported by a user-friendly transactional portal, then we will see if the soundbite of the year will come true: "Apple is going to do for publishing what the iPod did for the music industry."

Authors in the UK can make 75% of an e-book sale, which is not only fairer on the content creator, it reflects the fact that the actual cost of distribution of an e-book is zilch, nada and mafie. Editing and marketing are a cost - and an imprint will still want to gatekeep to keep quality high. But selling fewer books could make an author just as much money - and so smaller , more defined audiences can be served with more of what they want.

This doesn't mean the end for books and newspapers, by the way. It doesn't mean the end of journalism and authorship. It just means the end of publishing houses stuffed with gatekeepers, yoyo-toting cretins and marketing departments that want to sign up any half-celebrity or vampire novel rather than actually finding out what readers want. There'll be new publishers - quality imprints that are slicker, world-sourced and more nimble, marketing-centric and reader-driven, participative and community-minded.

And they'll be efficient.

Twitter and the Crash

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News is flooding Twitter regarding the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET409 off the coast of Beirut as I write this. There are persistent tweets about survivors, but no confirmed MSM (mainstread media) reports of any survivors as yet. There were 90 people on board, 82 passengers and 8 crew - Ethiopian Airlines was very fast indeed to get a press release out, proving neatly that the BBC had flubbed and reported the wrong passenger/crew numbers as 83 pax, 9 crew. A small detail, but the devil's in details.

The 'plane itself had just been bought from Irish low cost carrier Ryan Air, apparently, and was delivered in December. Specialists in aviation were soon tweeting detail like that, which together with eyewitness reports and breaking news from websites like CNN, made for the usual compelling viewing of a news event unfolding on Twitter.

Tens of people are dead and we're using words like compelling viewing. What's happened to us?

We're involved in the story now, of course. I saw the tweets from Beirut as I settled down in the office and passed on the most pertinent of them. It was interesting that people were being more cautious than they have before in annotating tweets with 'unconfirmed'.

Having sent out the 'heads up' and given links (thanks to @SpotOn) to a couple of journalists who were covering events, I stopped passing on news. The passenger names being Tweeted out (albeit they had been read out on LBC TV, a departure from the European practice of letting civil defence notify families before names are broadcast) nagged at me, along with details like the number of bodies that had been fished out of the sea at such and such a point.

And yet this is how our news comes to us - on the second, from the event, unfolding with each new fact, supported by a community that has formed around its common interest in the event, brought together by a hashtag.

I found myself thinking of the image of Iranian student Neda Soltani, whose last sight on earth as her eyes flickered closed may well have been the cameraphone lens pointed in her face. There's something terribly comforting about being in a mob that I don't like.

It’s a Gas

Image by Alexbip via Flickr

Many moons ago, we decided to resist the cunningly worded invitation from the motley crew at SEWA to accept their piped gas for a mere Dhs 1,000 service fee. I applied the same logic to this as my old landlord, Mr Mohammed, had applied to the use of power tools.

Back in the day, our old villa had a bathroom that featured terracotta walls, burnt umber flooring and a vibrant, custard yellow bath suite. We stood it for so long, but then I suggested to Mr. Mohammed that we replace it with a nice, clean white bathroom. I’d pay half the cost. Being a builder, he quoted a paltry sum which I agreed and then he got massively over-enthusiastic and completely remodeled the bathroom from, literally, the ground up – including re-routing all of the piping in the floor and walls. I have to say, we only paid the paltry sum. We have been Lucky In Landlords here.

During the inevitably extended period of work, Mr Mohammed and I stood together one day watching his men re-channelling the pipe work in the 20 year old concrete floor using nothing more than hammers and chisels.

“Why don’t you use Hiltis for this?” I asked, all innocent, like.

His incredulity was a picture. “Hilti? HILTI? Shou? Why for I want to use Hilti? This one piece cost same like two years’ salary for this man! Better I use this man!” said Mr Mohammed, with irrefutable (if brutal) logic.

I have to confess, I applied Mr Mohammed’s Theorem to the question of gas. Rather than pay SEWA Dhs 1,000 for the gift of gas (and then pay them whatever mad rate they decided to apply to expats for all time, raising it annually for all we knew, just like they’ve raised the electricity for us but kept it at the same rate for ‘nationals’), I decided to live with the occasional upset of running out – because having to call Mr Speedy Gas twice a year wasn’t the end of the world. He usually made it in 20 mins and cost Dhs 40 a canister. These days he’s charging Dhs 100 and taking his sweet time, as we found out last night. What's more, gas doesn't seem to last like it used to. Adding to all that, I do have to wonder how much longer he’ll keep going for, this supplier of what is now almost black market bottled gas to Sharjah's last gas holdouts.

It seems inevitable that some time in the future we’ll have to become SEWA’s Gas Bitches. Funnily enough, I'm not looking forward to it...

Outed

Image by Ian Hayhurst via Flickr

Well, I got outed today. Went onto Dubai Eye Radio's Dubai Today programme to talk about 'cyber-cide' and other online stuff and co-presenter Jessica Swann was lurking, cackling manically as I walked into the studio. That wouldn't normally be a worry, but her partner in crime, Robert 'Wes' Weston was smiling enigmatically. The combination of hooting and oriental inscrutability from a dangerous pair like that would be enough to unnerve anyone, but it had me looking for the door.

Indescision sealed my fate. The 'On Air' light was glowing, rooting me to the seat as Wes hit the button on the desk and Jess rocked with silent, malign glee. And they played this song.

Jess had been sitting on Bondi beach getting her backside burned, listening to this and had a 'eureka' moment, apparently. I can tell you, if I was lying on Bondi beach, this blog would be the last thing on my mind, but there's no account for Aussies...

So yes, it is where the name of this blog came from. And it is an inspiration to be be proud of, too.

Have a nice weekend y'all!

Blockheads

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"The regulations over Internet have a dynamic structure and necessary legal changes are made when problems are detected in implementation."

The above, rather marvellous sentence, was blurted out by a Turkish official when he was responding to the OSCE's strongly worded call for Turkey to reform its Internet legislation a couple of days ago. The call came as the OSCE published its report on media freedom and Internet censorship in Turkey.

If you thought we had it bad in the UAE, spare a thought for the poor old Turks, who have been at various times forbidden to access YouTube, a number of Google sites including Blogger and others, including sites like MySpace and Last.fm. A number of Turkish language news sites are also blocked, particularly, notes the report, those dealing with South-Eastern Turkey. The Turkish government has also blocked Farmville, which is probably no bad thing.

Hitting the old nail on the head, the OSCE's Representative on Freedom of the Media, Miklos Haratzi, said: "Even as some of the content that is deemed 'bad', such as child pornography, must be sanctioned, the law is unfit to achieve this. Instead, by blocking access to entire websites from Turkey, it paralyzes access to numerous modern file sharing or social networks."

The issue is not, let us be clear, pornography. There are a number of provisions for blocking access under Turkish law (stuff like child pornography, incitement to suicide and illegal gaming, for instance), including crimes against Kemal Ataturk. It was, in fact, the existence of a number of videos on YouTube defaming Ataturk that led to the ongoing block of the website.

Along with a worrying rise in the number of sites being blocked overall, the OSCE report also notes a rise in the number of sites being blocked outside of the scope of the Internet law, identifying some 197 sites that have been blocked outside the law in the past year. Blocks were instituted against a number of gay sites, sites like Indymedia Istanbul and a number of news sites as well as advocacy sites for socialist, muslim and Kurdish organisations.

It's a worrying time for the poor old Internet. The increasing ubiquity of the medium and the many ways in which people are finding to use it (including, and I want to be quite clear here that I disapprove, Farmville) appear to be spooking a number of governments. It's not just a Middle Eastern thing, although the recent news from Jordan is a worrying indicator of a tide of thought and opinion among more traditionally minded legislators in our region - the Australians have been going on about instituting wide-ranging blocking powers. And we all know what's been happening in China.

It's all very well slapping freedoms in a constitution. But when people start taking 'freedom' too literally, it appears they need a little help from the law... or even outside the law, in Turkey's case...

Green and Greener

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I know I'm a bit hard on Gulf News occasionally and it does, believe me, make me feel guilty. But sometimes the chaps over at the Newspaper That Tells It Like It Is do stuff that has me shaking my head in incredulous disbelief.

Today's 450g slab of papery joy contains a shiny supplement titled 'Go Green'. It's one of those special supplements so beloved of newspapers here - the ones where you get a page of the uncritical, slavish blether of your choice printed about you as long as you advertise. The ones nobody in their right minds reads. Ever.

In fact, 54 pages (including covers) of shiny, high-ceramic glossy paper are dedicated to the green message - and, of course, not even a nod to the concept of carbon neutrality or perhaps the advantages of not wasting something like 11 tonnes of paper (if my calculations are correct, 100g per supplement, 112,000 claimed run by GN) to produce something that is purely a vehicle for printing advertising for profit. Its informational value or the fact that it is in fact a genuine attempt to educate and inspire people is something I would love to see someone try and defend.

This next bit isn't going to make me popular among a number of people, including those I count as friends.

The same issue of GN (which, incidentally, also covers the IRENA summit in Abu Dhabi) also illustrates its tabloid section with the headline 'Green Day' and a cover image of a Toyota FJ Cruiser churning up the green desert like a little blue plough, following in the tracks of many others that have destroyed the delicate plant life on the side of the dune. This car would have been one of the thousand or so cars that annually plough a great scar of tracks through the desert in the name of the Gulf News Fun Run.

The desert here is a delicate biome and never more so than when it greens after rain. To show it being destroyed by hundreds of cars, the carpet of tentative life torn up and mashed into a muddy gash next to the words, 'Participants... enjoyed the unique sight of the desert in bloom.' shows a most definite lack of understanding of the word irony.

Now I have to admit I'm deeply conflicted here. A long term resident, I often drive in the desert and have done so for many years in parties of varying sizes.

I have always had a mild aversion to the idea of a thousand cars churning up the desert, believing (probably wrongly) that smaller parties of drivers would have a lesser impact than hundreds at a time. At the same time, the Fun Run is a much-loved annual event that brings a large number of people together in their enjoyment of the outdoors - and I have to record that the marshals do ensure that litter and the like are not left behind.

But today's Gulf News gleefully slaps the word GREEN on two activities that are most definitely negative in their impact on our environment. I guess it's one thing to proselytise in naggy 'go green' editorial campaigns, but quite another to truly practice what you preach.

No Comment

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Hetta e-magazine court case (reported by Gulf News here in case you hadn't heard of it) is a worrying precedent.

A judgement against Hetta (Hetta is a headscarf or Keffiyeh) has been reached by the Abu Dhabi Court of Appeals in the defamation case lodged by the Abu Dhabi Media Company (the owners, interestingly, of a number of media outlets, including newspaper The National) . The case centres around a comment made on an article by a reader. This is the important bit, the article linked here (you'll have to spikka da Arabi) attacking Abu Dhabi Media Company's hiring policies, is not the issue - the alleged defamation came as a reader-submitted comment posted against the article.

That precedent would potentially mean that any online site (including, *gulp*, blogs) in the UAE would be held legally liable for any content posted by commenters to the site. That would have an immediate and drastic effect on any form of open or free speech (no, I'm not interested in arguments about how little of that there is). It would also make us all moderators, or 'censors' of content posted on our sites by the public.

“The decision taken in this case against an independent news website is clearly disproportionate,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement, in full here. “Why close an entire website for a month when only a few comments posted by readers were at issue and only its editor was being blamed? And before going to court, why didn’t the plaintiff ask Hetta.com’s management to remove the comments in a spirit of conciliation?”

Why indeed. And a media owner, at that.

Hetta's lawyer is taking the case to the top, a final appeal is to be filed with the Federal Supreme Court, according to GN, so the fat lady hasn't sung. Let's hope she's got a reasonable tune when she does.

If you add to this the result of the defamation case in the UK against Gulf News a while ago, you also have a precedent that anyone who has business interests in the UAE and considers themselves defamed in the UAE by any commenter on any global medium accessible here, they could possibly launch a case in the UAE court. Far fetched? Oh, do I hope so.

This alarming judgement, by the way, comes a week after Jordan's decision to apply its press and publishing law to online activity. That law, similarly, would hold bloggers and other online sites responsible for user comments made on articles - treating them effectively as letters to the Letters Page of a newspaper - an editorial responsibility.

But here - this is possibly the really interesting bit that affects millions rather than a raggle-taggle bunch of bloggers and online publishers - we reach the edge of gibbering insanity. If I'm responsible in law for what you write on my blog, am I just as responsible for a comment you leave on my Facebook page?

Both of these moves are subject to a final decision, so there's a chance for reason to prevail. But it's never been more likely that those cautious little green shoots of commentary and dialogue could well be snuffed out in the Middle East.

The GeekyFesto

I put this together with Saadia as we prepared to 'export' the idea of GeekFest to Beirut and then popped the file over to Alexandra Tohme in Beirut - Alex is UNorganising GeekFest Beirut. She promptly, to my mild horror, posted it up on the excellent Google Group that they started over there in order to put together ideas and collaboration over the event (it's perhaps notable that the Lebanese approach to GeekFest has been a lot more collaborative than the Dubai one. Don't ask me why, it just is).

And then I thought about it a little and realised that, well, what's to be so coy about? This is, after all, The Event With Nothing To Hide. So here, at least in part to be a perennial answer to the many people who ask "What's GeekFest?", is the Idea.

GeekFest
GeekFest is intended to be an offline social event for online people and should be interesting to anyone who's involved in the online world and in using technology to create, educate, entertain, inform or just play around.

It’s purposefully kept organic, free and easy. We truly hope that expanding GeekFest regionally will bring new ideas, offshoots and events to the whole thing. However, one thing must be clear from the start. GeekFest must never actually matter to anyone. If you’re holding a GeekFest and five people turn up, you should be able to shrug your shoulders and have a chat with the five people rather than die a million deaths that your attendance was low. If people don’t come, they don’t want it and we’ll simply stop doing it. If that all makes sense!

We are very proud of the fact that GeekFest is, as far as is practical, UNorganised. There are no officials, gatekeepers or people telling attendees what to do. There are no rules beyond the ‘no corporate behaviour, selling and stuff’ one. The only reason there is a start and finish time is that people insisted.

However, there are some guiding principles that we’ve established, mostly by trial and error.

GEEKFEST ELEMENTS

Guiding principles
No corporate stuff, no bossing people around, no gatekeepers, no hassle, no drama.

GeekFest consists of three elements – GeekTalks, TechnoCases and ArtStuff. Other than that, it’s just a big room full of smart people who have stuff that is interesting, engaging and even possibly visionary to discuss. Oh, and good fingerfood. The fingerfood is more important than the idea stuff.

GeekTalks
These have evolved as a series of four 15-minute presentations on areas/issues of interest to the audience and are not limited in any way by topic - they could be 'Why I love my iPhone' or 'A lion tamer's guide to Zeppelins'. They take place in an area separate to the main area (in The Shelter we use the private screening room, a 30-odd seat cinema) and can be wide-ranging but should be interesting and intellectually engaging.

The speakers are responsible for sorting out their own technology requirements between them (we provide an LCD projector and screen) and for their own time-keeping. Nobody tells them when to start and stop talking or stands around tapping watches. They are also responsible for bringing their own audience – there’s nobody to tell people they have to attend a talk.

GeekTalkers are expected to suggest a successor to speak at the next GeekFest.. This way we, the UNorganisers, aren’t always the gatekeepers to a speaking slot. We will find a speaker if GeekTalkers don’t want to for any reason.

Holding a TechnoCase at GeekFest absolutely DOES NOT include, ever, a talking slot. Talks are user views and never sales pitches.

GeekTalks typically take place from 8pm-9pm at GeekFest Dubai.


TechnoCases
The Technology Showcases give companies a chance to interact with the attendees at GeekFest. They’re not an invitation to scream slogans or brand the event, they’re a chance to show funky stuff and engage with an audience of highly influential online thought-leaders in a dialogue.

Companies can bring a bunch of laptops, a gadget or 15, a display case or free-standing display. Whatever is sensible, really – and doesn’t dominate the event, get in the way or otherwise act as an irritant or eyesore. People that can talk with authority about the product/idea are probably more important than any branding.

Within those sensible constraints, companies mounting TechnoCases can use areas within GeekFest as they see fit – but they are actually asked to sign a contract agreeing not to hassle the Geeks.

Mounting a Technology Showcase at GeekFest does NOT confer the rights of sponsorship. We’ll include companies generally in promotional stuff and try to take care of them when we remember to, but there are no branding elements, logos or other promises made. They’re coming to the party to talk to people interested in engaging with them and that’s the deal.

GeekFest Dubai started charging companies $1,000 for a TechnoCase and subsequently has increased this to $1,500. The venue partner raises invoices and manages settlements.


Art Stuff
The art stuff at GeekFest has happened spontaneously but we’re now careful to include an element of art ‘happening’ at each event – wherever possible of a digital variety. This would be a graffiti artist, a digital artist, a photographic display, an installation or some such – the more the merrier – and accessible to everyone, too!

GeekFest Dubai has a back-beat, a funky soundtrack selected by Shelter DJ Simone Sebastien.


Food and Drink
We use the TechnoCase revenue to subsidise/fund the food and drink (pass-around food like quiche, kebabs, pastries, sandwiches, cakes and fresh juices) at the event. One of the UNorganisers keeps an account of incoming/outgoing revenue.

We don’t have alcohol at GeekFest Dubai in deference to Muslim attendees. Each GeekFest will have its own cultural environment, however.


Promo
We promote GeekFest Dubai using FaceBook, Twitter (an important platform, actually) and blogs – Alexander’s in particular, but also the UAE Community Blog (Thanks, Sam!). GeekFest isn’t about any one group (gamers, Twitterers – it’s NOT a Tweetup!, bloggers and the like) but about integrating everyone regardless of platform.

There has been quite a bit of media interest in GeekFest Dubai but we haven’t ‘pushed it’ or made formal announcements or anything – word of mouth has been very strong. We have done a number of interviews ‘on demand’ with media.

We’ve found that making announcements closer to the event is best – although we set the date early. GeekFest Dubai is now running on a steady two-month cycle, typically the last Thursday of the month or so – 2010 will be Feb, Apr, Jun etc – Ramadan and Christmas etc obviously require some judgement calls.

Last minute excitement runs quite high, particularly on Twitter. We tend to stoke this a bit by holding back speaker announcements and other stuff. Being tarts, basically.


UNorganising
GeekFest Dubai is UNorganised by a two-wo/man team – Saadia and Alexander. Alexander looks after promo and the geeks, Saadia owns and looks after the venue (including F&B etc). We will always have GeekFest at Dubai’s The Shelter – it’s the place that Saadia runs and it’ll never move from there – even though we already have logistical issues (the cinema’s too small for the talks, but the atmosphere’s electric in there). NOTE: That's changed now, The Shelter shut down and so GeekFest was untethered from its emotional 'home') If attendance spikes too high we’ll just move to registration or even first come first served. That’s cool because it limits the event to a hard core audience and doesn’t let us get all big headed or anything.

We put labels and pens at the door if people want to make badges for themselves. A quaint trend of wearing especially geeky t-shirts has started, BTW.

The best way to UNorganise a GeekFest, we think, is that two person team – someone to take care of the geekiness and someone to take care of the realities. UNorganising the venue isn’t hard – book the date, book F&B for the broad estimate of attendees. Arrange a speaker area and projector. Err. That’s it. We think the geek/blogger and venue owner combination is tops, but a geek/blogger and event organiser would do the same job, no? The F&B is a bit hit and miss, but we think it's better than having to put everyone through registration and stuff.

As we expand (IF we expand and it works!), we’d hope to bring our pool of stuff together and share platforms, ideas, presentations, communities and so on. We’re not sure where that’s going yet but there’s an interesting cloud over there that could turn into something really quite smart and regional. Or not.

Either way, GeekFest is there purely for enjoyment. Oh! And it's a resolutely not for profit event.



Alexander and Saadia

Nota Bene

The first GeekFest Beirut takes place at Art Lounge in Beirut on the 6th February 2010 - you can follow @GeekFestBeirut on Twitter, Facebook or mess around in the Google Group.

The next GeekFest Dubai has been dubbed GeekFest Dubai 3.14 and will take place on the 25th February 2010 at The Shelter in Al Quoz. You can do the Facebook thing, follow @GeekFestDubai on Twitter or just pop back here nearer the date for more information.

Is Google Done With China?

Google's stance on its ongoing business in China is outlined in a straightforward and clear fashion in this entry by Senior VP David Drummond, posted on the Google Blog. It's nice, by the way, to see a corporate talking this straight, clear and concisely.

The post is self-explanatory and follows the unearthing of a number of sophisticated hacks of Google and other sites. Those hacks appear to have been targeting the personal information of activists, dissidents and advocates of change in China - the implication being (although Google's language clearly avoids drawing any conclusions) that this move was the work of a government agency rather than a criminal organisation.

Google, it would appear, is pretty hacked off*.

It's clearly a shot across the bows for the Chinese government - Google has 'decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn' according to Drummond's post. The company has clearly made a decision about a situation it had always found uncomfortable (there has been much criticism of Google for its stance on China and censorship) - now we'll see how Google's negotiations with the Chinese government progress and whether this move results in access to uncensored search for the Chinese or Google pulling out of the country.

If Google has decided it can no longer tolerate the censorship of the Internet, it will be interesting to see how it will defend its operations in other world markets where censorship - for whatever reasons - is in place. Differentiating censorship of dissident voice and censorship for reasons of morality, for instance, starts us down a long and rocky path that would have to be carefully negotiated with a finely tuned 'moral compass'. And that doesn't even bring in commercially motivated censorship (banning Internet telephony providers, for instance), muckle-headed censorship (banning social media platforms) or straightforward, good old fashioned censorship (A number of .IL sites for a start).

Will Google pull out of Australia if the government goes ahead with its plan to censor the Internet? Or does a government have to combine a policy of censorship with egregious hacking behaviour before Goog steps out?

*(Sorry!)

Five Books for Kareem

Kareem Shaheen is a journalist with Abu Dhabi based newspaper The National. Try not to hold that against him, he's a decent fellow for all that.

Kareem's New Year's resolution is slightly unusual but highly laudable. He's setting out to read a book a week for the year. Yup. 52 of 'em. Rather wonderfully, he's also reviewing them on this blog linked right here.

I gave myself the unenviable task of listing the five books I would recommend to him above all else. It nearly killed me, but here they are: five books for Kareem. Feel free to add your five penny'orth.

A quick note for those of you reading this on FaceBook, which includes many of my literarily inclinated pals, please pop over to the blog if you would like to add your recommendations. Cheers!


The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
I think I can say this is my favourite book of all time, although it's really a four-in-one recommendation. Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is a winner on all fronts: set in '30s and '40s Alexandria it's lush, evocative and rich, its vivid characters occupy settings described with a sumptuary's eye, everything touched by notes of the mystical and imbued with a smoky sexuality. The Quartet is just that, a tetralogy - four books that describe the same sequence of events, forming an interlinear which sees its events unfold from four narrative perspectives: Justine, Mountolive, Balthazar and Clea. Structurally, imaginatively, intellectually and lyrically brilliant, it's a book I have re-read many times with joy at every encounter. If I had an ounce of Durrell's genius, I would be a giant. He was, incidentally, an alcoholic who liked to beat women, but I suppose you can't have everything...


Seven Pillars of Wisdom
TE Lawrence
Thomas Edward Chapman has been something of a hobby for me: I have every book written by him or about him during his lifetime, each one a first edition. I don't have the famous 'subsriber's edition', sadly, but then I'd be sitting on tens of thousands of pounds worth of book if I did. Lawrence's account of the Arab Revolt and his role in it makes for fascinating reading, let alone that it reveals old TE to be an author of considerable power and style. It's classical stuff written wonderfully and stands as truly a great work of literature - regardless of how you view it as history.

The Honourable Schoolboy
John Le Carré
John 'call me David Cornwell' Le Carré has to be one of my favourite contemporary reads. Often shrugged off by snotty, superior types as 'just spy stories', Le Carré's books are a good deal more literary than many suppose - he's a master stylist whose bleak landscapes are peppered with tragedy and human failure, increasingly so as he's grown older. The Honourable Schoolboy is set in Hong Kong during the fall of the British secret service following the uncovering of its head as a Soviet 'mole'. Using back-tracking techniques, basically going where the mole didn't want them to go when he was in place, Le Carré's famous Smiley and company start to buy their way back into viability by pulling off a major intelligence coup. It's unputdownable stuff at every level.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S Thompson
He hardly needs any introduction, but journalist Hunter Stockton Thompson invented 'gonzo', a school (if it can be elevated to that!) of journalism that celebrates the journalist as participant in the events being covered. And Hunter's idea of immersion is a Mach-speed plunge into the depths of drug-addled frenzy. Brilliantly played by Johnny Depp in the film of the same name, Thompson trod a constant tightrope of alcohol abusing, gun-toting, high speed drugged-up insanity in his quest to cover the Mint 400 desert race in Las Vegas. If Fear and Loathing doesn't make you laugh with manic glee and want to go out and commit a crime, you're not human.

The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
When he's not writing books, Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics (at Bologna University, as you ask), the study of signs and symbols, and his books reflect his intellectual engagement with the ideas of the dawning of human comprehension that took place as Europe emeged from the dark ages. The Name of the Rose is set in a monastery in Italy, where an English monk and his Italian apprentice attempt to solve a series of murders. Set against a backdrop of Albigensian heresy and the Inquisition, their quest for truth takes place among the mysteries of the massive library-maze and the scriptorium that the Monastery is famed for - and where truth is by practice kept hidden. It's a brilliant whodunnit peppered with ideas and explorations of human thought and symbology. Oddly, I also liked the film but then I'm a sucker for Sean Connery...


So there they are. My five favourite books of all time. I know in my heart of hearts that I'm going to regret this, that the others jostling just under will make me regret this - let alone those that didn't come to mind this morning. I could so easily make it 50 or probably even more. But it's set in stone now...

What are your Five Books for Kareem?