Al Khaleej Strikes Again

Image via Wikipedia

Journalist Anwar Abdelkhaliq, writing in today's Arabic daily Al Khaleej, attempts to once again set the bar even higher with an exclusive scoop interview with the Dubai Shopping Festival. Having previously nailed scoops with Dubai Summer Surprises mascot Modhesh Al Modhesh and the Burj Khalifa, Al Khaleej has certainly cornered the market in celebrity interviews and Anwar today does a sterling job of following in that fine tradition.

The journalist is minding his own business when the phone call comes on his mobile. Wows! It’s the Dubai Shopping Festival on the line! The Festival arranges to meet the journalist on Seef Street at 5pm. The journalist’s daughter wants to come to the interview because her mommy told her about the Festival. The journalist calls the Festival to let it know his daughter will be coming. The area was like a wedding, with people from all nationalities having fun. He looked around to find his Festival friend, describing the music and people, the perfume market antiques market and so on at great length.

The journalist is puzzled. Despite all this fun and laughter, he can’t seem to find his friend the Festival. He puts in a call: “Where are you?”

“I’m next to you!” says the Festival, who obviously has a tremendous and rather coquettish sense of humour. “Follow me to Riqqa Street where I am now – there are thousands of people here who won’t let me leave.”

The journalist is excited at his scoop, the first time in 15 years that the Dubai Shopping Festival has agreed to speak. Along with his daughter he rushes to Riqqa Street. “What’s this?” asks his daughter.

“This is the joy that the Festival brings!” says dad.

“Now I know what mummy meant! But don’t say that your friend didn’t show up! He’s all around us in the fun and joy we see!”

Undaunted, the journalist calls the Festival again in pursuit of his scoop – the first talking Festival interview. “I won’t disappoint you!” says the Festival. “Meet me in Global Village. First you have to go to Jumeirah Beach Walk where my heritage is displayed – your daughter will love it!”

“Don’t worry my daughter! We shall meet the Shopping Festival in Global Village!” says the excited journalist.

The journalist finally meets the Dubai Shopping Festival at Global Village. “Are you ready for the interview?” gushes the journalist.

“Completely!” affirms the Festival.

“Why this place?” asks the journalist.

“Because this is where the Arabs unite – I’m very concerned with Arab Union,” says the Festival. “On this land is where the Iraqi people became one!”

The Iraqis are divided by policy, apparently, but united by Dubai – as are the Lebanese and Syrians in this great mixture of peoples – “This, my friend, is why I came into existence!” says the Festival, using litotes to great effect.

“I owe my 15 years of success to Dubai and its wise leadership and people who allowed me to become such a great event. It is because of Dubai that I am the number one shopping festival in the Middle East. People from all over the world come to watch my annual celebrations awaited by everyone thanks to Dubai.”

Unbowed from following his hard-nosed journalistic instincts, our man yielding the pen that is mighter than the sword throws in a curve ball. “They say you are just an occasion for buying and selling stuff.”

“This is the wrong way to look at things!” Thunders the Festival. “Sure, there are opportunities to shop but I am a greater expression of joy than this, with events every year! I came to tell the world that this Emirate is a land of love and peace and to tell the world that our winning trade is the basis for peace in the world!”

“Where is your daughter?” asks the Festival, demonstrating a surprising ability to make sudden and oblique changes in conversational direction.

“She’s over there playing with a group of friends.”

“Don’t worry, she’s safe – the Al Ameen service provided by Dubai Police for parents’ protection ensures peace of mind!”

The journalist is dedicated, obviously, to putting the hardest questions to the Festival and smacks it round the head with the immortal: “So what do you think of the launch of the Metro and the Burj Khalifa?”

“I see them as the best response to people addicted to rumours. Projects and achievements keep happening – they don’t stop and won’t stop. Days will pass by and I will celebrate my 100th birthday with Dubai’s head high and embracing the sky just as its tallest tower embraces the clouds,” says the feisty Festival.

“Who do you blame for this?”

“To the old people at the wedding who do nothing but talk when our motto is ‘do nothing but work’, I say come to Dubai to see the malls and parks – talk to the people who say that Dubai is in the heart and mind together.”

“Is this why you have talked this year?”

“I was provoked by these people who are blind. Dubai will remain great in spite of them.”

The journalist gathers his papers, delighted at his scoop. And we must share in his delight as we benefit from the wise words of the world's only talking Shopping Festival. That award for great journalism during Dubai Shopping Festival is surely in Al Khaleej's bag now!

Next week: we interview Jebel Ali Free Zone...

Health Warning: This article is an extract from the original Arabic rather than a verbatim translation. For the full effect go to Arabic lessons or get a colleague as talented as Marwa Yehyia to translate it for you so that you can dash down the better bits whilst trying to maintain your composure enough to type.

Crédit Agricole - Green Washing

Sean Connery via last.fm

I have to admit to finding the Sean Connery-voiced Crédit Agricole TV advertisements mildly annoying. The theme is consistent - scenes of awful doomsday industrialisation are played over Sean baby's trademark Shcottish vocal - in fact, he's hamming it up so much that he sounds like a cheap voice-over artist trying to sound like Sean Connery - and then suddenly, with the exhortation that it's 'time for green banking', we're shown 3D animations of some mad bastard's nightmare 'green world' where people are made badly out of polygons and all surfaces are rendered using 1980s graphics technology.

I've been meaning to take a look at the company's website for a while now and find out quite what 'green banking' is. And now I know. It's rubbish.

Crédit Agricole does nothing that any other major corporate wouldn't do. It's got a diversity program. It's carbon offset. And it finances wind farms. That's about it - and pretty much any large financial or other corporate today would be in a position to make similar claims. In fact, Crédit Agricole's own 'green banking' website lays claim to 'green banking' as an 'alternative way to conduct banking business' on the following three pillars:

Its origins. Crédit Agricole was founded by the merger of local banks dedicated to providing finance to farmers. Seriously - this is CA's primary claim to being a greener bank than others. The idea that French farmers are green is mildly interesting given that they're lobbying for the introduction of GMOs and are more agri-industrial than they are cutesy organic homesteads.

Its organisation and culture. There is no reason given on the website why Crédit Agricol's organisation and culture are in any way 'greener' than anyone else's. In fact, there is no reason given whatsoever for any green credentials to be attributed to the bank's organisation and culture. This would likely be because Crédit Agricole's organisation and culture aren't really 'green' in any meaningful way.

Its identity. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the payoff. Crédit Agricole is green because its identity is green. We're green because we say so is the message behind all of those millions and millions of dollars in international advertising.

Behind Sean Connery's trademark lishp is that one marvellous message. If you've got enough money, you can just repeat unsustainable assertions at your compliant audience and they will eventually come to accept your liesh.

Jusht shay it will be sho and it will be sho...

When Silence Ain't Golden

Image by keira-anne ♥ via Flickr

Well, I was having a nice quiet start to the day when I got a call from La Swann wanting to talk on air about the Burj Khalifa elevator incident and how the communications aspect had played out.

Crisis management takes many shapes and forms, but generally is called for when something happens that is deeply regrettable in some way. Managing a crisis these days is about getting as much dependable information out as you can - fast. By being communicative, you earn the right to get your story out in full - to mitigate the hard facts with some explanations.

I've seen my fair share of these, from explosions and deaths through to recalled products and political screw-ups. Everyone's first reaction is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout lalala until all the nasty people go away. When you've endangered lives, when you've attracted the attention of the world's media, sadly, that's simply not an option - and no professional PR practitioner would consider it as an option for one picosecond.

So what do you do?

In minor and/or simple issues, you'd tend to be 'reactive' - you'd answer questions when they're asked, typically with a prepared statement. Where you've got a major problem on your hands (any issue involving danger to human life being a Great Big Red Flag), you get out there and communicate.

Typically, you'd want to say what happened, how and why it happened, what you've done to ameliorate the effects and how you're working to ensure it won't happen again. Critically, if there has been danger to the public, you have the opportunity to express regret and concern for those affected - and what you're doing to help them deal with the consequences.

Trying to get by with issuing a statement that does not recognise the facts is a short term fix that will rarely, if ever, work - particularly these days when everyone with a mobile is a TV crew. Rather than getting one hard hit with your side of the story told alongside the unpleasant facts, you're begging for a drip feed of stories that are wholly negative.

If you preserve your silence while that negative coverage is breaking, you are effectively positioned as arrogant and uncaring. News expands to fill a vacuum, so your silence encourages investigative reporting which will tend to be negatively skewed precisely because your silence ensures that your side of the story is not being told.

Because today's world is a fast-moving little place, news can globalise in minutes flat. That means having a sound crisis communications plan in place. This starts with imagining the unimaginable, planning for the very worst (including the unthinkable. It's funny how often the unthinkable happens) and then answering the million dollar question - how would we react if this happened?

There are a lot more questions to answer, too. Questions like who do we care about? What are our policies and procedures? Who owns this problem?

You actually need to put procedures in place, define reporting and escalation paths and have a team assigned for the unthinkable. You need to have 'dark sites' in place - websites that can be cut in to replace your standard home page so that relatives, friends and other concerned people can get access to information. You need to be able to scale quickly to respond to requests from media - local at first, but very quickly global. You need to have statements in place, at least in draft, so that you can minimise the time you spend wondering what on earth to say. Where appropriate, you need to have advice lines up fast and other facilities to help people deal with the incident and the concerns it raises with them.

For me, the most valuable part of this whole extensive (and, yes, expensive) exercise is forcing organisations to actually think about the unthinkable - and how it could be avoidable. If more organisations went through this structured process, I believe that more of the unthinkable could be avoided. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get people to take this whole process seriously, by the way. Until, of course, they get that phone call...

Official. I Sympathise With Gulf News

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In reporting the recent 'incident' at Dubai's Burj Khalifa today, Gulf News appears to have gone as far as it felt it could. In the face of unhelpful and possibly even mendacious statements made on behalf of the tower's developer and management company, Emaar, the newspaper has managed to collate a number of eyewitness reports of something having taken place that went way beyond the 'routine maintenance' that we are being expected to believe has closed the observation deck on the tower.

The official statement, quoted by Gulf News is: "Due to unexpected high traffic, the observation deck experience at the Burj Khalifa, At the Top, has been temporarily closed for maintenance and upgrade. Technical issues with the power supply are being worked on by the main and sub-contractors and the public will be informed upon completion."

Gulf News reports eyewitnesses as hearing a 'really loud noise and what looked like smoke or dust coming out from one of the elevator doors' and paramedics being called to the scene. That's hardly the stuff of 'maintenance and upgrade' is it?

Once again, I suspect we are about to see an attempt at obfuscation result in widespread media coverage - the eyewitness reports are stacking up and now social media interest is also perking up quite nicely. GN's story was enough to raise some very real question marks - and now people are going to start looking for answers. They're not going to have to look very far, either.

Geekiness Beirut Outbreak

GeekFest Beirut was truly a wonder to behold. There are photos on the FaceBook page from those what got Twitpicked on the night, and this Photobucket from Fady Nammour gives a pretty good feel for the ‘vibe’ – at a guess something like 120 people streamed into Beirut’s uber-funky Art Lounge to find displays of digital photography as well as the art that literally festoons every space at ArtLounge.

There were loads more GeekTalks, starting with an odd rant from yours truly, going through to an overview of Creative Commons licensing from graphic artist Naeema Zarif (Naeema designed the cool new GeekFest logo, posters and stuff) and cartoonist/blogger Maya Zankoul and then a look at some of the projects being undertaken in Lebanon by the UNDP’s CEDRO, thanks to Elie Abou Jaoudeh.

Ayman Itani spoke on the human/technology aspects of communications, while Elie Haddad’s talk on the potential of mobile applications continued the telecom theme. George El KHabbaz threw a few F’UX into proceedings with his GeekTalk on user experience (that’s what an UX is, folks) and how it needs to be designed in from the beginning of processes (Ha! Tell HSBC that).

Isaac Belot topped the geek charts easily with his in-depth and totally geeked-out presentation of the technologies that lie behind filming in 3D. That one even had the true geeks bug-eyed.

The evening finished with a short, boisterous and totally fun presentation from artiste extraordinaire (and designer of the GeekFest Twitter Icon and, I hope, T-shirts) Joumana Medlej (@CedarSeed). Joumana’s work is stunning, her cartoon strips are brilliant and the auction of a book of her early drawings and development sketches pulled in a fast and furious bidding war to top out at $300 – even the barman got into the act. Yes, there was a bar too and it did a brisk trade at that.

So what was the ‘vibe’ like? Different to GeekFest Dubai, for sure – and I can’t quite put my finger on how it was different. The Beirut guys did a lot more collaboration on many aspects of the event and so there was a wider sense of ownership. There’s no doubt that they’ve had an impact on GeekFest Dubai, particularly with the contribution of the graphic art elements, the ID design from Naeema and Joumana’s iconography.

It looks increasingly likely that there will be other GeekFest events springing up around the region now. And I think that’s possibly going to be very interesting in a number of ways that we haven’t really thought through yet!

Beirut, Beirut!

We are, as my niece would say, 'one sleep away' from GeekFest Beirut and I have to confess to being a tad excited. The building blocks of tomorrow night’s event would appear to be, in as much as they’ll ever be, in place and it promises to be a fun-packed evening of diversity, deep thought, art and expression that is going to be utterly fascinating!

The GeekTalks are starting at 8pm in Room One and include:

The Quality of Disintermediation
A millennium of disintermediation, how technology is challenging the world to change
Alexander McNabb

Creative Commons
Naeema Zarif, Maya Zankoul

CEDRO Sustainability projects in Lebanon
Elie Abou Jaoudeh, CEDRO, UNDP

Our Relationship with Information, past and present, personal and business
How information has evolved and its effect on personal self-expression and business communication.
Ayman Itani, Telephone.com, LAU

What the F'UX?
User experience presentation. Using an everyday object to reflect the online UX and a simple guide to build a good ux. Room 1 The Talks
George El Khabbaz

At the same time in Room Two, there’ll be a rolling digital photography exhibition by photographers Fady Nammour, Toni Yammine, Lara Zankoul and Mherigo Krikorian. Alongside this, there's a TechnoCase going on from GeekFest early adopter Nokia.

At around 10pm there’ll quite possibly be a 3D film presentation by Isaac Belot at BassBrass.org followed by an exhibition of Ten Devil Woman and other work from leading Lebanese artist Joumana Medlej. The evening’s last, but by no means least, ‘happening’ will be an auction of a prototype sketchbook from Joumana's Malaak comic series in aid of @lebfunraising..

Huge props to UNorganiser Alexandra Tohme and to the many people in Beirut who came together around this event in a remarkable collaborative effort. I just know this is going to be very cool.

Oh! And thanks to the lovely website hosting folks Moodeef.Com!

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.

Do We Treat Our Taxi Drivers Badly? Hell, Yes!

Image by Qiao-Da-Ye賽門譙大爺 via Flickr

I have frequently posted in the past about my regular cabbie Mr. G and the iniquitous conditions that cabbies work under in the UAE since private cabs were banned and replaced by the taxi companies. These companies have been treating cabbies effectively like indentured labour, fining them huge amounts and saddling them with all sorts of charges and 'extras' that most people out here expect as part of their conditions of employment.

Gulf News has reported on one group of cabbies who have filed a complaint against their employer, oddly enough going as far as to name the company. The report is doubly surprising given the reaction of the company when GN contacted them for comment.

The drivers are complaining that their salary, a nominal Dhs300, isn't actually paid as they're employed on commission and are made to pay over Dhs3,000 for their visa, Dhs 1,000 for their uniform (must be designer brand stuff) and Dhs 26 a day for 'operational costs'. If they don't make a minimum of Dhs 1,200 a day, they're fined Dhs 200. They're complaining that they have to work 12 hours a day and beyond to keep their heads above water.

Given that our safety is in their hands, 12 hour shifts seems dangerous - and I know that Sharjah cabbie Mr G not unusually works 16 hour shifts, 365 days a year.

The company's response to Gulf News was brilliant.

"They work 12 hours, seven days a week because we consider them partners and not employees," Metro's GM told GN, going on to confirm that drivers must also pay for operational costs, which include insurance, plate registration, car cost, car maintenance and for all needed expenses.

The taxi companies are, apparently, 'working on getting rid of signing the labour contract'. Now there's a solution!.

For a company charged with egregious behaviour, unfair practices and treating its staff appallingly to respond with 'Hell, yes!' is pure genius.

We're re-writing the rulebook of PR by the day, folks... By the day...

More Great News for Media. Not.

Image by the_repairman via Flickr

Gulf News carries the story today of the award of Dhs 100,000 to a Saudi Prince in compensation against Al Arabiya TV for choosing NOT to air an interview with him. According to Dubai Civil Court, quoted by GN, Al Arabiya had "failed to adhere to the media code of ethics and breached the nobility and morality of journalism."

The nobility and morality of journalism? Are they having a laugh?

This was the appeal in the case, which went through the Civil Court last year. It is the latest in a number of precedents and announcements that are of concern to media in the Middle East as it tries to perform something approaching a mild version of what an unfettered media would be doing.

According to the GN piece, Arabiya brought Prince Dr Saif Al Islam Bin Saud Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud to Dubai to record an interview, which it subsequently promoted but chose not to air. The Prince wrote a letter to Arabiya, which the channel apparently ignored. As a consequence, according to the prince's lawyer, the prince suffered "...moral and social damage on the prince's status as a royal and academician. His fame was affected before his family, students and the social circles to which he belongs."

"According to article 293 of the Civil Procedures Law, the claimant is entitled compensation because the defendant damaged his reputation and social status."

The channel's argument that, as the producer and copyright holder to the work, it had the right to do what it wanted with it fell on deaf ears.

The case goes to the court of cassation now, so all is not yet lost, but this is yet another worrying precedent at a time when bad news for media has been breaking here, in Jordan and in Kuwait.

It is by no means unknown for a journalist to carry out an interview and then not run it - newspaper, radio, TV and all. For instance, if the interview is deadly dull (and boy have I seen a few of those) and lacks any content of interest to the reader. Or if it veers so far off topic that the journalist hasn't got enough to hang the piece on. I have also seen interviews not run because events have overtaken the interview and rendered it irrelevant. And, yes, I have also seen interviews not run because journalists have been lazy or daft and generally just goofed it up.

But the right to run the piece or not, to do a news in brief or a double page spread, to be nice about you or to be horrid lie entirely with the journalist. By undertaking an interview, spokespeople sign up to a well defined 'bill of rights' that includes the fact that the interview may well not run and also may well not run in the interviewee's interest. There's a whole load of stuff you can do to try and ensure that you give good interview and so get coverage. But there are no guarantees. None whatsoever. It's a contact sport and only a fool would engage with media without any appreciation of that media and how it comports itself.

At the end of the day, the journalist (and his/her editor) are responsible for providing us with stuff that we want to read/watch/listen to. It's their job to increase their audience by delivering great content. And so it's only right and proper that what content to use when is entirely their decision.

Now we would appear to be questioning that, and it is not good news at all.

Talking Towers

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday's Arabic Al Khaleej features an extensive feature by writer Mustapha Abdulraheem. Rather brilliantly, it is penned the form of a chit-chat between the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Shopping Festival. This comes to us from the newspaper that once memorably interviewed that little yellow bundle of fun, Modhesh Al Modhesh.

"I feel happy because I was born as the tallest, most important Emirati, Arab and international building ever made by man on this planet. There's nothing in the universe to match my pride and how it rises,' the building gushes. 'My days start in the morning when I am wakened by the clouds. I praise God and I thank him for being born Emirati. I look over the world through twelve telescopes fixed on my platforms. I look through one of them and I can see the skyscrapers of New York and Malaysia as well as the pyramids.'

The iconic tower was surprised, apparently, on the 28th January to see fireworks as well as smelling the scent of musk from the city's streets (sadly, the piece doesn't explain which aspect of the construction is responsible for its olfactory senses). Not unnaturally, unsure of what the fuss was about, the Burj turned to Dubai Mall and the Burj Al Arab and asked them what's going on. They laughed, we are told, because the Dubai Shopping Festival was with them.

'I'm a big success that has lasted for 15 years,' DSF tells the inquisitive young Burj, going on to talk at some length about what a tremendous symbol for Dubai's success and progress it is. It's not, it would appear, the humblest festival in town, but then it's trying to big it up to the world's tallest tower.

At this point in the dialogue the Burj smiles and DSF asks him why. 'Has my presence and name added to the attraction of you as a festival this year?'

'Of course, says DSF. 'You are the pride of every Emirati and Arab. You have a wide audience, considering that your opening night was the best international event this year and you are the tallest building this earth has ever known!'

The Shopping Festival then takes the Burj Khalifa on a tour of Dubai (after talking at some length about its success and importance and its regional leadership of the festival industry) but, sadly, the iconic tower had eventually to return to its guests, making a promise to visit again next year.

What a wonderful piece to inspire everyone! One notes there is once again a series of awards for journalism during this year's Dubai Shopping Festival. Mustapha must be a front-runner for a gong and perhaps even a cash award as an appropriate award for his excellent work.

The Unbearable Inevitability of Disruption

Image via Wikipedia

I started today off taking part in the Dubai Eye Radio Apple iPadFest. The launch last night has meant that iPad has trended Google consistently for the past 24 hours, beating Obama’s State of the Nation address into as low as 6th place. The buzz on Twitter, blogs, radio stations and TV has been phenomenal – and it was nice to see Sky News cut live to the announcement and then lose the link, totally flubbing the story and cutting to Milliband and Clinton droning on sanctimoniously about Yemen instead.

Given, then, that it’s international iPad day today, I thought I’d expand a bit on something I said yesterday. Granted, it’s an element of the McNabb catechism, but I think it’s core to the million dollar question for people who write books – will people use this thing rather than a book? Could I see myself doing that?

The catechism bit is this: “Quality becomes irrelevant when technology enables access.” This has been the case consistently over the ages. The first example that I can think of is the invention of the printing press. The movement of knowledge around Europe in the Dark Ages was laboriously slow, illuminated manuscripts painstakingly copied by monks in scriptoria and jealously guarded from those ‘unfit’ to have access to such a trove. These books were beautiful, true labours of love that were illustrated in amazing detail, both as illustration of the text as well as illustration to give form to concepts and ideas contained in the content.

The Book of Kells

Then William Caxton pitches up without so much as a by your leave and invents the printing press. Suddenly anyone could make multiple copies of books, let alone posters and leaflets. The significance of the invention for governments, let alone the Catholic Church, was tremendous. The quality of the print was lousy by comparison, but that didn’t matter. Technology had improved access.

An early Caxton print
 

Each major leap forward in technology since has had a similar effect, the telegraph, the telephone, wireless and so on. Each time technology improved access, quality didn’t matter. Would I prefer a lovingly written letter on fine vellum telling me that my daughter has had a healthy 8lb baby three months after the fact? Or a terse telegram printed out on strips of paper in block capitals?

There’s another example from an earlier post here, but my favourite comes from last time Apple pulled a stunt like this. I, like many other people, bought a CD player and started buying CDs instead of vinyl. The quality was so much better, banks of 16-bit analogue to digital converters straining away to sample sound at a staggering 44 MHz to give a 22 MHz playback – higher than the human ear can hear (the 44/22 relationships is thanks to the Nyquist criterion. You don’t want to know about that, trust me). I bought the ‘you can hear the conductor put down his baton’ sales line and our house filled with racks of CDs, the cassettes and vinyl getting dusty in the attic.

Now I’ve ripped all my CDs and play them on our iPods. The process of ‘ripping’, compressing a CD track to an MP3, causes a reduction in quality. Worse, I listen to most of my music when I’m driving – using a little radio thingy that plugs into the cigarette lighter. So my reduced quality sample (reduced high end as well as dynamic range) is now played over a radio link (further reducing both) to give me an audio experience that is worse than chrome cassette.

Do I care? I do not. I have access to all my music in one handy player (well, three, if I’m honest).

The qualitative argument made by publishers is of the quality of writing. Quality is a funny word (it is impossible to define, according to the key character in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), we have quality of product, quality of mercy and a million other qualities. The key to the ‘will people adopt e-reading’ debate is not quality of writing – it’s the quality of experience. We see reading as essentially tactile , you know, ‘I like to curl up a warm sofa with a good book’ but that’s just force of habit. We used to see music in the same sort of way, we were attached to good old vinyl and didn’t like those cold little silvery platey things.

Believe me, reading a book on a computer screen is a real bitch (anyone who’s been through the authonomy mill knows that all too well). But we already read more on screens than we do on paper each day. And we write books on screens, too.

The convenience of an e-reader that is readable, that turns pages fast and that gives us access to books, newspapers and anything that the Internet can chuck at us is, I believe, just about enough to start the ball rolling. I’m not saying we’re all going to be using readers by the end of the year, but I believe that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people will.

This will have any number of effects. One will be that there will be more authors able to reach wider audiences. Another will be that people will have access to a wider choice of reading material from more ‘voices’ than ever before. Another will be that authors will make less money on average, although have the potential to make more money than before. And another will be, as I said yesterday, that publishing will be changed forever. Quality, as the publishing industry has it, will suffer to a certain degree as everyone who thinks they can write a book shares their awful scribbling (I blush when I read my first book, Space, now. It got the old authonomy gold star and it is very funny but it’s an awful mess of a thing). But that’ll even out as imprints emerge that build reputations around offering new, good quality writing.

We called the iPad disruptive on the radio this morning. And disruptive it most certainly is. Sure, the Kindle was first. But the iPad looks slicker, a great deal more usable and with an iTunes-like back end it's likely going to set the market afire.