Ebooks Outsell Booky Books. So What?

Image by englishpen via FlickrWith the news that ebooks have now outsold booky books, we can perhaps now recognise the tipping point has been reached.

One fascinating report I’ve seen of this year’s London Book Fair neatly paints a picture of an industry reeling as it comes to terms with the ferocity of the changes taking place around it. More and more writers are taking to putting their works up on the Kindle store and other self publishing platforms rather than go through the relentless round of submissions and rejections that getting published entails.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, speaking at the LBF, called this time 'a watershed'. Murray was noting that sales of a number of HC's front list titles were running at over 50% on ebook formats - he also noted that the growth in e-readers (to 40 million) was having a disproportionate effect on the market because e-readers had reached 'core' readers, people who buy over twelve books a year.

There are reports of Amazon employing editors and seeking an editorial director. This is interesting precisely because if Amazon decided to have its own imprint, it could pick from the many new titles being uploaded to the Kindle e-book store and take the best of them and place them under its powerful marketing wing – with editors guaranteeing the quality of books under that imprint.

That would address one major complaint of the post-ebook era - the lack of qualitative guarantees where so many authors now have direct access to the market without the checks and balances of editors and the like.Yes, this gives a more egalitarian market with greater choice for readers (and less Katie Price schlock being pushed in our faces), but it also atomises the market (there is such a thing as overwhelming choice) and makes it potentially hard for readers to work out when a book is total rubbish. I have to confess, of my current crop of 34 Kindle books, one non-fiction title turned out to be a rip-off project.

But with editorial input, an imprint, Amazon could possibly create something a little like Authonomy done right. Everyone’s uploading their books, the best of those books are plucked out and given a sheen by Amazon, which could sell books under its imprint at a premium (because you know they’re good) and effectively become its own publishing house. Now a publishing house that owns the majority of the distribution medium becomes interesting. It would be like one publisher owning every high street bookstore (remember them?).

It’s also potentially massively anti-competitive, but that’s another kettle of frogs.

Big Bang (Blowing up Paradise)

As if you needed any, above is incontrovertible proof of my long-held assertion that Modhesh is evil.

Yesterday, largely unheralded, was the 55th anniversary of the first airborne hydrogen bomb tests on the Pacific island of Bikini atoll. Life magazine, in commemoration, has released a remarkable 35-slide set of images from the bomb tests of the cold war, including one that scared me more than even the awful plume over Muraroa atoll - an image of a group of sublimely insouciant nut-heads cutting into a mushroom-cloud shaped cake. What tremendous idiocy it must have taken to celebrate this dubious 'achievement' in this way.

Take a look at the picture set, linked here,do - it's really quite stunning.

Of course, the 36th picture never made it to Life's pages. It's the one above, exclusive to Fake Plastic Souks, that proves what we've always known about the little critter...

We are all publishers

Image by noobbaru via FlickrThere’s been a lot of talk in the UK about super-injunctions, triggered by the seeming inability of anyone in public life to behave with even the scantest degree or morality or decorum. I suppose when the world’s most powerful man goes around inserting himself into interns, the Governor of California lives surrounded by his secret children and the head of the IMF seems to be channeling Casanova, you could forgive a certain laxity among the minor stars in our firmament.

The problem, of course, is that while they all like doing these things, they don’t like us knowing about them. I think, actually, part of the fun of doing it in the first place is the frisson of danger it involves. When the brown stuff really does hit the fan, using some of one’s hard-earned millions to brief a brief and gag the media seems to gaining in popularity. In the UK and elsewhere, ‘the media’ includes a clamorous pack of newspapers casting ever further afield to find salacity and scandal to reverse their plummeting sales figures and so taking an unusual interest in any scraps they can find.

What’s making things so much more fun these days is while you can use your power and wealth to gag a newspaper, you can’t gag the Internet. Once stuff is out in the wild, it’s game over. The publication of the names on Twitter of six people seeking “super-injunctions” to stop media publishing their names caused an outbreak of great wailing and gnashing of political teeth, with British Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt telling The Independent:

"We are in this crazy situation where information is available freely online which you aren't able to print in newspapers. We are in a situation where technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws we have and we do need to think about the regulatory environment we have.”

The problem is, of course, that Twitter, Google et al are all arguing that they are not the publishers of this material, they are merely a medium, a tool of communication. It would be like suing a telephone company because someone said something bad over the phone or sent a libellous fax. Or suing the paper mill because its product was used to commit a libel.

This is one reason why Goog and friends are so very hesitant to take judgement calls over content posted on their platforms – the second they do so, they become editors and therefore publishers.

Governments are less than happy about this – and it can only be a matter of time before legislation is brought to bear on the free-for-all aspects of online platforms. The UK government is already making a racket about legislating against online platforms (Hunt was paraphrased in the Indy story linked above as saying there "may be a case for converging the regulation of traditional and new media"). If the industry won’t regulate this content itself, governments are arguing, then legislation must be brought to bear defining the responsibilities of platforms for the content they carry. This’ll potentially create an odd situation where communication platforms are forced to become, effectively, publishers by law.

Until that happens (and I fervently hope it doesn’t), the responsibility for creating, moderating, curating, sharing and publishing the content we post online actually belongs to us. We are all publishers.

You’d have thought democratic governments, the representatives of the people, would be happy that we’ve found a medium of open expression which gives us all the opportunity to take responsibility and use the power of free communication. But then those in power (as I found when I had that spat with German state secretary for the Federal Ministry of the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety, Matthias Machnig) believe only they understand, and therefore should wield, power.

Including the power, as public figures, to behave awfully in private then gag the public.

Yellow Peril

It's summer and Paris Hilton's in Dubai. Yay.

The Emirates ID Card. Meh.

Image via WikipediaHaving applied for, and received, my Emirates ID card ages ago, I no longer take much notice of announcements, pronouncements and other strange noises coming from EIDA, the Emirates ID Authority. This is lucky as I would have gone mad.

The Cards Middle East conference has been taking place this week and EIDA's officials have been taking the opportunity to further inform the public regarding the ID cards, the introduction of which caused so much fun and hilarity. If you're interested in the backstory, you'll find much of it documented gleeully here.

Monday saw EIDA announcing that soon people will be able to use the PIN number issued with their cards. I cannot for the life of me remember being issued with a PIN number alongside my card, but who am I to argue? The PIN number I don't have will soon allow the public to access online services from the government, at first in Abu Dhabi. This is a good thing and I, for one, have no intention of letting any hiccups in the past colour my view of the most excellent services being planned for the future.

Today's announcement is that PROs can now pick up ID cards on behalf of company employees. For those unused to the many strangenesses of life in the UAE, a company's public relations officer, or mandoub, is the guy that takes care of visas, health tests and the many other government requirements businesses here have to satisfy. The EIDA move is all part of the 'redesign' of the card issuing process. Given the cards were first introduced/announced back in 2008, you'd have thought we'd had plenty of time get the process bedded down, but apparently not. Applicants have complaning about delays in issuing cards that stretch into weeks according to Gulf News, which does cite EIDA as saying 70% are delivered within five days.

The big news, however, is that the National ID card is 'to be mandatory' according to the GN piece, which manages somehow to keep a straight face in its reporting of a card we were first told would be mandatory back in 2008 and which has managed to be largely useful in the intervening period as a way of opening certain types of locked door, as a handy wallet-stiffener or a useful tool in prising apart the fingers and thumbs of accidentally super-glued infants.

Any contributions regarding other potential uses for Emirates Identity Cards are welcome.

The Arab Media Forum's Elephant

Image via WikipediaThere's going to be a pachyderm* in the room at this year's Arab Media Forum 2011, the event that sparked the very birth of this little blog. It's not a new elephant, but it's been getting bigger every year. This year, it's going to be interesting to see if a single delegate gets to squeeze in.

It's the Internet and the way in which our media landscape is not only being changed, but torn up and remodelled - not just by social media, but by our new information consumption habits. It is not, according to today's Gulf News and previous reports, a topic up for discussion. In fact, Gulf News' subs reach a new low today. Failing to stand up a headline with the story is one thing, but when you're failing to stand up sub-heads, my but you're in trouble. The sub-head in question, 'Social Media' is followed in the story by anything but any mention of social media at all.

The GN story's headline sort of frames the story: "Forum to look at impact of Arab Spring on media".

Isn't it interesting that the Arab Spring (sic) is having an impact on media rather than the other way around? I do wonder if the many portentous debates between 'important media figures' will include the appalling mendacity of the region's media when faced with the challenge of change - not least the Egyptian media's craven cries of 'Lalalalala' when faced with the stark facts of Tahrir.

Looking beyond the half inch of Methodist near-beer that is the debate about the Arab Spring and its impact on our media, you'd perhaps be forgiven for wondering why the impact of the online revolution that preceded, helped to drive and then was accelerated by that self-same spring isn't worth debating and highlighting. Perhaps it's not 'media' within the narrow definition of a Press Club. Although the people served by the media are increasingly deserting the paper form for online sources - and changing the way they consume media and the types of information they access.

It's a fundamental change in human communication that has helped to reshape our region, driving change across our societies and challenging many aspects of our media - including the practice of journalism, legislation, individual and collective freedoms, activism and responsibility. There is no greater challenge to our media, in fact. But it is obviously not the right 'media' for this forum. This year, we haven't even seen reports of a token blogger to lighten the mix.

Giddy up, Jumbo!

* Apropos of nothing, many, many moons ago, Gulf News reported on an mistreated elephant at Dubai Zoo. The picture caption, thanks to that strangest and most malign force, the GN Subs, referred to 'the unfortunate pachyderm', which triggered a scramble at Spot On to see who could fit the word into a piece of client work that day. Carrington won with brilliance, although I don't remember quite how.

Are Your Footprints All Over The Web?

Image by Andreas-photography via FlickrThe answer's probably yes.

The recent massive facepalmohmigodicantbelievetheydidthat scandal involving Facebook hiring a bunch of mendacious flaks to tout around fear-mongering stories about Google's 'privacy issues' merely highlighted (as Gulf News' Scott Shuey pointed out in his Saturday column) the issues of online privacy in general - and didn't leave Facebook unscarred. Amusingly, Shuey points out that, in his experience, most PRs are "...soulless drones who would sell their own mothers to keep a client happy."

I can't disagree with him, but then most social media sites and online publishers are soulless bots who are already selling us all to keep clients happy. It's a marriage made in heaven, no?

As time goes by, we're putting more and more data out there - and that data can be interconnected in ever-more creative and interesting ways. I was highly tickled the other day to do a Google Image Search on myself, looking for a picture someone had taken of me wot we needed for a presentation. As well as the usual daft pictures of me (of which the sunflower one is a firm favourite), the search started to throw up images from my blog and, as we go further down the search, images from people associated with me for one reason or another. The growing tree of interconnectedness was fun, if mildly disconcerting - try doing an image search on yourself and see what I mean (I assume you're in the habit of Googling yourself or have set up an alert on yourself/your unique identifying keyphrase).Bing also delivers, although relevance appears weaker and the associations come in more strongly and earlier.

Here's a scary trick. Take a look at your Google Search History, linked here. You'll have to sign in with Gmail and then you can access your entire history of search - every last query stored for posterity on Goog's servers. I deleted mine, believe me you don't want to see the things I was looking up while I was researching Beirut, something I have alluded to in posts passim!

The basic rule of thumb is that if you put it out on the web (and by that I most definitely include Twitter and all other things comfortingly transient), it stays out on the web. Take three or four seemingly disconnected pieces of data and you can start to build a profile - the more comprehensive the profile, the more sticky every new piece of data becomes until you can build exponentially more intelligent data sets that define you very nicely indeed.

Facebook has consistently been in trouble over things like privacy settings and is often accused of encouraging people to share too much. But that's the trouble with social search - you're selling increasingly intelligently filtered access and so you need to get people to share more as well as create more from what they do share. It's a self-fulfilling beast. And it's after your data.

There's no need to buy a nuclear bunker quite yet, but it would do as well to be aware that you're now essentially a public figure. And you're leaving footprints behind all the time...

Nakba

Image via WikipediaI sipped some wine and watched her. Long, dark hair with highlights she’d had put in at the weekend, brown eyes fixed on mine, her brow creased and the last remnants of a smile dying on her full lips.

‘I’m really sorry about your cousin.’

She relaxed. ‘It’s okay, Paul. The funeral’s over, life’s back to normal for everyone. You have to move on, you know.’ She laughed, a bitter little laugh, flicked her hair back. ‘You even start to get used to it after a while.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

She tensed again.

I looked at my glass. ‘About your father and your brother.’

‘Oh.’ She said.  I watched her shoulders hunch and her hands come together on the table, a barrier. ‘Why does that matter?’

I ploughed on. ‘Because other people are telling me about it and I wanted you to tell me first.’

‘It doesn’t concern you, Paul. It’s...’

 Go on, I thought. Tell me it’s none of my business. She looked down at her own wine glass. I saw her eyes were moist, the warm light from the stove sparkling in them.

‘It’s not something I like to talk about very much.’

I tried to be gentle but, heard myself whining instead. ‘I wanted it to be open between us.’

Paul Stokes, bumbling prat. The man who takes his conversational gambits from third rate soap opera scripts. If I had a low opinion of the human race in general, at least I had the grace to put myself at the bottom of the heap.

Aisha looked away from me, reached into her bag for her cigarettes and lit one. I got the ashtray I kept for visitors, grateful for the excuse of movement to break the tension. She talked to the table, her voice low. ‘My father was born on a farm in Palestine in 1946, outside a village called Qaffin. It’s the farm we have today. My grandparents left during the troubles in 1948, what we call the Naqba, the tragedy. You know this, right? The Naqba?’ I nodded. ‘When the Zionists threw my people from their land and declared Israel a state. They had a saying, you know, “A land without a people for a people without a land” But it’s a lie’.

Aisha was slowly twisting her lighter between her thumb and forefinger. ‘My father met my mother in the camps. He was just another urchin in the streets there, but he was smart and started selling fruit on a street corner, grew it into a business by employing other kids so that eventually he could open a shop of sorts in the camp. He was a good businessman and soon opened a proper store in Amman, made of blocks. He opened more of them. He started to trade with the Syrians and the Iraqis before he left the Amman business in Ibrahim’s hands and went to the Gulf in the ’70s, to Kuwait, with my mother. The Gulf had oil and needed food, steel, concrete, cars. He did deals with family traders in the Gulf, gained a name for being able to get things nobody else could get, ship things nobody else could ship. Ibrahim found the supplies, my father sold them. My parents moved back here after I was born.’

‘And he met Arafat in Kuwait.’

Aisha’s eyes widened and she took a pull on her cigarette, staring at me, the lighter twisting in her hand, the shaking tip of the cigarette glowing momentarily as she inhaled. ‘Yes, he met Arafat in Kuwait. Through Quadoumi. And he supplied Arafat. My father believed in Arafat. His family had lost everything, including my grandfather. My father believed that we had to try and fight to return to our country, to our land.’

‘But Arafat was a terrorist.’

She was trembling. ‘No. Abu Ammar was a unifier. There was no Palestine, no Palestinian people, no Palestinian identity. We lost everything, you see? Arafat brought us the dream that one day we could go back to things we had lost, that one day we could become a nation again. What could my father believe in other than this? We are lucky, at least we still have some of our family land, but only because we are on the border, only because we had an Arab Israeli lawyer on our side. Back then, there was no hope for any Palestinian other than Arafat.’

Aisha gestured with a wide sweep of her hand.. ‘My people lost everything they had, living in camps with rusty keys and English title deeds that meant nothing. The world stood by and let it happen. Who else offered any hope to the Palestinians except Arafat and the people around him? Who else was helping us?’

Aisha ground her cigarette viciously into the ashtray. ‘My father supported Arafat in the early days, but he turned away from them after the problems in Jordan. He stopped believing in Arafat’s way. Both he and Ibrahim became closer to King Hussein, then the King threw the PLO out of Jordan. We stayed here.’

‘Why did they leave Kuwait?’

‘Because I was born. I was my father’s favourite. He was always very close to me. We used to go on little adventures together, especially after I learned to ride. He was an accomplished horseman. I remember once we went riding with His Majesty. It was such a special day, the horses groomed until they were shining and HM chatting with us while we hacked along the wadis. He asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told him I wanted to be a princess. Can you believe it? My father told the king I was already a princess and they both laughed at me. My father was a very gentle man.’

‘But he was with a Hamas man when he died,’ I blurted.

She recoiled as my words shattered her reminiscence, catching my gaze for an instant, her eyes flickering around the kitchen, casting around for something from inside. I waited for her to calm and speak. She took a deep, shuddering breath and spoke to the tabletop in a small voice.

‘Yes, Paul. My father was in a house in Gaza that belonged to one of his old business contacts from the Gulf days. Another man was visiting, an important man in Hamas. The Israelis attacked the house with missiles. They killed my baba and took him away from me forever.’

‘Was he involved with Hamas?

I had spoken as gently as I could but then I saw, to my horror, the splashes on the tabletop. The tears brimming in Aisha’s eyes ran down her cheeks as she looked up. Her chin was puckered, her words halting as she fought for control of her breathing. ‘My father. Was not a terrorist. He was. Not an evil man.’

She held onto her lighter so tightly that the blood drained from her fingers and her hands shook. She dropped it, sniffed and wiped at her cheeks with her fingertips.

‘He was not accused, tried or found guilty of a crime. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the young mother in the shopping mall when the bomb comes. He was killed by a state formed by bombing and violence, founded by terrorists who threw my people off their land by murdering them and driving them away with fear. By the people that killed the villagers of Deir Yassin and hundreds of Palestinian villages like it, the people that killed thousands when they smashed into Gaza and poured phosphorous on it from the sky like rain. There was no judge, there was no jury. He was murdered in cold blood.’

Aisha delved into her bag for a tissue and wiped her eyes, shaking her head as she looked out of the kitchen window, away from me.

‘I don’t want to think about this, Paul. I prefer not to live with it in my mind every day. I have a life to live. As Palestinians we have to put this behind us and live, because we can’t afford to spend every single day focusing on the tragedy and death that is around us, inside us.’

She drank from her wine, her reddened eyes on mine over the fine rim of the glass. Her mascara was smudged.

I broke the long silence. ‘So is that why Hamad did what he did? To revenge your father?’

Aisha glared at me, placing the wineglass on the table with agonising slowness, her eyes on me as she pushed her chair back and stood looking down at me. She turned to hook up her coat.

My chair rattled as I stood in panic. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t need this. You don’t need Daoud lecturing you, but I don’t need you questioning me, either. You just go ahead and believe what you want to, listen to what you want to. I will not be interviewed by you. I’m going home. Goodbye, Paul.’

I was incapable of movement, shocked by the realisation of my own immense stupidity and crassness. I saw her chin pucker again as the light caught the side of her beautiful face, but she didn’t look back as she closed the door gently behind her. The kitchen was quiet, apart from the soft background grumble of the wood burning in the stove and the electronic tick of the wall clock. It ticked four times before resolution rescued me from stasis and I ran out after her. I caught her opening her car door, about to get in. I called across the road to her as I stood at the bottom of the steps that led up from the road to the garden: ‘Aisha.’

Today, May 15th, is Al Nakba or 'the tragedy', the day Palestinians mark the creation of the State of Israel. Israel declared statehood on the 14th, in fact - the 15th marks the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. The above is a little bit of 'Olives'.

Hot Buns

I know, I have the sense of humour of a particularly puerile eight year old,  but this one did tickle me. We checked out the staff, but sadly the place doesn't do what it says on the box.

This was a slightly nervy snap as the shop is just on the edge of what is now the second security check point on the road from Dubai to Hatta - the road has always passed through the little Omani enclave of Wilayat Madha but now the rabbit-proof fence has been expanded to full covered road blocks either side of the enclave staffed by UAE military who check IDs as you pass through - so do have your passport or National ID ready. Yes, they do accept the National ID and yes, it is a use for that otherwise untroubled piece of plastic.

The UAE soldiers were generally a cheery bunch as I have invariably found them to be and readily shared a laugh over the new arrangements. But soldiers and cameras (let alone mobile cameras) never make easy bedfellows.

We had a glorious 'it's tough in the Gulf' stay at the Hatta Fort Hotel, as always. The Ramoul Bar, a brown velour and walnut museum piece from the '70s, remains one of my favourite places in the Middle East. If you're going to do a cocktail bar, do it right I always say...

The Unbearable Ubiquity of Twitter

Image via CrunchBaseI have now seen a number of friends taking nervously to Twitter, stumbling around for a while blindly and then giving up on it only to return a while later and find things generally easier and more productive than they ever would have thought. From being critics of the 'I don't want to know what you had for breakfast' school, they have become rabid adherents.

The increasing ubiquity of Twitter fascinates me. Its role in spreading news, information and opinion with blinding speed becomes ever greater - from small events of interest to only a few (Google's Android Market will expand to 99 countries, excluding the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt - the region's three largest markets. Thanks, Twitter) through to its role in the 'Arab Spring' alongside cousin/rival/deadly enemy Facebook.

All this stuff is leaving 'traditional media' rather racing to catch up. The Arab Media Forum this year, Gulf News tells us, is to discuss the way in which events in the region have impacted regional media - rather tellingly, there's no discussion of media's role in those events.

I was disconcerted while in the UK to hear Sky News telling me that "the British Foreign Secretary has tweeted he is to meet Hillary Clinton". That one really gave me pause for thought - a national news channel reporting on a tweet? And it's now commonplace for journalists to 'stand up' stories on tweets - not just the Hollywood gossip tabloid stuff, but serious news stories. Mind you, I was equally disconcerted (not to say amused) to learn that Pippa Middleton's bum had its own Facebook page before the wedding was over!

One area where I do have increasing issues is in media reporting the weight or movement of public opinion by citing Twitter. One story in Gulf News today on the possible accession of Jordan and Morocco to the Gulf Co-Operation Council (the Middle East equivalent of the EEC) tells that 'a number of Twitter users specifically targeted Morocco for criticism...' It's by no means the only example of media citing Twitter as 'public opinion'. Fanboy that I am, it's not.

While undoubtedly true, 'a number of tweets' is hardly empirical evidence of a shift or trend in public opinion. But then we're all beginning to accept it: if it's not on Twitter, it didn't happen, aren't we?

Talking of traditional media, today's Gulf News piece on the newspaper that removed Hillary Clinton and Audrey Tomasoni from the now-famous 'White House Situation Room' OBL picture because they may be considered 'sexually suggestive' is rather coy about quite WHICH newspaper did this. It was this newspaper, a Brooklyn based orthodox Chasidic Jewish newspaper. Presumably GN felt it couldn't for some mad reason use the word 'Jewish'. I do feel somewhat misled - I'd originally thought it was perhaps a Saudi paper... but I had to find out the crucial (remember 'when what when where why how'?) details myself online.

Context and analysis? Nah, I'd rather trust Twitter...