I said in my previous post here that I don’t actually buy e-books myself. But more and more people do, and as a result more books are being made available as e-books, and people are having all sorts of creative ideas about what e-books can do, and how they can do it.

Take Book View Café, for example, of which Chaz Brenchley has recently become a member. Book View Café is a consortium of authors in all genres who have come together to promote their work – and in particular to bring lost or neglected works to a new audience – using internet technology to offer both free and paid-for content.

As I said, I’m more comfortable reading print on paper. But if a book isn’t available, if it’s gone out of print and the available copies command silly prices, what then? Better an e-book than no book at all. And if there’s enough demand for an e-book, perhaps publishers will take note, and produce a paper edition. So I shall be watching the progress of Book View Café with interest.

While I was updating Chaz’z site with this information, I followed a link to this article by Sarah Zettel in the Examiner: she asks, "How do you get your e-book signed by its author?" – and she answers the question, too, though you’ll have to read the article to find out how.

Which set me thinking. I’m currently working on a facelift for My Home Library, an organisation set up to encourage children to read by offering free bookplates with which they can personalise their books. It has a wonderful selection of original bookplates created by many of the best of today’s illustrators, all ready to be printed off and pasted into books. But what if your home library consists of e-books on a reader? Can those be personalised by adding a bookplate? After all, the plates are just electronic files until you download them. I’m sure it must be possible…

One of the reasons why authors have web sites is to encourage people to buy their books; and one of the ways of encouraging them is to make it easy for them.

That’s why so many of the web sites I manage have links to Amazon. It’s not the only place you can buy books: and Cornwell Internet run on-line sales for small publishers, encourage people to buy through independent bookshops (and provide ISBN identifying numbers to make it easier for those shops to order books they might not have stocked) and link to alternative suppliers. But Amazon is big, reasonably efficient, has an Affiliates scheme which actually pays a small percentage back to the author on books ordered through their site – and, the deciding factor for me, at any rate, they stock an enormous number of books. They make it easy for me to use them to make it easy for my clients to sell books.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway.

Nine months ago I blogged here about AmazonFail, a storm in a teacup in which Amazon had – apparently accidentally – removed the sales rankings from a number of books on their site. I commented then that Amazon was a large operation that seemed to find it easier to make mistakes than to correct them, and that they had completely failed at public relations in their response to complaints.

Once is happenstance; twice is…

Last week Amazon.com removed their sales links from books published by Macmillans and their subsidiaries. If you followed a link to one of those books, you would find it, but you couldn’t buy it from Amazon themselves, only from their Marketplace sellers (who sell secondhand as well as new). This was part of a dispute between Amazon and Macmillan about the pricing of e-books.

Personally, I don’t buy e-books. I like ‘real’ books, made out of paper, and while I’m happy to read an extract or a short story online, to decide whether I’m going to buy a particular book, I don’t like the idea of paying for electronic text which only exists on the reader. But that’s just me. There is a market for e-books, Macmillan sell them, and while they can’t force Amazon, as a retailer, to sell their books (e-books or otherwise) at a particular price, they can say that they won’t supply them below a particular price, and if that doesn’t suit the retailer, well, you don’t need to sell that particular item. Amazon not only sell books, they sell the Kindle e-book reader as well; they have a vested interest in keeping the price of e-books down, because the cheaper the books, the better value the reader looks. (I think they also have a vested interest in new books continuing to be written and published, which means keeping the price at a level where that is financially viable, but this isn’t about the merits of the dispute, it’s about the way it was conducted). If they think Macmillan’s price for e-books is too high, they could decline to sell them.

But they didn’t do that, they pulled the plug on all Macmillan’s books.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve started receiving messages from the publishers, particularly the US publishers, of authors whose site I look after. Please, they say, would we link to some other bookshops as well as Amazon? They want to persuade as many shops as possible to stock and to promote their books, and how can they do that if we only encourage people to buy from Amazon? This involves extra work, and takes thought if the page isn’t to look so complicated that people are deterred from purchasing through it; but it’s a fair request, and I sigh, and do it. Since AmazonFail, I sometimes do it even without being asked. And this last week, I’ve been very glad I did, because it made it so much easier to go through and remove the links which – because of Amazon’s action – weren’t actually encouraging people to buy from Amazon anyway.

Today, a week after Amazon’s links vanished without a word of explanation, I was looking at something else on Amazon and – hooray! – the links are back. You can once more buy Macmillan (and Tor and St Martin’s Minotaur and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux…) books from Amazon.

I suppose I should restore my links to Amazon.com. I’ll probably get round to it, but I’m in no hurry – who knows how long the entente will last, or what stunt Amazon will pull next?

Cornwell Internet spend a lot of time on publishers’ web sites, whether we are looking for information about our clients’ publications, or for some other reason – we even buy books ourselves, occasionally. On the whole, unless the site is one we built ourselves, we are not impressed by what we see. Roger’s favourite example is the site on which you could not find a book unless you knew in which month it had been published.

Ungratefully, we are also prone to complain when publishers renew their web sites: they have been known to delete the whole site and replace it with a page promising ‘new site coming soon’ (often with a completion date which they overrun). Then, when the new site appears, we have to change all our links because material has been moved – or deleted!

So here’s double congratulations on your new site to ISIS Publishing, the audiobook specialists. It isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s a huge improvement on the previous version. The search feature now works with Firefox! Eack book groups under one title the different formats in which it is available (tape cassette, audio CD, MP3 CD…) so I can link to a title and allow the visitor to choose which format they want. Better still, I can now link to a title full stop – the old site was so constructed that you could only link to the front page.

One result is that where previously I would link to ISIS titles on Amazon, because their site allows me to link to individual items, now it is actually easier for me to link to ISIS’s own site, encouraging potential customers to go to them direct. This has to be good news for them, doesn’t it?

One of the great things about my job is that on Saturday mornings I can linger over my breakfast, my second cup of coffee and the Guardian review section, and I can call it working – because you never know when a client’s name will crop up! Back in December, for example, there was a review of the SF anthology When it Changed, with a special name-check for Chaz Brenchley‘s contribution.

It isn’t always that direct. Ten days ago there was a review of a book by Richard Milward, which included the offhand remark that "Nobody writes about Middlesbrough [like Richard Milward]". Which made me splutter into the last of my coffee, and wonder how many of Middlebrough’s finest the reviewer had read before coming to this conclusion.

I wasn’t alone, it seems. Last Saturday’s paper brought a letter listing some of the people who’ve written about Middlesbrough, from Pat Barker to Bob Beagrie and beyond. The letter was from Andy Croft, of Smokestack Books, though I suspect that the condescending headline "Middlewhere?" was provided by the sub-editor (probably being post-modern and ironic).

I’d intended to link to both the original review and Andy’s letter, but neither of them has yet found a space on the Guardian‘s web site.

Funny, that…

For some reason – and it’s probably coincidence, though I’d like to think it’s the birth of a trend! – we’ve been to two events in the last two weeks which brought together crime fiction and music.

This week’s was the launch of The Myth of Justice, the second book from Red Squirrel Press’s Crime imprint. The author, Graham Pears, retired from the Northumbria Police force with the rank of Chief Superintendent, and perhaps this helped persuade Northumbrian Piper David Bailey (who is Piper to the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police, as well as to the Lord Mayor of Newcastle upon Tyne) to provide some musical interludes for the event. It was clear from Graham Pears’ lively reading that his 33 years in the force had helped him to write his book, in his humorous and believable depictions of the working life of a police station if not in the life of crime itself!

Last week we had been at another event which brought together a crime writer and a musician: Ann Cleeves and fiddle virtuoso Chris Stout got together to bring a touch of Shetland to Gateshead, in an event which Ann describes in her diary.

This wasn’t strictly a launch, but an overview of Ann’s quartet of mysteries illustrating the four seasons in Shetland – but she did give us a preview, the first ever reading from the fourth book of the series, which will not be published until next February. Ann read the opening passage, which describes a very bumpy flight in to Fair Isle; "That’s exactly what it’s like," confirmed Chris. "You can see it on YouTube, one of my band made a video of it!"

Two very different and very enjoyable events: here’s hoping it’s not a coincidence but a trend, and that there are more collaborations ahead!

Back when I worked in advertising monitoring (don’t ask) I used to complain that work flowed over into my home life: that I couldn’t read a magazine any more, because something at the back of my mind would start trying to classify – and to price – all the advertisements. And this was not a good thing.

Yet one of the reasons why I love my job is that work and not-work are so inextricably entangled. Even when we’re on holiday I see things that make me think of clients. In our social life, too, some of our friends have become clients, and many of our clients have become friends.

Which is how we came to be spending last Saturday evening helping Ann Cleeves celebrate her birthday, and hearing her exciting news about spending a day on set with ITV Productions who are filming Hidden Depths, one of her Vera Stanhope novels. We talked, too, about the Shetland evening with Ann and fiddler Chris Stout, which I am very much looking forward to.

The previous Sunday, we had been in Boroughbridge, lunching with the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers’Association. This was a useful opportunity to talk to CWA members about keeping the web site up to date with their news, and it was also a chance to catch up with a number of individual clients. But it was also a pleasant lunch in congenial company. CWA Press Officer John Dean, who also runs his own PR company, commented that we probably found, as he did, that you occasionally did work for the client, because you wanted to, that you couldn’t fit within the professional budget. We agreed that yes, that very day we had travelled 50 miles to eat lunch with the client… "And we appreciate that!" he replied.

What is more, this evening the Dagger Awards ceremony is being televised: so I am about to go and watch television on behalf of a client. The great thing about my job is, sometimes it really doesn’t feel like work…

Cornwell Internet is just back from a week in Brittany, where we enjoyed ourselves greatly walking around small towns and across small islands, discovering new places and revisiting places we had been before (and discovering new aspects of them). There was also a fair amount of eating and drinking and catching up on some reading, and altogether a very pleasant break from work.

But as I have said before, there is always something there to remind us…

Roscoff is one of the ports used by Brittany ferries, and although we have been there in the past, I’m sure it was for no longer than it takes to get off the morning ferry and away. This time we had a more leisurely look round, and were charmed by the old town. Several of the old houses in the central square are decorated with carvings, as is the church – some of them look old, some very new, and with some it’s impossible to tell! And opposite the church, on a gatepost, is this strange figure. The stumpy legs and round tummy make it look like a toddler in fancy dress, but it could be something more frightening…

I knew that one of the first jobs I would have to do on my return home was update Karen Maitland’s web site, to reflect the publication in the US of her new novel, The Owl Killers. And I knew that one of the inspirations for The Owl Killers was her discovery of a medieval bogeyman known as the Owlman "who had the head and wings of an owl, but the body and legs of a man" (as she describes him in her guest blog on the Random House web site). And here to remind me was the Owlman himself!

Back home, and ready to pass my curious little story on to Karen, only to discover a e-mail from her: she had a curious little story for me, too. It seems that the US edition of The Owl Killers has sold at least one copy, and to a completely unexpected reader – former President Bill Clinton! (Read the full story).

As you might expect from her books, Anne Fine is an entertaining speaker: she has plenty of opinions, and she expresses them with force and humour. When she read and disliked Melvin Burgess’s book, Doing It, she said so.

This has made her a favourite with journalists, but that’s as in ‘favourite meal’ rather than ‘favourite person’. Earlier this summer she expressed reservations over another new book, Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels on the basis of a description given to her by a journalist:

“I have to wonder generally whether a children’s publisher does not sometimes have a responsibility to stop and say that although a shocking new book will make money, and even be popular, it does not have what the Americans call ‘redeeming social importance’.”

Note the tentativeness of that remark. Later, when she had read the book, Anne was rather more forthright, telling people that it was the best book she had read in some time – but that, of course, isn’t news. Fortunately, Margo Lanagan was understanding, describing the trick as blindsiding an expert.

The latest episode of the story goes a step further. The Times reports on a panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival called ‘Compelling Novels, Vulnerable Children’ at which Anne Fine asked an audience of social workers what effect they thought it had on vulnerable children to read novels which were not only dark and realistic but which maintained this note through to a downbeat ending. She may have been thinking of her own books for older children: in The Road of Bones Yuri’s survival in a quasi-Stalinist state comes at a price, and the final twist is as much a sting in the tail as an upbeat ending; or The Tulip Touch, in which it is brutally clear that Natalie’s happy ending can only be attained by admitting that she cannot save Tulip.

This wasn’t controversial enough for The Times, which headlined its story “Anne Fine deplores ‘gritty realism’ of modern children’s books”. Alison Flood’s post in the Guardian‘s Book Blog drew on the same source (though she acknowledged that “I have a feeling that her comments at the Edinburgh international book festival have been blown a little out of proportion” before moving on to a general discussion of the issue) and provoked a flurry of comments from people who had actually been at the event, and didn’t recognise it from The Times‘s account.

Today’s Times carries a brief letter from Anne putting the record straight. It’s good to know that where the Teesdale Mercury leads, the Times is not afraid to follow. So that’s a happy ending of a sort, then. (Pity neither of the comments so far received by the Times shows any sign of having read the letter…)

Stop Press: Since I wrote the above, I’ve read two more contributions to the debate: Nicolette Jones writes in BookBrunch that newspapers will inevitably not falsify what is said, exactly, but present it in the most sensational light they can; and Melvin Burgess says much the same thing, adding that it is no wonder people feel bruised by such encounters with the press – and adds his own recollection of what really happened.

It’s a fine bright day, and in theory Cornwell Internet are off to the seaside – specifically, to Whitby, to see my brother and sister-in-law who are there for Folk Week.

In practice, of course, something has come up. We have heard from several clients who use BT / Yahoo! as their Internet Service Provider that e-mail forwarded from their own domain is not getting through to them.

Roger spent much of yesterday trying to sort this out. The problem is not at this end, but, we think, with Yahoo! – but we can hardly expect people to do without e-mail while we put pressure on them to sort it out. So in the meanwhile, he is setting up some arrangements to work around it.

If this applies to you – that is, if Cornwell Internet provides you with mail forwarding (e-mail to you@yourdomain which you find in the same inbox as mail addressed to your BT / Yahoo! address) and you notice that mail is not reaching you – please let Roger know about it.

We are still planning to be out for most of the day, but he will do what he can!

It’s just as well that I love my job, because sometimes it seems that, no matter where I go, I just can’t get away from it.

Cornwell Internet is recently returned from a holiday in Iceland. We left the business, as always, in the capable hands of Stephen Mellor, knowing that we could rely on him to take care of the one big task that would have to be done during our absence – the announcement of the winners of the CWA Dagger awards.

As it happened, wireless internet was widely and easily available in Iceland, so we were able to eavesdrop on Stephen’s correspondence with CWA Chair Margaret Murphy. But we didn’t expect this addition reminder of Margaret:

– her book, The Dispossessed displayed in the secondhand basket outside a shop in Stykkishólmur on Iceland’s Snæfellsnes peninsula.

But it seems that English-language crime fiction is very popular in Iceland. We also sighted Margaret’s fellow Murder Squaddie, Ann Cleeves at number 4 among the best-sellers in a Reykjavik bookshop: