Cory Doctorow suggests in the BoingBoing blog that publishers should adopt the convention of creating a directory on their web sites in which they would make available good quality images of the covers of all their books. Oh, that would make my life so much easier – and I’ll add the request that they do it, please, as soon as the covers are finalised, so that those of us who are trying to publicise the books can get ready before publication!

The plan, as propounded at BoingBoing, is that bloggers could be encouraged to hotlink to the covers (ie, set their page to refer to the image on the publisher’s site, rather than transfering images onto their own server). I don’t like hotlinking: it’s a way of using someone else’s bandwidth, which is dishonest, and it can create problems for the linker, if the image to which they have linked is removed or switched. But Doctorow suggests that this last point could be a benefit, an incentive for publishers to go along with the scheme: when you change the cover design of a book, you simply substitute the new image for the old one, and all over the internet, bloggers are suddenly displaying the latest edition!

That’s the headline in a brief "Newsbyte" in yesterday’s Guardian, reporting that:

The tiny South Pacific island of Niue is the first to provide all its children with a laptop and free internet access, after receiving 500 free OLPCs.

Cornwell Internet can claim to have been part of Niue’s technological edge ten years ago. In those days, Niue was ahead of the crowd, as one of the first small nations to realise that their internet was a saleable asset. And our very first domain, before it was practical for small users to register .co.uk or .com addresses, was cornwell.nu.

I love Google’s automatic translation service: it reassures me that human translators are not yet threatened by competition from computers. I’m currently updating and expanding the section of Anne Fine’s web site where we try to keep track of foreign editions of her books, and since I have a copy of Aamu Ilman Äittiä – that’s Press Play in Finnish – I was trying to track down other books in the same language. Instead I found a newspaper article (from Turun Sanamat, in 1999) which intrigued me enough for me to accept Google’s kind offer, and read their translation. Which read, under the headline quoted above:

Britain entered the public, according to the highest poetry kunniavirkaan “poet laureate” selected poet Andrew Motion). 47-year old Oxford educated received a Motion is a traditional representative of poetry, and he has been one of ennakkosuosikeista. Officially, poet laureate appointed by Queen Elizabeth Prime Minister Tony Blair’s recommendation.

1600-in the early to mid established by lifelong hovirunoilijan office belongs to an annual nominal around 900 marks, as well as the pay box of wine. Poet laureate is expected to write poems nationally important events, such as the Royal häihin or funerals.

The election was pettymyskin
Previous poet laureate had died in the autumn of Ted Hughes, whose last book’s Birthday Letters (Syntymäpäiväkirjeitä)) sales have risen to record figures. Hughes reportedly had Motion production, which picks out seven runoteosta, two novels, as well as the poet Philip Larkinin a biography.

Motion selection has been a disappointment to many, who considered the second ennakkosuosikkia, Carol Ann Duffy prefers the poet. Press reports claim that he is not wanted the post because he is gay and unwilling to write to the royal family.

A safe choice is a disappointment even to those kirjallisuuspiireille, who have called poet laureate of “a thorough overhaul. Poet laureate has been made to amend the palkalliseksi posts, which serve more ordinary citizens.

The children’s own poet
The children have already benefited from the oman hovirunoilijansa, when the last week, was designated as the first children’s laureate, Quentin Blake. He received a celebratory occasion, Princess Anne’s ojentamana 10 000 pounds, or around 90 000 markka and the premium for the honour of the titteliä two years.

Children’s poet laureate chosen noted lastenkirjailija or illustrator and Blake have both. He has illustrated more than 100 books, mm. many of Roald Dahl books.

Blaken the selection of paneliin belonged to children, a librarian, publisher, critic, the bookseller, as well as radiotoimittaja. Two other finishing straight into the author was Peter Dickinson, and Anne Fine.

So now we know…

Penguin Books take the internet seriously. The Penguin web site is full of information about their books, with extracts and audio samples, and they encourage their authors to set up web sites of their own.

Not only do they encourage them, they provide a 40-plus page PDF file of guidance.

While this is no doubt just what some authors need, for others it is overkill, full of information which is more alarming than encouraging. The author has tried to combine very basic information (“What is a domain name?”) with guidelines for people who are confident enough to be running their own site – here’s a sample:

First, you need to transfer the files for your website to the server. This is done via FTP (file transfer protocol). It’s a very easy process, and will be handled most likely by your designer (although you could certainly do it if you have the experience and an FTP program).

And indeed you could. But if you need to be told that, you probably won’t want to do it yourself – and if you don’t want to do it yourself, then you don’t need to be told how. Again, a clear and on the whole helpful explanation of domain names and how to choose them is followed by the comment that you may find that a “cybersquatter” has already registered your chosen domain, but don’t worry:

In some instances this will be something you’ll be able to resolve easily, for only a few thousand dollars.

That’s all right, then.

So, if any Penguin authors are reading this, I’d like to tell them this: Penguin have put together some very helpful marketing advice with a lot of technical information which you probably won’t need. Read what they have to say about what they can offer you through Penguin’s web site, and about the different kinds of web presence you might want for yourself (a site of your own, a blog, using Facebook and MySpace…). They are sound, too, on why fancy graphic effects and Flash animations are probably not the best way to promote a book. But don’t feel obliged to try to register a domain name, find hosting or construct a site for yourself unless that’s what you want to do.

In fact, I’ll go further. Cornwell Internet – and I expect this goes for other web design companies too – would very much rather you don’t register your own domain before you talk to us. Unless you have a very popular name, it’s unlikely to be snapped up overnight – and if it’s that popular, it’s probably already taken, and we’ll think of an alternative (trust us on this: we built a web site for Mel Gibson, didn’t we?). We don’t ask this so that we can make a profit on registering your domain; unless you want something very exotic, domains can now be registered so cheaply that there really isn’t any profit in it. But administratively it is so much easier for us to register the domain than to transfer it, that there is no saving for you in registering it yourself – and probably a loss for us!

The New Rope String Band play all sorts of interesting venues – but even for them, the Rainforest World Music Festival in Borneo was something special. So we wanted to make the most of the pictures they brought home with them: should we present them as a gallery of static images, or as a slide show?

Well, both, of course!

Our initial plan was to look at the software already available on the web. There are plenty of sites offering to display your pictures as a slide show, or software to allow you to do so from your own site – and we are all in favour of using what’s on offer: why reinvent the wheel? (That’s why, when Michael Jecks asked us about a keeping a photo diary, we built a page which used blogging software hosted on his own site, and the third-party Flickr photo hosting site.

So we started looking at slide shows on the internet: this one integrated well with the look of the site, but the photo quality wasn’t great (and the rapid rewind at the end of the show made me a little seasick), that one had better picture quality, but ran on a third party site… Which is why, in the end, Roger decided to write his own routine which would meet all our specific requirements. Sometimes, if you want a thing doing well, you have to do it yourself.

And if you want to know more, have a look for yourself!

You wouldn’t expect working in what I still think of as "New Technology" to lead you into making connections with museums, antiquities, archaeology: and yet…

I didn’t mention, when I wrote recently about hearing Maureen Almond read her poetry, that her book, Recollections, has a double relevance for Cornwell Internet; not only is it published by our client Flambard Press, it is inspired by items from the Museum of Antiquities (now in the process of moving to the Great North Museum), a joint museum of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne.

We dined this weekend with the editor of the Society’s News Bulletin who told us she had just been to London for the press preview of the British Museum’s Hadrian exhibition. "Of course I’ll be writing about it for the newsletter," she said. "After all, we’ve loaned the BM some of the exhibition’s key items…"

Quite apart from that, she gave the exhibition a very favourable review.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in London, the Wellcome Collection has an exhibition of skeletons from the Museum of London. Maybe I’m just squeamish, but I’m not entirely comfortable with the practice of exhuming skeletons and putting them on display. Nonetheless, I was interested to see from the Guardian‘s gallery of photographs from the exhibition that Ann Cleeves is not exaggerating when she describes long-buried bones as "red" – which is why she has called the third volume of her Shetland Quartet Red Bones.

An entertaining and instructive article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker examines the history of of children’s literature in the United States through the opposing figures of Anne Carroll Moore, who pioneered children’s libraries, and E. B. White, journalist and author of Stuart Little. What brought them into conflict was the notion of "suitability": what is suitable for whom, and who gets to make those decisions.

This link goes to the first page (of eight) of the article, while this one links to the article on a single long page.

Neil Gaiman, in whose diary I found the link, quotes from it a passage from Katharine White (E. B. White’s wife, and one of the first children’s book reviewers:

It has always seemed to us that boys and girls who are worth their salt begin at twelve or thirteen to read, with a brilliant indiscrimination, every book they can lay their hands on. In the welter, they manage to read some good ones. A girl of twelve may take up Jane Austen, a boy Dickens; and you wonder how writers of juveniles have the brass to compete in this field, blithely announcing their works as ‘suitable for the child of twelve to fourteen.’ Their implication is that everything else is distinctly unsuitable. Well, who knows? Suitability isn’t so simple.

Experts, it seems, have been saying No to Age Banding since the 1930s.

Two outings in two days, both of them connected with work and both of them great fun!

On Tuesday evening we were at the Lit & Phil, for a panel discussion on translation. This was quite a coup for the Lit & Phil: from five books short-listed for the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger, three of the translators were present, two days before the winner is announced. The CWA gala dinner and awards ceremony is tonight, and then we’ll find out which of the books has won – exceptionally, this is a prize which recognises that a translation is collaboration between author and translator, and rewards both of them.

So Ros Schwarz, Stephen Sartarelli and Peter Millar are rivals for the prestige (not to mention the cash) which goes with the Dagger; but you wouldn’t have known to hear them speak. It was more like being allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation between fellow professionals who were enjoying comparing notes on their job, discovering which things they did alike and which they did completely differently. For Ann Cleeves (who, as a partisan of crime fiction in translation, did a fine job of chairing the session) , it was less a matter of getting her guests to speak and more of trying to hold them back when the conversation raced off in all directions! It was a lively and often very funny evening (and the only disappointment was that one of the publishers had failed to deliver copies of the books under discussion, so it wasn’t possible to buy them).

Then yesterday we headed south to Middlesbrough, to mima where Smokestack Books were launching two poetry collections from a USA we don’t often see: a radical, left-wing USA, a USA in which the colonised speak louder than the colonists. It was an unusual poetry reading in that two of the rpoets were reading from anthologies, not their own work (Jon Andersen, editor of Seeds of Fire, who told us that if you exclude a twenty minute detour across the Canadian border, this was his first trip outside the USA, and Ellen Phethean, publisher of The Ropes). The star performer was Martín Espada, who didn’t so much read his poems about Puerto Rico as sing them, and even dance them.

Unexpectedly, the two events turned out to be linked by yet another of our clients. One of the questions Ann Cleeves asked her panel was "Which book would you most like the chance to translate?" All of their responses sounded fascinated, but Ros Schwarz’s nomination of Le Message by Andrée Chedid rang a bell: Flambard Press had published a collection of Andrée Chedid’s short stories. Better still, Flambard Press, in the persons of Peter and Margaret Lewis, were present to say so.

Flambard Press were not in Middlesbrough yesterday – but one of their books was: another of the supporting readers was Maureen Almond. Her current book is Recollections, a collection of poems about pieces in the Museum of Antiquities, each poem accompanied by a photograph of its subject taken by Glyn Goodrick (and taken, Maureen explained to us, after he had read the poem). South Shields God (as posted in Maureen’s blog) is one of the poems she read.

One of the things I love about my job is that you meet such a wide variety of interesting people – and what’s more, they meet interesting people, too. Helen Savage has just sent me a photograph of herself with footballer David Ginola.

Why? Well, oddly enough, there is wine involved: and all is now explained on Helen’s web site.

On Sunday, Cornwell Internet celebrated its tenth birthday as a web design business.

Of course, we’ve been building web sites for longer than that, for ourselves and for others, professionally and as a hobby. But it’s ten years since Roger Cornwell took early retirement from BT and went into business for himself: that was at the end of June 1998, and we celebrated his independence with a party the following Saturday, July 4th. Ten years on, we felt it was time for another party!

This time, we invited all our clients to join us at Newcastle’s Stephenson Works, the world’s first purpose built locomotive works on Forth Banks, where the famous locomotives “Locomotion” and “Rocket” were built. Not only is it a delightful space to be in, it also seemed appropriate as an important site in the new technology of its day.

Some of our clients are very far flung (indeed, there are some we have still never met!); and people tend to have other commitments in the summer. But we were delighted that so many people were able to come along, both those who had traveled specially from London or Lancashire, and those for whom the venue was only a short way away on the metro (some of whom enquired whether the space would be available for their own future events!). We also received a number of birthday cards, which charmed and delighted us!

People seem to have enjoyed themselves (I certainly did, but that’s not quite the point!) – but then, we thought they would. A comfortable location, delicious wines (thanks to Helen Savage) and our own-label beers from the Durham Brewery (Webmaster, Uploader and Downloader) and plenty of nibbles to accompany them (thank you to Gail-Nina for heroic sandwich-making!) – but what really makes a party successful is the people. And, as I keep saying, we have the best clients!