A brief update…

The Hellbrat is duly punished, and let all within reach of my voice pay heed, for thus does House Harkaway – most puissant, most awesome – deal with the low, the cussèd, the unwise, the irksome burrs that trouble our mighty stride. (Thank you, Sheri S. Tepper for writing True Game when I was a kid.)

I rang the parent this morning and explained as delicately as I could the trajectory of the situation. The parent used words parents should not use. By this time I had heard from most of the offended parties and was disposed to some measure of mercy. (Consider, ye rash folk, what my mercy entails. See below.)

We spoke as men do. This is a secret thing, and subtle. It involves long periods of avoiding the issue entirely and establishing in good mammalian form that no actual combat will be necessary. It then moves to cautious searches form common ground.

The upshot:

I am to be spoken of as a saint by all of his line and their chattels.

He will not be spoken of at all, and the matter will lapse gently into the public forgetting. I will shortly move the original post to the archive, where almost no one ever goes. (Except @benjohncock for some reason no one really understands.) It may have been apparent to you in your initial reading, but I took pains to obscure the identities of those involved even when I was in a fury. This airbrushing will continue.

No, I wasn’t meeting David Cameron.

In exchange for my forbearance, the parent will require of the Hellbrat that he should spend his free time engaged in a serious effort to raise money for Haiti. He will recruit no fewer than three of his putrid, thuggish, street urchin friends and they will between them raise a sum the parent assures me will be almost impossible for the Hellbrat to achieve without some act of public self-immolation such as shaving his head or running ten miles in his sister’s ballet clothes.

He will do this without parental assistance and at no time will he reveal to anyone that this is not his own idea.

And he will do all this… analogue style. No computer use will be permitted.

Bwah. Ahahah. Ahah. HA.

Yes, it’s one thirty in the morning and yes, I am awake.

There is absolutely no prospect of my going to sleep until I’ve told this story, so I’m going to tell it and then I’m going to cause some other things to happen, things so dreadful that I cannot actually mention them on the interwebs.

Yes, that bad.

Yes, too bad for the interwebs.

Yes. Hush now and pay attention and all will be reveealed. It happened this way…

I was having a meeting.

It was a boring meeting and thankfully it was never going to be a long one. It was about infrastructure, cables, and digging holes in the street. The guy I was meeting came to the house and we talked about all these exciting things. For added value, he brought his youngish son with him. I was given to understand that the child was not in school owing to some sort of medical issue regarding an injured leg.

It is now clear to me that the leg was almost certainly injured in the preparation and commission of some criminal act.

Be that as it may…

I had a fair quantity of electronic swag on the desk, because I’ve been trying to do some clever stuff recently like recording podcasts and learning to use a stylus/tablet combo in my endless quest to avoid RSI. I also had my two e-readers out for a sort of furtive re-comparison; having been snotty about the Kindle for ages, I was actually given one at Christmas and forced to acknowledge that it’s a decent bit of kit, albeit still a “third device”. In the spirit of honesty, I had my Sony Reader out too (which I actually paid for), in case my initial assessment of the Sony was also a bit unkind. All this, of course, delighted the infant, who at the ripe old age of fourteen was apparently something of a gearhead.

“Are you gonna get a new laptop soon?”

No. This one works fine.

“But it’s really old!”

It’s only about three years old, actually.

“That’s REALLY old.”

In fairness, some people do feel that’s old for a laptop. I, however, still have a first gen Apple monochrome upstairs, just in case I ever need a doorstop with a floppy drive and just enough space on the hard disk for a couple of iPhone apps.

So while the father wandered around the kitchen tutting and saying things like “we’ll never get the gaskets” and explaining why my newest attempt to drag Harkaway Towers into the nineteenth century is doomed to failure, I talked to the infant about life, the universe, and everything. Specifically, about ebooks, and the Apple Tablet, and Google Books.

And that is where I made my mistake, because the little monster is a copyright extremist-activist.

Look out, Lord Mandelson. This kid is a filesharing 800lb guerilla (yes, I do mean that). One mention of copyright and the issues surrounding the GBS was enough to send him into a kind of focused volcanic eruption. Apparently, anything which stands in the way of Google must be burned to the ground and sowed with salt. Anything which restricts the freedom of the fourteen year old masses to copy, re-copy, re-mix and distribute anything online for fun and profit is an act of barbarism which must be resisted with martial arts and big, big guns.

At which point, his father came into the room to ask me about quarter inch versus half inch piping, and I, bloody idiot that I am, wandered out into the hall. For six minutes. Leaving. The Hellbrat. With. My. Laptop.

I am an idiot.

In the course of those six minutes, he managed to do the following:

Move my new (unedited) novel to a folder marked ‘squirrel porn’ and hide it in the Utilities folder.

Email my old college with the information that I was dead.

Send a Facebook message to a female friend asking her to come round later and give him/me a “Swedish massage”. And certain other services we shall not go into.

And – and this is the kicker – tweet Jasper Fforde and Waterstones with a request that they bring out a Kindle edition of Jasper’s new book, Shades of Grey. Which at least shows he was listening when we were talking about the differences between e-readers, I suppose.

He also sent a couple of other messages which thankfully don’t matter or didn’t do what he wanted them to.

(I found out all this when my wise and tolerant Facebook friends texted me to let me know my account had been hacked. Thank you, thank you, thank you.)

The upshot of which…

… is that for ten seconds I really thought I was going to commit murder (until I found the book – yes, it’s backed up, but I nearly expired with horror all the same) and then suicide (when I discovered I had to all appearances simultaneously propositioned one old friend and possibly insulted another in public at his own publicity event, and been unpleasant to Waterstone’s into the bargain.)

Sorry, to all concerned.

Most especially to Jasper, and to Glenville, Kate, Andy & Greg at @waterstones. And to a lady whose Facebook headshot is apparently particularly attractive to evil teenaged males.

There will be drinks bought and suchlike. Just say the word.

Yes, that’s the Hindenburg, and no, I do not believe it’s all over for bookshops.

It does appear, however, that Borders has crashed again, only a few months after being rescued, and the flesh-and-blood booktrade is apparently losing money hand over fist to the online shops.

On the upside, the IndieBound initiative is coming to the UK. Indiebound is a network, a cultural talking shop, a pro-local, wired revolution centred on independent booksellers. After all, as they’re keen to remind us, if you buy from an indie bookseller, you’re putting money into your local economy, supporting charities, reducing your carbon footprint, and reinforcing your community in the face of the atomising effect of globalisation. So it’s kind of a no-brainer. It may be in the medium to long term that the creative businesses have to change, but let’s not let the Idiot Hand of the market tear down communities and put up cardboard replicas. Let’s make the shift a benevolent one. Buying is voting, so let’s vote for something worth having.[1,2,3,4]

In the spirit of which, here’s a couple of things I would like from my local bookshop…

Diversity and insanity

I can get the latest Dan Brown at the train station bookshop. It will inevitably be ludicrously discounted. (Hm. And there’s a thing. Waterstone’s is in a price war with Amazon. Waterstone’s and other real world shops and the online sellers are jointly squeezing publishers for greater discounts. Here’s a notion: if publishers take a stand on discounting and Waterstone’s and friends go along with it, Amazon &co. can be pushed away from crazy reductions and the booktrade can breathe for a few months. Aaaaaaanyway.) These days I’ll probably buy it on iPhone, anyway. I don’t need a paper copy of The Lost Symbol.

I don’t mean that a small bookshop shouldn’t sell bestsellers. I mean that what’s great about them is that you can trip over My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist or Night of the Avenging Blowfish, or a forgotten gem like Fawn Brodie’s staggering The Devil Drives. You can get these books on the internet – but you won’t hear about them unless someone tells you they’re there.

Which brings up…

Curatorship

Yes. The bookseller is the sommelier of the written word. “With your new sofa and a glass of Talisker, Frabjous & Lobe’s Books Of Quality is pleased to recommend Don’t Point That Thing At Me, sir. The verbiage is fruity, the plot pithy, and the characters possess verve, sir. And to follow, we recommend a crackling log fire and David Grossman’s most excellent Writing In The Dark. It broadens the mind, sir.”

Dexterity

One of the bizarre experiences of buying a book from big chains is ordering. I’m staggered when I have this dialogue:

“I’d like a copy of Sharp Teeth, please.”

“Oh, yes. Great book. Uh, we’ve sold out. Would you like to order it?”

“Yes, that would be great.”

“Okay, it’ll be here in a week.”

“Wait, we’re what now?”

Disadvantages of scale? Problems with parking? I have no idea. But Primrose Hill Books, my old local shop, could get most titles in 24 hours – making them at least as fast as Amazon.

Print On Demand?

This requires a bit of shift, but I really think it’s interesting. I love the idea of being able to go into a bookshop and have them print a properly formatted book for me, in one of a variety of sizes (“pocket or portfolio, sir?”) and put on, perhaps, one of a number of independently-produced jacket designs of my choosing. A local artist’s work, perhaps. Or, of course, a lightweight temporary version at lower cost, which I can write in and drop in the bath. And what if they could do that with my eBook? What if I could buy the eBook and then decide I wanted a paper version after all?

Yes, all right, this is bookscience fiction. But it needn’t be for long.

Stopping there for the moment, because I have work to do. What do you think about all this?