[Photo: NYTrotter, license details here]

Hair and sex have always gone together…

…whether it’s werwolf eruptions of alarming masculinity or the equally disturbing bodily baldness of the fashion scene, or the dispute about blondes versus brunettes, or the thorny issue of whether James Bond could ever be played ...]]>

[Photo: NYTrotter, license details here]

Hair and sex have always gone together…

…whether it’s werwolf eruptions of alarming masculinity or the equally disturbing bodily baldness of the fashion scene, or the dispute about blondes versus brunettes, or the thorny issue of whether James Bond could ever be played by a fair-haired man. (Do you remember that time before Daniel Craig? It was a serious question…)

And back in the day, your barber was also the chap who asked you in a discreet and deferential manner whether you ‘needed something for the weekend, sir?’ (I don’t know, and dread to ask, whether there was ever a ladies’ equivalent of that question.)

All that aside, there’s the grand, weird tradition of soft-focus clothed pornstar style shots of models in the windows, tastefully Vaselined to give them that 80s shoulder-padded glamour. Apparently, when we get a haircut, the thing we want most of all is to look like a Patrick Nagel poster. Granted, I did at one time desperately want to live in Nagelworld. But people, come on: it must have been the late 80s, early 90s, when my deepest ambitions were to own a katana and sleep with Liv Tyler.

But my local place has now gone too far. They have fallen off the slippery log of ridiculous sexual advertising and deranged drooling over Flashdance styles which were old before I was twenty. They have plunged and pouted their way to a new low of irony-free self-parody. How? Listen closely, and I shall tell you. There are two parts. The first part is relatively simple: they have exposed a nipple. The gauzy, wafty image on the front of the shop now features an unequivocal breast. It’s a very nice example, and no doubt all terribly artistic, but you couldn’t mistake it for anything except a bit of genuine nudity and it’s somewhat startling next to the grocery shop on one side and the cream cake place on the other. I don’t want to sound prudish. I’m a big fan of nipples. I’m just rather surprised to find them casually available beside the kumquats.

And then there’s the second thing. This is where it all goes so very, very wrong. Yes, I know, many would say that the decision to move from pseudo-orgasmic dollfaces to actual bodyparts is already a bridge too far, and I’d have some sympathy for that, especially as the owner of the nipple in question is in that dodgy age/bodymass bracket which invites adjectives like ‘pert’ and ‘budding’. (Ew.) Still and all, it’s what it is, a respectable and indeed elegant and artistic secondary sexual characteristic doing its bit for the sale of hair services. However… I called a friend of mine to discuss the matter – this is what authors do while they’re waiting for agents to read new novels; we fret about public morality and make useless phonecalls to one another – and he had a story to tell.

It would seem, then, that this chap had an urge to get his hair cut on Boxing Day. I find it inexplicable. I think of Boxing Day as a day to be hung over in a genteel, liverish sort of way. It’s a family day, a sleepy day, a day to clear up and wander around and wish desperately for a few hours of kip and a salad. It’s a day to fight over games of Risk or Monopoly. However, he went to get his hair cut. He walked in off the street, a bit bleary-eyed, and said could they cut his hair and they said they could, and it was only as he began to wake up and the stylist was soaping his head that he realised that she – along with all the other women working in the salon – was wearing not a lot more than her underwear and a sort of see-through item around her shoulders.

“Oh, yes,” she said blithely, when asked, “it’s Sexy Underwear Haircut Boxing Day.”

Oh. Er. Good. Carry on.

Dearie, dearie me.

The Phoenix Convention in Dublin took place over the weekend, and I was asked to be Guest of Honour. It was huge, huge fun. It’s always nice to go somewhere and feel that you’re at the centre of things, but this was different; that old line about strangers being friends ...]]> Wow.

The Phoenix Convention in Dublin took place over the weekend, and I was asked to be Guest of Honour. It was huge, huge fun. It’s always nice to go somewhere and feel that you’re at the centre of things, but this was different; that old line about strangers being friends you haven’t met yet is the actual truth at an event like #pcon. That makes it special.

When I got home last night I was completely exhausted and I had a ton of things to say. This morning, inevitably, I’m wrapping myself round a cup of tea and thinking how wonderful it was and many of those things have completely evaporated, leaving behind that infuriating sense of “if you think a bit longer, you’ll remember me…”

However: I do remember saying in the “what non-genre fiction do you read?” panel that one of the things I’m conscious of when I read something amazing that I didn’t write is sheer envy. True. But I missed something when I said that, and it was brought home to me on the flight back to London. At the airport, I finally picked up a copy of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I started reading it, and immediately stopped to write four pages of a new novel on the backs of our boarding passes, in pen, on a pretty bumpy flight, using my tray-table as a study desk and fighting nausea as we hit the occasional airpocket.

Really good books can send you roaring off to write your own stuff. I do feel envy at the brilliance of Mitchell’s prose. But it doesn’t hurt. It just makes me want to play, too.

What else?

Actually, no! I can’t recap the whole thing. It’s impossible. Read the Twitter feed, the blogs. There’ll be some video in due time, as well… it was amazing.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Peter McClean for asking me, to Cheryl Morgan, to everyone.

Wow.

GET IT NOW!

So here’s the deal: a few weeks ago I got a message from @gregmcqueen: would I contribute to an anthology for Haiti? Something of a no-brainer. I had a story sitting around which had had a brief moment in the sun on Radio 3’s excellent The Verb show, ...]]>

GET IT NOW!

So here’s the deal: a few weeks ago I got a message from @gregmcqueen: would I contribute to an anthology for Haiti? Something of a no-brainer. I had a story sitting around which had had a brief moment in the sun on Radio 3’s excellent The Verb show, and I’d been meaning to release it some other way so that people could read it. Because, y’know, that’s what it’s for. The story was called All Or Nothing Days, and it sort-of-but-doesn’t-really fits loosely with The Gone-Away World. It also sort-of-but-doesn’t-really fits with a couple of stories I had published in Interzone in the late 90s. Yes, I am an old fart. Yes, there are people born in the 90s who can now vote. Shut up.

Anyway. Greg actually asked me to write an intro as well, so even aside from 99 other great stories stories in a huge variety of styles and voices from a bunch of writers who can really do their thing, you get a double helping of moi and you get to give money to charity. See how awesome that is?

Here’s a couple of other perspectives on the metastory of 100 Stories [1,2] but the real deal is that the book is now out.

Yes. The book is out now. I’ll say it again. You can now buy this book and do good and get cool stuff to read.

To find our where you can pick up your copy: here

You can preview the first 30 pages of the book here: here

So: rush out and buy, buy, buy!

First of all, the Fairness Hearing – the bit where Judge Chin decides whether the Settlement is acceptable to the US court – started on Friday. James Grimmelmann has a transcript here. As you’d imagine there’s a lot of it, but the Maestro has ...]]> Time for a Google Books Settlement update…

First of all, the Fairness Hearing – the bit where Judge Chin decides whether the Settlement is acceptable to the US court – started on Friday. James Grimmelmann has a transcript here. As you’d imagine there’s a lot of it, but the Maestro has helpfully culled a summary here and here. Even the summaries are not short, but hey: this is rather a significant thing. You can cope.

A few things which have occurred to me of recent days, as a result of the hearing, and of some meetings I’ve been to:

1. Orphan Works

Somewhat startling discussion between Michael Boni for the Author’s Guild and Judge Chin. I’ll reproduce Laboratorium’s account here and then say a couple of things…

Judge Chin: What about those [opted in rightsholders] who don’t come forward?

Boni: They’ll be looked for.

Judge Chin: Aren’t the vast majority out of print?

Boni: So far, some 620,000 out-of-print books have been claimed by 40,000 authors, through the notice program alone. We expect to find a lot of these people. We’ve had an 85% success rate; the UK licensing society has found over 90%.

First up: it’s vital to distinguish here between books which are out of print, which frequently come back into print and (especially if there’s been a film or the author has won an award) sell more copies than they did first time round – and orphan works whose copyright owner is impossible to locate (for a given value of impossible).

Second, Boni seems to be saying here that they expect to find a high percentage of the rightsholders. If that’s the case, I have to ask what we’re all doing here. The whole point, surely, of an opt-out settlement is to bring in those works for whom no negotiation is possible. Otherwise this is just a massive compulsory licensing system for the convenience of a large media company.

Third, the discussion of orphan works has become something of a magic word in copyright reform and Digital Economy chatter in the UK. I’ve been guilt of taking this at face value myself. That figure of five to ten million orphan works is impressive, but it’s a little misleading. Some estimates put it as low as five hundred thousand. If Google expects to find 85% of those rightsholders eventually, then the number of works at risk of loss is… er… well, seventy five thousand at its low end and seven hundred and fifty at the top. Not so impressive as a bargaining chip, is it?

2. The Plan

I think a lot of people are assuming merrily that Google has A Plan. This is very comforting for publishers and agents and writers alike. The digital world is looming and digital piracy (or filesharing or booklending, call it what you like) is already begun. It’s a scary new world, and ho ho! Here’s the most friendly face in it – or one of them – offering to sort it all out. Yay!

Except the thing is Google doesn’t seem to have a plan. Google has a belief in Creative Destruction and a sense that if they put stuff out into the world first and find ways to monetise it later, that will work. It has done before. Never mind that inductive reasoning is not dependable (ask a turkey) or that it may, if it works, work because of Google’s stunningly privileged position as the index of the web rather than because it’s a good way of dealing with stuff. It’s only ‘creative’ if what is produced is better and more powerful and brighter than what was there before, and there’s actually no particular reason to believe that to be the case. This may just be destructive destruction of an industry which is heavily bound up in the culture of our nations and whose existence props up the production of long-form fiction and all sorts of other stuff, in favour of, er, Google and companies like it which are essentially aggregators and searchers rather than content creators.

Google has said repeatedly that they are not entering publishing, and we tend to take that with a pinch of salt. Guess what? I think it’s absolutely true. They’re not. If they end up being in the position where they have to take over some of the roles of publishers, that will be a side effect rather than an ambition, and they may not do it very well. Indeed, they may choose not to do it at all, leaving the broken bits of our industry to fester where they lie.

Or they may become a great publisher. The point is, I don’t think they know.

3. The Plan (2)

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The Settlement cuts off in January last year, and from now on, Google will notionally be focusing on contractual and legislative means of acquiring the right to display books. Unless they can persuade the governments of the world to grant them an compulsory license (unlikely) there will be books whose rights they do not acquire. In fact, there will be many. The publishing industry produces hundreds of thousands of new books every year. A percentage of those will be exclusive to other internet formats. Some of those will be successful. Google will be in the position of watching its library shrink in proportion to new output. So here’s the question I’d really like an answer to:

Are we going to go through this whole process again in ten years time with Son Of GBS?

Because you have to wonder.

It occurred to me just now, reading this, that there are some weird consequences floating around waiting to leap on everyone as a ...]]> Because a day on which I don’t take ten minutes out from actual work to speculate on something no one can actually be sure of is clearly wasted…

It occurred to me just now, reading this, that there are some weird consequences floating around waiting to leap on everyone as a result of the arrival of digital books – always assuming that they have arrived, do arrive, and stay arrived – which are not the ones everyone is expecting.

Basically: it’s not that publishers think pricing ebooks high will lead to more sales (clearly, it won’t), it’s that they are scared that pricing them low will devalue the book per se, with the result that no book will be valued enough by the market to command a price which makes what they do profitable.

They also believe that digital sales will cannibalise paper sales.

You know what? If digital sales are any kind of success, they will. I just do not buy the idea that ebooks will be a driver of paper sales for ever. Either people will shift, or they won’t. In the latter case, ebooks are Minidisc or Betamax and the discussion is over. In the former, they will consume a part of the paper market. They’ve already consumed a part of my paper purchases. Why, why, why would I ever buy books I will almost certainly want to leave in my hotel room and carry them around instead of a Kindle?

But here’s the interesting thing: I think people do crave authenticity. I think they do enjoy the physical connection with a book, with the process of manufacture, and I think we underestimate the tactile connection with paper and so on at our peril. Otherwise, why would anyone wear a clockwork watch? But people do. Why would anyone go to the theatre? Blah blah.

So the upshot of all this may not be the death of the hardback – which seems to be the particular hate object of many ebook enthusiasts – but of the paperback. If you want to object, you want a proper, solid, long-lasting, attractive object. A boutique object. Otherwise you get the ebook. And if you buy the hardback, of course, you get the ebook and all the singing dancing multimedia thingies thrown in. For which privilege, you pay.

Maybe.

The list of opters-out to the Google Books Settlement is up here. It’s a long image-scan .pdf in which all the responders are filed by first name, under their real rather than professional name. I understand there may also be issues with married and unmarried names. Annoying, but still ...]]> Quick round-up:

The list of opters-out to the Google Books Settlement is up here. It’s a long image-scan .pdf in which all the responders are filed by first name, under their real rather than professional name. I understand there may also be issues with married and unmarried names. Annoying, but still a fascinating document, and it includes more than a few notables: Thomas Pynchon is there, so is Louis de Bernières – and so is one John Prescott, who appears at first glance to be the John Prescott, former deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Perhaps I should write to him and ask – if it is he, then he’d be an interesting ally in nudging the government to get off its regal backside and do something useful.

On that note, I’ve been thinking about the government’s attitude and come to the conclusion that it’s relatively simple: it’s convenient to use the smaller players in the media as a whipping horse from time to time. The government loves to be friends with News International and Lord Mandelson gets on frightfully well with David Geffen, but it’s very happy to kick the British Film industry or let writers swing in order to be in tight with Google: trashing creatives in flowery shirts is painless and gives a sense of playing hardball with “the wealthy” – because all creatives are parasitic fops, don’t you know? And some of them, of course, go the other way like that Oscar Wilde bloke, and some take drugs, they’re a bad lot with too much time on their hands, never mind that they’re the engine of a decent slice of the ‘proper’ economy – without actually angering any powerful financial/media groups or making bankers unhappy.

Labour’s obsession with being a friend to industry and finance – a vital component of its election strategy when Tony Blair was reshaping an unelectable party – means that they can’t really be tough with city firms and so on except in crisis, and even then, as we know, it doesn’t stick. They like high-profile initiatives which mean little. Real banking regulation is hard. It’s so much simpler to trumpet the demise of naughty tax equity funding, for example, even if there wasn’t really all that much abuse of the system and it means the demise of £200m of filmmaking over night… (Sorry, that’s a ghost of 2004 I’ve been carrying around for a while – it made my life really difficult for a couple of years, and eventually resulted in me writing The Gone-Away World, so I shouldn’t really complain.)

Aaaaaanyway… rant over. Go check out the Google list. Moving on…

Regarding Oxfam…

I’m going to be talking to some folks from Oxfam this month and getting their point of view. If you have questions you’d like me to ask or wise thoughts you want to share, that’s what the comment thread here is for.

And stuff…

Appearances:

I’m at P-Con at the beginning of March, and then at the Oxford Literary Festival (event 564) at the end of March. Come along and laugh at me as I try to figure out what to say which won’t make me sound like a twerp. I will also be at the 140conf meetup this week.

Facebook:

Someone has created a Gonzo Lubitsch Facebook account. It isn’t me, but it is quite funny.

Someone else has created a Ronnie Cheung page.

UK News:

The Liberal Democrats have surprised me by announcing that they will not form part of a coalition government in the event (increasingly likely) of a hung parliament. They will instead demand four policy initiatives. I understand the logic, but I think it’s a mistake, and I suspect the effects of raising Capital Gains Tax to the same levels as Income Tax may be rather more far-reaching than they imagine. Not to mention that a Conservative government almost certainly wouldn’t go for that without weakening it to the point where it makes no odds.

Elsewhere, the shouting match over Binyam Mohamed continues. Alan Johnson’s bluster and Kim Howells’ inexplicable decision to be (as it appeared to several people I’ve spoken to) rather rude to my wife on Feb 12th have availed them nought. It seems the ISC was misled, and David Davis has said it’s toothless and unable to supervise MI5.

WoW:

By way of an experiment, I have created a World Of Warcraft guild – The Knitting Circle – on the European Scarshield Legion RPPvP server. (Yes, you heard me. RPPvP. I have no idea why, it seemed like a good idea at the time.) We’re an Alliance guild, and my character is a gnome called Weatherby. I wanted to call the guild Lady Weatherby’s Knitting Circle and serve tea in Warsong Gulch, but the name wouldn’t fit on the guild register.

Darn.

Anyway, the idea is that anyone who wants can sign up and we’ll all go trash monsters together and I will call that ‘work’. It is not what you would call a professional guild, and no one is to be mean to anyone. Except the enemy, of course. Actually, if there are any WoW-playing authors out there who want to throw down and make a Horde guild, that would be hilarious.

The New Book:

… is great (even if I do say so myself), bastard hard to finish properly, going well, and will be done when it’s done. At the moment I can barely see the damn screen because my nose is running so hard and my eyes are sore, so in about ten seconds I’m going to have a shower and go get a bacon sandwich, fill my body with over-the-counter medication (but not paracetamol which initiates a chain reaction of badness culminating in the blood vessels around my eyes breaking) and see what happens. If there is a passage in the middle of the book with unicorns and flowers we may assume I wrote it today.

Wow.

Alan Johnson is angry. He’s outraged. Like Jonathan Evans and some old geezer who studies MI5 and is therefore completely impartial (unlike five senior judges, whose ‘preposterous’ suggestion that the Security Service could be complicit in torture is baseless and wicked and gives succour to Al Qaeda).

[Photo: Downing ...]]> Wow.

Alan Johnson is angry. He’s outraged. Like Jonathan Evans and some old geezer who studies MI5 and is therefore completely impartial (unlike five senior judges, whose ‘preposterous’ suggestion that the Security Service could be complicit in torture is baseless and wicked and gives succour to Al Qaeda).

[Photo: Downing Street under CC Attribution]

There is no ‘culture of suppression’ in MI5 (I thought keeping secrets was their job, but I was wrong). They rushed – against the wishes of the Americans, who despite releasing all this information in their own country were absolutely determined to keep it from ours – they rushed to assist Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers with evidence that he’d been subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. The fact that the goverment’s lawyer wrote to the court to ask them not to say any of these things has nothing to do with suppression, and everything to do with the judiciary’s insane crusade on behalf of the enemies of Great Britain.

Yes, it’s all about Them and not Us. We are good, and everything we do by definition is also good, because it is done in support of our goodness. So all this talk about ‘democratic accountability’ and ‘the rule of law’ is just so much hot air spouted by men in dresses who don’t understand the exigencies. Criticism of Us is mana from Heaven for Them, and don’t you forget it.

It’s also not about complicity in torture. MI5 does not condone, collude in, sponsor or solicit torture. No, indeed. The British Government (being good) would not allow it. The fact that the law does not seem to agree with Mr Johnson and Mr Evans’ perception is not relevant.

And what does the law say? Let’s ask the Joint Committee on Human Rights:

The UN Committee Against Torture, on the other hand, appears to have adopted a wider definition of complicity, which includes “tacit consent” and “acquiescence”, and includes constructive as well as actual knowledge that torture was taking place (i.e. it is enough if the party who is alleged to be complicit should have known that it was taking place). The UN Committee also appears less concerned with the requirement that the assistance must have had a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime of torture itself. So for example, the Committee Against Torture has made clear that the involvement of doctors is to be treated as a form of participation, even if only for the purpose of ensuring that the victim of torture does not die or suffer physical injuries during interrogation.

We know already that it was apparent that Binyam Mohamed was subject to mistreatment during his time in Pakistan. That of itself may constitute complicity, at least as far as I can see. It is apparent that he then disappeared from view when he was rendered to Morocco for really serious, full blown torture, and that our questioning of him continued while he was off the radar. It is not yet demonstrated whether we knew in what circumstances he was being held or that someone was cutting his penis and testicles with a scalpel. It would however be clear to a hedgehog that when the security services of another country disappear someone for interrogation (which is in itself of questionable legality) from a place where that person is deprived of sleep and mistreated, and they then refuse to give details of the conditions under which the subject is being interrogated, certain conclusions at least suggest themselves. Myself, I would not imagine that they’d been taken from Pakistan to a beach resort with nice cocktails. If it were the case – and again, to my untutored eye, every step along this road of discovery seems to take us closer to this conclusion – that we were aware of what was happening in Morocco, that would clearly and unequivocally be complicity in torture. Even if we didn’t know but really should have (or chose not to) that’s apparently enough.

But none of that is relevant because we are good, and Alan Johnson and Jonathan Evans are keen to remind us of that. It’s shameful to ask the question and irresponsible to demand an investigation. Only wimps and liars and terrorist sympathisers would ever do those things, and they’re un-British and should be ashamed.

Only Al Qaeda, thundered the academic bloke who studies MI5, only our enemies will draw any comfort from this.

No, sir. You are in error. There’s one other group, small though it may be, who might draw such comfort from all this being examined by our judges: men who have been tortured with razor blades while we pushed notes under the door.

This has been on my mind a bit recently, but I haven’t had time to say anything about it. This morning, there’s a piece in The Bookseller, and as I wander around the internet poking things and muttering, I find that Susan ...]]> Oxfam is making few friends with its bookshop chain…

This has been on my mind a bit recently, but I haven’t had time to say anything about it. This morning, there’s a piece in The Bookseller, and as I wander around the internet poking things and muttering, I find that Susan Hill has written in The Spectator, as well.

So… what to say?

Well, first thing: Oxfam is not good just because it’s Oxfam.

Oxfam is good because it does good stuff. It has a positive effect on the world, so we applaud it. If it’s also having a negative effect, that’s something to consider. Any number of big entities, of course, have a crappy effect on the world a long way away from the UK. Mentioning no names. If Oxfam is messing with the UK’s local economies in order to feed the 3rd world, that wouldn’t make it unique, just weirdly upside down. That does not make it okay, it just makes it bleakly amusing.

So, first thought: being Oxfam does not make you irreproachable.

In fact, being a powerful charity means you have to be, if anything, more careful about where you step when you work in a commercial arena in your own back yard, especially in a recession. Why? Because you get tax breaks and low business rates and donations (more than 80% of income from Oxfam’s shops is from donations). Oxfam, like other charities, is awarded significant advantages under the law so that it can do good. The tacit presumption, it seems to me, is that it will not deploy those advantages in a fully-fledged, corporate-style commercial enterprise in which it competes directly with local shops. I think those advantages are supposed to make it possible for a charity to function on a shoestring and send as much money as possible to the battlefront. I don’t think that when they were created anyone envisaged a charity which would iterate as an aggressive chain. That transformation is genius in fundraising terms, but it also potentially indicates a shift in identity from something which is about transforming donation into cash to something which seeks to maximise profit from donation.

I think it’s incumbent upon Oxfam to consider very carefully whether what they’re doing here is really a good thing. There is sometimes a narrowness of focus in the charitable sector. It’s a necessity – or at least a huge pluse – when you’re trying to argue for your cause above a lot of others looking for the same funding. It’s a vital component of reminding people that beyond their own problems there’s a world which needs their support. It’s also a potential disadvantage in some situations, where the notion of the good which one’s own organisation can do is allowed to eclipse the other goods in the world, and even the possibility that one may do damage along the way.

Second thought: when a charity operates in a corporate style, what does that mean?

Is there a middle ground?

I can’t see how any bookshop can readily compete with an entity which enters the arena with such significant advantages. I’m a big fan of indies and I think there are some opportunities which will become available to them over the next few years which are really interesting. However, those opportunities will equally be available to Oxfam and the chains. So, would Oxfam be prepared to work with the indies? Would they wholesale to local second hand shops? After all, they’d still make money on the transactions, because their operating costs are low and they’re getting a lot of books free. They just wouldn’t make as much. And that’s where this becomes a razor issue to me. If Oxfam really is operating in the way which Susan Hill describes – if they’re moving in and driving out the indies – that is unconscionable. It’s one thing to open a charity bookshop in a thriving area. It’s another to identify a town as a target because you can undercut a local bookseller and walk away with the catchment area. The former is perfectly good practice, the latter is corporate brigandage in the interest of the financial bottom line, and a charity doing it is not better than a corporation, but worse. Corporations, after all, are profit-making machines. Charities get their status because they are good-making machines.

Third thought: it is not clear to me – yet – exactly how bad the situation is. However, if the Oxfam Books chain is endangering local shops, that is not something they can in good conscience ignore. It is not enough to say, as David Mccullough did the other day, that supermarkets are more of a problem for booksellers than Oxfam is. That may well be true, but it’s like saying that rain isn’t something to worry about when the river’s flooded.  Rain may make the difference between life and death.

So here’s a hypothetical question for Oxfam: if the cost of raising the maximum amount of money for your work abroad is the demise of the small bookseller in the rural UK – and possibly more widely – is that a price you’re prepared to pay?

It’s a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. I know people, I suspect, who would say “yes” without hesitation. If Oxfam’s plan allows for this possibility and has factored it in and approved it, that’s something we should be told, because it has bearing on whether we want to shop at Oxfam Books. After all, there’s nothing to say we can’t give them money in other ways.

@SamAtRedmag asked me this morning whether I thought people should withhold donations of books from Oxfam. The answer is that I don’t know. I’m a fan of charity work and I believe that – despite tales of 4WD excesses and banquets in famine zones – Oxfam is a massive force for good. That said, I’m incredibly uncomfortable with this operation. It seems a mismatch of cultures – when Oxfam shops were little scruffy places on the corner with wonky candlesticks for a fiver, then of course they needed all the breaks they could get. When (if) those breaks have been deployed as part of a nationwide strategy to create a smooth selling machine whose side-effect is to jeopardise one of the few remaining hubs of local life and throw more fuel on the fire which is consuming small booksellers, then I have no intention of supporting that process.

There are a hundred other charities which do great work around the world. I can sell my old books by weight to a local indie who will then make enough to stay afloat on them, and send the money to Water Missions International or MSF – some of the alternatives spend a far lower percentage of income on administration, so the bookseller’s cut will not affect the amount aid I’ve given. In the end, as with any use of money, the thing you have to remember is that in our world, buying is voting.

A few more links:

Guardian 4.viii.09

Debatewise

Independent 7.viii.09

[Edit: @oxfamgb have been in touch to say that Oxfam spends 11p in the £1 on administration, which is pretty good. However, I've also seen an estimate of 30p from the Unofficial Oxfam FAQ. I have to say my instinct is to trust Oxfam's own estimate. Set against that, the situation with the indies is more dire than I had realised: in 2009, 40 indies opened their doors, and 102 closed for good (link). In other words, Oxfam may be leaner than I thought, but that doesn't make what they're doing better if it really is causing problems for local booksellers. So it may come down to what you think is more important. If so, it's a lousy choice to have to make, full of incommensurables and unpredictable variables.

Oh, one last thing: when @oxfamgb picked me up on my numbers, I took the opportunity to ask about this issue. So far: answer came there none.]

[Updated edit: Very exciting. I'm apparently about to be emailed by Oxfam's trading director on this topic. One thing I can say without hesitation: Oxfam is a hell of a lot easier to talk to than Google... And isn't that completely bizarre?]

News I Made Up

[Photo: FCO, under CC Attribution No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic]

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has denied complicity in the bankruptcy of Portsmouth Football Club.

“We had nothing to do with this,” Mr Miliband told reporters. “And if we did, which we didn’t, ...]]> News I Made Up

[Photo: FCO, under CC Attribution No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic]

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has denied complicity in the bankruptcy of Portsmouth Football Club.

“We had nothing to do with this,” Mr Miliband told reporters. “And if we did, which we didn’t, it’s covered under the new Official Sports Secrets Act of 2010. I can’t reveal anything about our complicity in the mistreatment of Portsmouth, because we have a special relationship with Southampton which we would not wish to jeopardise. There’s a standing agreement between the UK Government and Southampton not to release this kind of information in case we all go to prison.”

Asked why he made the announcement from an American Football stadium, Mr Miliband appeared confused.

“This has nothing to do with America,” he said. “It’s entirely inappopriate to suggest that America is involved in any way. This is entirely about our relationship with Southampton. Everything we did was entirely appropriate. Just because we were in the room, asking questions and assisting in every possible way, that doesn’t mean we were complicit. Only an idiot would call that sort of behaviour complicity in a legal sense.”

Mr Miliband is apparently still suffering from trouble with his hearing after a visit to hospital earlier today. A spokesman for Jonathan Evans of MI5 said that the Security Service did not comment on sporting issues.