Judging an e-Book by its cover

Here in the UK, there has only been the faintest ripple of interest in Kindle, the wireless reading device which, endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, is making a big splash across the Pond.  Effectively an iPod for books, Kindle allows you to download books via Amazon and access them much like the iPod access music via iTunes.  Kindle, with its smooth white rectangular shape, even channels the spirit of Apple’s creation.  The Kindle application can also be added to your iPhone so that your iPhone effectively becomes an e-reader.

La Nouvelle Année and a few of my Favourite Things

So this is the New Year/And I don’t feel any different/The clanking of crystal/Explosions off in the distance

So everybody put your best suit or dress on/Let’s make believe that we are wealthy for just this once/Lighting firecrackers off on the front lawn/As thirty dialogues bleed into one

I wish the world was flat like the old days/Then I could travel just by folding a map/No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways/There’d be no distance that could hold us back

- death cab for cutie

The lyrics of emo/indie fencesitters and Seth Cohen pin-ups Death Cab for Cutie seem apt as 2008 and its events (natural, political, financial - it all seemed particularly calamitous) segues quietly into 2009.

When I Grow Up

As the year lazily plots it course, the reappearance of another birthday on the horizon inspired a period of quiet introspection; stock was taken of last year’s events and what I had learnt, and there was much contemplation of what the new year may bring. With this reflective mindset and the annual ’sloughing off of the old self’ fast approaching, off I trotted to Digitise or Die: What is the Future of the Book?, a discussion between Margaret Atwood, Andrew O’Hagan, Erica Wagner, the literary editor at the Times and Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber at Southbank on a topic close to my heart.