Interesting, inevitable: buy the content and get the e-reader for free

I spotted this little nugget yesterday:

Barnes & Noble said Monday that it will offer discounts on its Nook devices to customers who buy a digital subscription to People magazine and The New York Times.

For New York Times subscribers, it’ll offer a free Nook Simple Touch, a 6-inch e-reader that is priced at $99, or take $100 off on Nook Color, normally priced at $199.

It won’t be the last time an e-reader comes bundled with a digital subscription, especially as the devices are getting cheaper and cheaper. Tablets will inevitably follow – the Nook Color mentioned above is similar to the Kindle Fire tablet. I’m surprised Amazon isn’t giving free devices to its Amazon Prime members already.

The business model already exists: if you subscribe to cable or satellite TV, you essentially get the hardware for free; many mobile phones are free on contract, and so on. It isn’t hard to imagine somebody such as News International giving away a “free” Kindle Fire if you subscribe to the full-fat version of its digital service.

I’m making my books Kindle-only

At the risk of helping to perpetuate Amazon’s vice-like grip on electronic publishing, I’ve decided to enrol my books in its KDP Select programme. There are various upsides to that, but it does mean that the books must be exclusive to Amazon.

I don’t think I’m going to upset too many people – of the 2,100 copies of Coffin Dodgers I’ve sold so far, about 2,000 of them have been via Amazon – but if you really want to read Coffin Dodgers or Bring Me The Head of Mark Zuckerberg and don’t have a Kindle device or one of the many Kindle apps, then drop me an email and I’ll send you the book(s) in the right format for your device.

I’ll blog more about KDP Select and my ongoing e-publishing adventures soon.

David Cameron is the SNP’s best weapon

Kevin McKenna, in today’s Observer:

Last week, Alex Salmond chose to voice what everyone else in Scotland knows instinctively: that David Cameron is the best weapon the pro-independence movement possesses. He could have gone further. For in any photograph where Cameron is joined by George Osborne and their Downing Street fag, Nick Clegg, the SNP tally men can notch up another, say, 5,000 votes in favour of separation. Indeed, faced with such a photograph of smug, ill-earned indolence and privilege, most of us would gladly take refuge in a political and cultural union with Uzbekistan.

Illegal downloading and Adele

Simon at No Rock’n'Roll Fun has written a typically excellent piece about the BPI’s latest sales figures.

Despite all this “chronic” piracy going on, Adele’s album has sold more copies in a year than any album has ever sold. More than a Michael Jackson album managed in a year, even the good one. More than a Beatles album ever managed to whisk out the shops in twelve months. More, even, than the third Charlatans album sold in a year.

So, how come Adele’s album was not only immune to the chronic piracy, but thrived in a world so stricken? Had there been secret umlauts sewn into the hemlines of the choruses, rendering it impossible to torrent?

Were any of the many pirate-busting measures deployed? Did the pre-release circulate solely on a tape glued into a Walkman? Was every copy watermarked? Did a fleet of fake files get launched onto the internet to foil downloaders? Did Derren Brown hypnotise the world so that if they typed ‘Adele 21 free’ into Google they’d die?

Nope. The success of Adele’s album seems to be nothing to do with avoiding piracy, and more to do with sticking out an album that people liked and wanted to buy.

Worth remembering the next time you see the entertainment industry demanding new laws and filtering to fight the menace of piracy.ikoni

Odds and sods

Blimey. Is it 2012 already? A few odds and sods:

* I didn’t get as much reading done over the holiday period as I’d planned, but I still managed to devour Ray Banks’ Dead Money, RJ Ellory’s Bad Signs and Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman. They’re ace, gory and hilarious respectively.

* One of my favourite bands, The 4 of Us, did a really nice thing over Christmas: they packaged up their long-lost album Amplifier, remastered it and gave it away free to fans on their website and Facebook.

* I sold several ebooks over the last few weeks. I racked up my 1,900th sale of Coffin Dodgers this afternoon.

* Amazon UK’s meddling with VAT, if you’re interested in such things: it now applies 3% VAT to ebooks sold in the EU, not the 15-odd-percent it applied previously. When you’re selling books at 99p apiece, that’s a welcome development.

* It’s overkill for musical fiddling, but I remain utterly convinced that Apple’s Logic Pro music software is one of the best things since sliced bread. I’ve no idea how half of it works, but the half I do know is superb.

* The recipe for Bristol Dressed Pork in Jamie’s Great Britain is superb. And I don’t even like pork.

* I am heartily sick of “You’ve got an iPad! Buy our app!” ads appearing over websites I’m trying to read.

* Also, Facebook intercepting newspaper links and trying to make me install the newspaper’s app.

* Private Eye: The First 50 Years is a great coffee table book. Provided you’re interested in Private Eye, that is.

* And, er, that’s it.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope that Santa’s kind, that your relatives aren’t too annoying and that you have a very happy 2012.

1,500 ebook sales

I sold my 1,500th ebook today – it wasn’t the 1,500th copy of Coffin Dodgers (that’ll happen later tonight), but I’m delighted all the same.

I made another ebook – non-fiction, this time

I know what you’re thinking. “Man, if only Gary did more blog posts in which he tried to flog his bloody ebooks!” Well, have I got a happy surprise for you!

Bring Me The Head of Mark Zuckerberg is a new ebook by yours truly, and it’s available right now from – yes! – Amazon UK and Amazon US. This one’s non-fiction: it’s a collection of various tech pieces I’ve written in recent years, some of which are funny and some of which aren’t. Hopefully we’ll all agree on which ones are which.

Ready for some blurb? Let’s go!

Things move fast in technology. In 1998 Google was still in a garage, Microsoft ruled the world and the internet was made of wood. iPods, YouTube and Facebook were years away. Phones were rubbish, getting online cost a fortune and Gary Marshall tried to convince the readers of .net magazine that the Hitler Diaries had been written by a small dog. 

Luckily for him, the dog didn’t sue. 

Gary Marshall has been writing about technology like a pixelated PJ O’Rourke since 1998. In this collection of tech journalism from titles including .net, PC Plus, Techradar.com and Official Windows Magazine Gary picks through the PR nonsense, inflated claims and the reality distortion fields of the tech industry to concentrate on the big issues – issues such as, “does Google’s Eric Schmidt really own a coat made of human skin?”, “just how evil does Facebook need to become before people stop using it?” and “why are we being chased around the internet by adverts for horrible shirts?”

As ever, comments, Amazon reviews and offers of six-figure book deals would be very much appreciated.

A brief review of the stupidly expensive SuperDarts headphones from Atomic Floyd

Part 1: Thoughts on listening to music with Atomic Floyd’s SuperDarts 

Shit, I’ve just wasted the best part of £200 in Amazon vouchers. They sound okay, but you don’t spend that much money for something to be okay.

Part 2: Thoughts on listening to music with Atomic Floyd’s SuperDarts after turning the volume right up

HOLY FUCK!

Yes, they’re stupidly expensive, but the sound is really quite extraordinary. They were recommended by my Techradar colleague James Rivington, who reviewed them here. I think he quite liked them.

Tabloid-fuelled Twitter hate

The parents of missing child Madeleine McCann appeared at the Levenson inquiry into newspapers’ bad behaviour yesterday, and Twitter proved beyond doubt that it’s the original story, not the retraction, that many people remember. As the McCanns described some extraordinarily evil behaviour by newspapers and their hired help, all kinds of apparently respectable people posted all kinds of appalling allegations on Twitter. Where did they get such ideas? The Guardian’s Esther Addley knows:

Kate and Gerry McCann… do not appear to be afraid of the press. What, after all, is it going to do to them? Accuse them of killing their three-year-old daughter Madeleine and transporting her corpse in their hire car? They’ve done that already, many times over. Report that they were undergoing IVF to get a “new” child to “replace” Madeleine? Done that too.

Suggest they were taking part in orgies and swingers’ parties? That they had kept Madeleine’s body in their freezer after murdering her? That they had sold their daughter into slavery to pay off family debts? They’ve seen it all before. Each one of those allegations appeared in a British newspaper in the months after this ordinary couple from rural Leicestershire became the victims of the most terrible crime any parent can imagine, the kidnap of their child.

I’m no fan of media regulation, but you can’t read that and think “yes! Self-regulation and the Press Complaints Council really does work!”