Hardraw Force

It’s been a bit quiet around here of late. Things have been busy, but most importantly we had a week away. Volkswagen lent us a car from its press pool and we took it to Yorkshire with the rest of the family to buzz around the Dales, drinking tea and eating scones in the little hillside villages (below) in between treks up muddy paths to take photos of the waterfalls (above).

We’ve been watching All Creatures Great and Small, so naturally we hunted out the spots that had featured in the show - tiny little Langthwaite, for example, where Seigfried and James could be seen driving over the humpy bridge in the show’s opening credits, and to Askrigg, which was the setting for the surgery at the fictional Skeldale House, and then to Bolton Castle where James - in the series, not real life - proposed to Helen, and she said yes. One day we drove out of the Dales to the real surgery in Thirsk and visited the World of James Herriot, which turned out to be an excellent little hands-on museum, and where we discovered that he wasn’t really called James Herriot at all, but Alf Wight (he wasn’t allowed to use his real name as it would have counted as advertising).

One day we visited the Black Sheep Brewery and came out smelling of hops and yeast from the vats of beer that put our own brewing efforts to shame.

And eventually, of course, we had to come home and back to day to day life. The cat was very glad to see us.

And day to day life is quite full right now, which is the real reason why the blogging has been so quiet. The proofs of the book, which comes out in either September or November, depending on who you listen to, have just come back from the publisher and so needed reading and correcting while we were away. I’m working my way through those connections now, ready to send back at the end of the week. It’s already sold over 1000 copies in the US on pre-orders, and looking Amazon’s UK listings it’s apparently the 61st best-selling digital photography guide.

The second edition of the Independent Guide to the iPhone has just been published, after several weeks of re-writing and editing. And we’ve all just finished working on the Independent Guide to the Mac.

So it’s been a busy time, which means blogging has taken a bit of a back seat, both here and over at Blagger.

Hopefully, as things settle down, that should all change. Typing fingers crossed.

Low Row

Nobody knows much, if anything at all about Shakespeare: that’s the premise Bryson sets out to prove in this slim, amusing volume. The fact that it runs to fewer than 200 pages is testament to the playwright’s relative anonymity, despite the global recognition of his work.

So it seems a little disingenuous for the back-cover to describe this book as a ‘biography’. Sure, it tells us a little about who the man was, but at the same time it tells us far more about who he was not.

That is perhaps its genius.

We don’t know what he looked like - not for sure. The popular image we have of a pasty white scribe who should have seen the sun more often is based on one of three existing paintings, none of which we can be sure are really of the man himself.

Of the six signatures in existence he supposedly penned himself, none is the same as any other and at least three could easily be fakes. Shakespeare rarely ever spelled his name the same from one signing to the next and so to a modern-day investigator he remains an enigma. The temptation must clearly be to invent appealing facts through either frustration or an attempt to produce some meaty content that would bolster sales.

Bryson, to his credit, steers well clear. As well he might. His name, alone, would guarantee sales - and so he is free instead to dissect the work of others, exposing their lies, half-truths and cod theories, and showing how quickly they collapse under the lightest scrutiny. This, it must be said, makes for a riveting read.

Perhaps it’s a case of schaudenfreud: we all like to see stuffed shirts brought down a peg or two, or to stand by the fringe of a fight - even a literary one of this type.

So ultimately Bryson comes out on top, as you would expect, and we turn the last page having learned comparatively little beyond one simple lesson: that you shouldn’t believe half of what you read about Shakespeare. Much of it is more even fanciful than some of his plays.

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The BBC has bought Lonely Planet. Not just a single guidebook to help research a coming series, but the whole lot. Books, websites, TV shows and all, though its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. Reuters reckons it cost about £100m, which roughly roughly equates its profits last year.

It’s a logical fit, and great news for all involved. Both organisations pride themselves on their independence, and each has a great track record in producing the best in travel content (Palin and co from the BBC, and the only guides I ever trust from LP). It gives the BBC a hefty size-ten in the door of a market it has yet to exploit. For Lonely Planet it guarantees a future free from the advances of less appropriate suitors, and sees this multi-language publisher team up with an even more linguistically talented all-media champion.

The one who will benefit the most, though, is surely the end user. Both organisations have back catalogues second to none, and reputations to match, yet of greatest interest is their complimentary, non-competing activities. The BBC’s news gathering activities could (and should) revolutionise travel writing, bringing these guides the kind of geopolitical relevance to which they have always aspired, but somehow never quite attained. Lonely Planet’s enviable knowledge of local culture, meanwhile, will enrich the BBC’s online sites, broadening the appeal of its news content by placing stories within a context that simply can’t be conveyed within a 200-word report.

The challenge will be in deciding the extent to which the two content streams should be merged, if at all. BBC Worldwide is, after all, a commercial entity charged with making a profit. It can’t do by simply giving away Lonely Planet content. It is also quite distinct from the BBC’s domestic news and broadcast services, which are funded by the license payer, or the BBC World Service, which is funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

It’s early days, of course, and getting the two companies to work hand in hand, if that is indeed the plan, will take some time. It would be a missed opportunity if this was a purely financial transaction, but as a Brit who has grown up with the noble aims of the non-profit BBC it’s sometimes difficult to remember that BBC Worldwide is a semi-distinct entity with very different goals.

As such, the usual rules don’t always apply. More’s the pity.

What a shame. As a 10-year publishing phenomenon reaches its climax it’s been turned into nothing more than a supermarket price war.

This morning, or just after midnight last night to be accurate, the final volume in the seven-book Harry Potter saga went on sale, and his journey came to what Rowling called a pretty clear conclusion.

But the real story for media watchers is how the closing of the series has robbed publisher Bloomsbury of the clout it once had with the retail outlets. Throughout the life of the series it has been able to dictate on-sale dates and apply strict embargoes to which the publishers would stick. They did it ostensibly for the good of the reading public and avoid spoiling kids’ enjoyments of the fairly predictable surprises, but we all know that the real reason they’ve complied is that they’ve been terrified they might be robbed of the chance to sell the next instalment.

Well now there is no ‘next instalment’, and while nobody has broken the embargo - on this side of the Atlantic, at least - they are playing dirty on the price, using the book as a loss-leader to drag customers into their stores.

Bloomsbury sells it wholesale at a little over £9, and stamps a retail price of £17.99 onto the cover. Amazon significantly undercut this, and independent retailers wailed about not being able to compete, quite rightly.

But if they’re the Potters of our story, then Voldemort must be Asda, which is set to take a massive loss by punting the novels at £5 a pop. Naturally its online store has already ’sold out’, which is rather convenient as it means we’ll have to venture in-store to snap up the deals. And while we’re there impulse buy a ready-cooked chicken, a pasty and a bag of frozen chips to make up for Asda’s the loss.

You could almost say they planned it that way.

So it’s Asda, once the consumer’s champion that bought from local suppliers and sold at affordable prices, not Amazon, that turns out to be the nemesis of the independent bookshop. The purveyor of cut-price brands looks set to cut deep into the profits of an already under-pressure sector of the high street, and could do significant damage to our future ability to walk into a store where the staff understand and love books, and know how to order a rare or out-of-print novel.

With this in mind I went down to Waterstones in Piccadilly to show the assembled queues some support, but I needn’t have bothered. They were queuing around the block, and the place was mobbed with foreign TV queues reporting on ‘ze krayzee Breetesh’ who wait out in the torrential rain to buy a book they could have got cheaper online.

The irony is, the majority of the voices in the queue didn’t sound British at all, implying a fair few Europeans have actually taken time of work and bought tickets to come and stand in line along a busy London street.

Jane Austen would have trouble finding a publisher today, says Reuters, completely missing the fact that, actually, she has plenty of publishers, as her books have probably never been more easily available than they are today.

But you can see their logic. Struggling writer David Lassman sent copies of several Austen chapters to 18 different publishers, changing nothing but the book titles and character names. 17 of them rejected it out of hand. The 18th told him to try writing less like Jane Austen.

You can read what you want into the first 17 rejections, but they prove nothing beyond the fact that Austen just isn’t what publishers want these days. I’d guess that at least half of the rejections were on that basis alone, and the other half were probably thrown on the slush pile because the guardians of our nation’s literary output recognised them for what they were: poorly-disguised plagiarism.

18 out of 18 rejections, 17 of them out of hand, proves that our nation’s publishers are serving their employers - and us, the reading public - well. There was a time and a place for Austen. Roughly from the day she was born to the day she died.

Yet her body of written work lives on, as it teaches us as much about the social mores of the times during which it was written as it does about the kind of people who used to read it. But expecting a modern-day publisher to pick up and run with with Emma or Northanger Abbey is naive at the least, and could well show why Lassman’s own book remains unpublished.