I started my publishing career on the internet in 2003. The technology was primitive by today’s standards, but amazing for the times.

The new Amazon Kindle DX eReader, with 9.7in screen

My first venture involved a static website called The Dial. I created business “How-To” eBooks — by far the easiest to sell — in a desk-top publishing program and converted them to PDF. It was laborious getting the pages to format properly, but the result was satisfying and professional in appearance.

The files were uploaded to a specialized part of the website, from where they could be downloaded by customers paying between $5 and $9 per book. Only the American market was sophisticated and enterprising enough for the products in those days.

I didn’t make a fortune, but it opened my eyes to the attractions of the internet and especially “e” formats. The astonishing thing was, you could actually make money by selling nothing … well, electronic files to be exact. It was cheap, labour intensive at first, but once it was up, the cost factor was negligible. The future had arrived.

Now, mainstream published books are being sold as e-books readable on devices even more convenient than the print versions. Amazon’s Kindle, the market leader, will hold up to 1500 complete titles, obtainable from a free 3G mobile network. While current bestsellers can cost more than discounted print copies, out-of-copyright classics may be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg in attractive rich-text versions.

I had hoped to buy a Kindle over Christmas, but the big 9.7in screen model was unavailable in Britain. A 6in “global” version was purchasable from the American website. We are now hearing that the Kindle DX will be on sale here in a matter of weeks.

Meanwhile, many other models are appearing, from the Sony e-reader to Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which uses Google’s Android operating system. Everyone is piling into this market. It’s the “next big thing” in electronics, mainly because it offers a new platform for newspapers and magazines.

Right now, the market is full of potential but is not quite ready for the big time. A 6in screen is just too small for comfort, little different from the bigger mobile phones. An iPhone has a 3in screen, a BlackBerry Curve has a 2.5in, measured diagonally.

What a 6in screen looks like can be mocked up by folding an A4 sheet of paper in four, that is, folded twice. The A6 result has a 7in diagonal. Chop an inch off it and you’ll see what I mean. The new 10in e-readers (9.7 for the Kindle DX) can be compared in size to a large paperback book, perfect for carrying around — and reading. This technology is set to barnstorm next Christmas.

Imagine what can done with it. School books and lessons could be loaded into these devices via mobile networks and given to students. In the present weather conditions, children would be able to study at home, prompted by emails to their mobiles or even the device itself. Almost certainly, this is the future of education.

Any political party that says it can’t cut a chunk off the education budget, does not understand what this technology is set to do.

Newspapers and magazines also will be revolutionized by large-size e-readers. Currently, there’s hardly a print paper in the world that is not considering charging for content from their internet sites. There simply isn’t enough advertising revenue to go round online.

Rupert Murdoch has signalled that his fleet, which includes The Times (London) and the Wall Street Journal, will adopt a micropayment system (pay-per-article) later this year. The Times is already chopping up comment pieces into two or three pages, a move which increases the number of pageviews, allowing the site to charge more for its advertising space.

From the same stable, The Sun, has pulled its much-read Columnists link from the website, so if you want to read Trevor Kavanagh’s commentary pieces you must buy the paper, page-3 girls and all. Many people wouldn’t be seen dead with it under their arm.

The rival Spectator magazine has recently adopted a “six-ways-to-pay” system, with just a few taster articles given away free online. Everyone is doing it.

The answer, though, lies not in elaborate charging mechanisms, with stingy giveaways that enrage loyal readers, but in the new e-paper and e-ink technology. And imagine the scope for smaller publishers to produce high-quality e-ink magazines and journals, even taking on the big boys.

The more popular blogs could be produced as eMags on subscription, even some of the political commentary sites might benefit, perhaps with extra material not available online. It would be almost like real publishing again.

Syntagma’s prediction for 2010 is that e-readers will become the must-have item for the discerning consumer, and the 10in versions will be how, increasingly, we read newspapers and magazines. In the jargon, we will consume news and comment on electronic, book-sized, wafer-thin devices, paid for by subscription, with daily downloads via 3G mobile networks.

Already, some American papers and magazines are testing the waters. As with simple e-books back in 2003, they are way ahead of the game.

Newspapers will survive. But not as we know them now.

So, here’s a New Year toast to e-ink.

John Evans

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David Cameron is an unpredictable chap. Just when you think he’s shaping up to be a fine, transformative Prime Minister, he does something straight out of the Tony Blair Manual of Initiativitis.

Examples:
1. Asking prospective parliamentary candidate, Annunziata Rees-Mogg to change her name to Nancy Mogg to show she’s not a toff — even if she is. She refused, thankfully. Courting rebuffs with insulting requests is not good leadership. What on earth possessed him?

2. Having tarnished his famous cast-iron guarantee through a lack of candour about its sell-by date, it’s emerged that he turned down a most generous offer from UKIP which would have restored his honour on the Lisbon issue.

UKIP’s new leader, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, reveals he approached Lord Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, with an offer from Nigel Farage to disband UKIP if Cameron would hold a referendum on the issue come what may.

Of course, there would be no point in having a plebiscite on a ratified treaty, but using the moment to launch one on a Norway-Switzerland type arrangement for Britain would have yielded the result a large majority of the electorate wants.

Bringing it up fresh at a later date would only sever the connection between the promise and the policy, and hence put the EU collectariat on the front foot.

Recognizing that the new Prime Minister will have a Matterhorn of issues to deal with on day one, I have suggested The Syntagma Compromise (third outing):

Embed into the manifesto now an offer of a referendum three years into the next Parliament. It ticks all the boxes, gives the party a breathing space to prepare and allows it to sort out the financial and economic mess left by Labour.

3. I won’t even get started on the “green” aspects of modernizing Toryism. Christopher Booker has covered all the bases.

What David Cameron requires now is some real edge, not girlie initiatives. He also needs the appearance of a substantial backbone. Tony Blair is off the menu for the voters. Blairish attention-seeking and cheeky side-steps will only turn them away from the Conservatives at the next election.

Step up to the plate, David, or miss out on the feast that should be yours for the taking.

Last week in this column I wrote this: “Alistair Darling should do the decent thing and write an honest Budget Report based on Treasury and Bank of England advice. He should deny Gordon Brown any input … Darling would then be the only participant in this rear-end shambles of a government who could leave office with his head held high.”

In today’s Sunday Telegraph, Political Editor, Patrick Hennessy reports that Darling is going to do just that:

“[He] will use next week’s Pre-Budget Report to paint a grim picture of severe spending cutbacks during the next four years, setting up a pre-election clash with Gordon Brown.” Brown is opposing any talk of big cuts.

Now, I have no idea whether the Chancellor took his cue from Syntagma, although it is a possibility — I find quite a number of our ideas thread their way into the public domain days or weeks later. Take this case:

On November 14, I wrote the following column: Saturday Ramble: Poor information is destroying the quality of our lives:

“In the 21st century, the terrors haven’t gone away. They have re-emerged in the form of phantoms arising from surges of narrowly-based information, largely created by computer-generated mathematical models, … [such as] the fantasies of catastrophic man-made climate change. When even the Prince of Wales claims ‘we have 90 days to save the world’, you know that a new psychological contagion is upon us, and spreading fast.”

A week later, these fantasies are all over the press, thanks to bloggers like James Delingpole spilling the legumes on Climategate — the falsification of climate data.

See if you can spot the story in this column which will make news next week.

Vanity, all is vanity.

Annoyment of the week
A Gordon Brown freeish zone

Gavin Essler’s Newsnight interview with Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, was a red-mist moment for this diarist.

Referring to the Beeb’s “competition” (ha!), Thompson sneered at their “commercial self-interest”.

It’s the “self-interest” bit that pings me, commerce being generally held respectable. To attack everyone in the wealth-creating sector, which pays his fat package, as primarily self interested is not only wrong, it’s a hell of a cheek.

Let’s see, Thommo’s BBC “remuneration package” includes a salary of more than £800,000, plus various perks and generous expenses reimbursements, including a piffling parking ticket.

No self interest there, then?

PS: a few readers have said that their annoyment of the week is this annoyment snippet. Why? Because the word annoyment doesn’t exist!

It does now.

False data is again in the public eye with the sickening story of filthy wards and poor nursing at Basildon NHS Trust.

This is one of 11, and possibly many more, NHS hospitals that were recently inspected and pronounced “very good or excellent”. Clearly something catastrophic has gone wrong with the data-capture systems at these State institutions. It has also emerged that “cause of death” is rarely investigated, thus removing inconvenient information from the public domain.

This is a Labour party culture that has been obvious from Year One of its period in office. It has contaminated whole areas of public concern by skewing conclusions to the benefit of the government.

It is crude, nasty, and despicable. Alas this cult of truthlessness has infected most of the nation, like veins in a blue cheese.

A reprise on the BBC’s two current history series: Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain (Wednesdays, 9pm BBC2), and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The History of Christianity (Thursdays, 9pm BBC4).

I gave them a bit of a hard time after their first episodes. Andrew was a mad Dervish, as I remember, while the Prof was fixated by his hat. Not what you might call deep journalistic critiques.

However, I’ve come to enjoy both programmes in the meantime, despite their quirks. I’m told that the Prof’s hat is not a white trilby, as I reported, but a Panama of an indeterminate straw colour. How wrong can you be?

AM meanwhile is still mucking about like a schoolboy — last week he plunged into a mud-dark sea in the kind of bathing costume last seen on Edward VII. Not a pretty sight.

The episode on the Great War was the turning point for me. Brilliantly put together, with extraordinary footage of the trenches, it caught the mood of the time perfectly. And the presenter kept his jokes to a minimum. Since then, it’s gone from strength to strength.

As for the Christianity series, it has become a majestic tramp through the long history of the “universal” church and its fragmentation into a myriad pieces — Protestantism alone is said to have more than 20,000 denominations. Unmissable compared to the rest of the Beeb’s output.

There, I hope that resets the balance after my scrappy start. I’m not right all the time, you know.

Like many law-abiding citizens, I carry a compact digital camera with me wherever I go. If something catches my eye, like the Monet pattern in the river you can see by scrolling down this page, I whip it out and train 8-megapixels on the subject matter.

Alas, I’ve known for some time that photography is another innocent pastime now demonized by the ‘elf ‘n’ safety tyrants. And not just them. Ever since the Madeleine McCann case the public has become jumpy if they spot a camera anywhere near their children. You can’t blame them, of course, but it’s yet another example of the innocuous becoming tarnished by a small number of evil men — and increasingly, women — in our age of intolerance and total exposure.

Predictably, a BBC cameraman was questioned last week under Section 44 of the Anti-terrorism Act for taking photographs of a sunset close to St Paul’s cathedral.

On this morning’s Marr programme he explained what happened. It seems two police officers were obliged to approach him over the “incident” and judge whether or not he was a terrorist casing the joint, if you can do that with a sunset.

Sounds like sunset for our culture and liberties to me.

John Evans

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We are hearing too much nowadays about predictions of the end of the world on December 21, 2012 — well, we’ll get through the London Olympics alright. Hang in there, Boris.

The Mayan Prophesies have been around a long time. They can be traced back at least to the 6th century BC. This particular prediction is drawn from a combination of various Mesoamerican calendars which only go as far as … you’ve guessed it.

Now call me obtuse, but every calendar I’ve ever owned usually comes to an end on December 31 of the year it relates to. Do we all run to the hills immediately after Christmas?

And then there are the Mayans themselves. Although they were pretty snappy at maths and appeared to know very tricky things about very long numbers, they hadn’t invented the wheel and were totally deficient in technology.

They were also the most bloodthirsty race ever to inhabit the earth. On one occasion 80,000 people were ritually sacrificed by cutting out their living hearts and holding them up to the gods still beating. The ground ran with rivers of blood for days.

So why do the usual ninnies imagine these people would know what’s going to happen on December 21, 2012? For the same reason, I suspect, that the scaredy-cats among us imagine the world is going to boil over some time soon.

Even Sony corp has got in on the act. Promoting its film, 2012 (what an original title!), it has a website terrifying the life out of many folk of a febrile disposition, not least thousands of children, who are also prey to the rantings of the climate bogies.

This madhouse we call Planet Earth should be subjected to a strict control order from the Galactic Council.

On a related subject, it seems the world is not going to run out of oil and gas for many a long while yet. In the Daily Telegraph Business pages on Monday Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported on the rise of new oil shale technologies to produce previously unattainable natural gas.

“The world Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected,” he writes.

I remember a Canadian friend telling me years ago about the huge oil shale resources in that country. They are, he said, greater than the oil reserves in the Middle East. “Take that, Omar,” was his rather politically incorrect conclusion. I’ve not heard much about them, and other fields like them, since.

“This is almost unknown to the public,” writes A E-P, “despite the efforts of Nick Grealy at ‘No Hot Air’ who has been arguing for some time that Britain’s shale reserves could replace declining North Sea output.”

It’s no use depending on the present government, but shouldn’t the Conservatives make this a top priority before committing billions of our money to foreign technology and energy supplies?

I’ll bet the Mayans didn’t dream of that.

We should, I think, be in optimistic mood this autumn. Many things are going right for the world now, despite Sony’s Planet X waiting in the wings to destroy us all two years hence.

The one dark blob on the horizon is the Met Office. After its “barbecue summer” PR disaster, it remains unusually silent about the coming autumn and winter. I’m subscribed to its bulletins and warnings service, so would surely have heard by now if the boffins had put their heads above their Exeter parapet.

Other sources are less reserved. It seems that October has been unusually cold and snowy around the world. Eastern Europe and the Balkans are already snow spattered. It presages a similar winter to last year when North America suffered unbelievably cold weather throughout the season. Here in Britain it was not that bad, but chilly enough.

Whatever happened to global warming? And why are governments spending trillions of our money on ways of making us colder still?

Definitely another case for the Galactic Council.

Gordon Brown and his swivel-eyed team of policy wonkers and PR duffers, continue to talk about “fairness”.

Fair play is a typically British concept, one we have exported all over the world and which once imbued us with great moral authority.

Not any more. The present broken thunderbox of a government has let it die in half a generation. Brown’s use of anti-terrorist legislation to bully little Iceland when its banks failed was a monstrous abuse of power and hardly “fair”. The Icelanders will never forgive us for the humiliation.

Now the grumpy dinosaur of Downing Street is employing a kind of reverse psychology to win back some voters. Fairness is what Labour is about, he thundered at his party conference.

Let’s take him at his word. Mr Brown, do you think an electorate that was promised a vote on a foreign constitution should be given one as a matter of honour … and fairness?

I thought not.

Annoyment of the Week

A Gordon Brown-free zone

As a reader of history it pains me to say this. Historians are becoming very annoying.

Have you noticed whenever they pop up in the media — which is frequent — they talk about ancient times in the present tense?

Turn on Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4 on Thursday mornings and you will hear: “King Alfred is burning the cakes”, while “the Vikings have landed in the East.” It’s enough to frighten old ladies half to death.

Now metaphysically it is just possible to insist we all live in an “Eternal Now” where Alfred is indeed burning the cakes as we speak. Even those giant pygmies of our time, the particle physicists might agree, and some do.

It just gets a tad confusing though when a billion buses all come along at once.

Time may be a human construct but it wasn’t invented for nothing. More to the point, time and space go together, so unless we all want to be compressed into an infinitesimally small dot, we’d better hang onto it until we think of something better.

An example of how badly things can go wrong is called for: a small boy is preparing for school when he hears Melvyn on the radio: “Winston Churchill is Prime Minister. The war is raging across the Channel.”

In school a teacher asks, “Who knows who the Prime Minister is?”

A small boy puts up his hand: “Winston Churchill, Miss.”

I rest my case.

Some people have asked me why I’m publishing my own book: The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face?, instead of approaching a trade publisher.

The reason is that I’ve been in publishing for a long time and, just as I’ve always financed my own businesses rather than used banks or venture capital, I enjoy the freedom and lack of fuss of being in charge of the process. It’s not control freakery, just the opposite — the sense of space and freedom when I get up in the morning.

The book is now finished and being prepared for press. Imagine the long wait for the final result at a conventional publishing house. Think how ghastly the cover may turn out to be, and all those book promos at GMTV, Waterstones in every part of the country, and the sheer grind of having to explain what the hell it’s all about over and over again.

I rest my case for the last time this week.

John Evans

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Belief seems to be essential to all peoples, even if it comes in the form of unbelief. Modern religions, like secularism and scientism, are belief-systems too because their supporters believe in their own views, contrary to other people’s experience.

The problem we have in our scientific age is that our brains have become so big we mistake them for our minds.

The brain is a fantastic tool, like a hammer, a wheel or a knife. Since the European Enlightenment, we’ve been taught to identify with it completely. The result is that most developed humans are trapped in their own heads. Their worldview is limited by what the brain can do and what it perceives.

Thus everything perceptible beyond the brainview is dismissed as “myth”, fantasy and primitive. Richard Dawkins, riding on a reluctant Darwin, is the high priest of this message.

The alternative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, writes about “extended mind”, showing us the obvious fact that our minds extend well beyond our heads. It doesn’t take much introspection to arrive at that result.

We call explorers of our extended mind “mystics” — folk with their heads in the clouds. It’s a term of abuse to scientists. Yet mystics are scientists too, working in areas designated untouchable by the materialists.

Religion is man’s response to the mystical message — that which lies beyond the cage of our brainview. Religion, like philosophy, has followed science slavishly down its tubular path. It has become an artificial construct, dependent on a narrow slice of experience and much wishful thinking. A dramatist’s creation, not a God’s.

The mystic knows “God” as the sea of awareness that lies at the heart of everybody’s consciousness. We all rise and fall within it, and share its characteristics — even its immortality.

We can be made to believe anything, but only through direct experience can we “know” the truth.

Organized religions have caused more violence than almost any other aspect of human life. They are the economic and political exploitation of who we really are.

True mystics are always peaceable, because they “know”, not just “believe”.

Easter symbolizes the rebirth of life in the northern hemisphere. It’s not a subject to squabble over, but to “know”.

John Evans

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

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The UK Daily Telegraph’s economics editor, Edmund Conway, writes today about a whisper that an unnamed agency is set to cut Britain’s sovereign credit rating. Given the S&P reduction in Spain’s rating just days ago, it has the ring of truth.

In the event, it would put up the interest paid on “gilt-edged” government bonds, and filter through to almost every part of the economy.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling yesterday gave a blank cheque to the entire banking system. When you consider that Royal Bank of Scotland alone has liabilities of £1.8 trillion ($2.7 trillion), Will Hutton’s jibe that Britain is “Iceland on Thames” hits home hard.

But what is Gordon Brown’s current state of mind? He has a fragile ego at best and apparently needs to believe he leads the world, despite everything he has done in the UK over the past 12 years collapsing around him.

Psychologically this is the danger zone. Politicians often retreat into their bunkers at this point, surrounding themselves with smiling head nodders and sychophants.

He may not even be aware that one more mistake could plunge Britain into a hole that will last a generation. That error may already have been made in the form of Brown’s blank cheque to the banks.

Our Moneyizor site is asking the question, “Should Brown be placed on suicide watch?”

It is not an idle question in the circumstances.

John Evans

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