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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The Conservatives have just announced that companies like Google and Microsoft will, in all probability, provide the technologies behind their new scheme for replacing the abysmal NHS computer system — likely to cost as much as Trident.

[Aside] Stephen O’Brien put up a sturdy case on the Today programme this morning, much better than the hesitant Andrew Lansley yesterday. A pointer to the future? [/Aside]

The latest in the spate of Labour train wrecks in the large computer field is said to be costing up to £20 billion. Given the present government’s hopeless record on public debt, this is nothing less than scandalous.

I use Google’s cloud services for lots of online applications, including the wonderfully-reliable Gmail — Googlemail in the UK if you didn’t get in quickly enough. In 99.9pc of cases, they work like atomic clocks.

Would I prefer a Google/MS solution to the cavernously wasteful Labour alternative? You bet!

Would I prefer a Google system to one produced by fading Microsoft? On balance, yes. It’s easy to say, “I wouldn’t trust my information with Google”, but who would you trust it with? The alternatives are:

1. Paper files at the doctor’s surgery — which may be broken into regularly by drug addicts and dealers.

2. The failed NHS computer leviathan.

3. An unknown provider.

4. Microsoft — not yet fully “in the cloud” and struggling with its desktop applications.

5. Google — imperfect maybe, but by far the best out there.

If we are going to do this, let’s at least choose the best. It will also be vastly cheaper than Labour’s solution, even when we’ve written off Brown’s £20 billion.

John Evans

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This Saturday I’m impelled by an urge to write about something less gloomy than the world financial meltdown. So I’ve chosen:

The death of the database.

Bear with me, it’s not as dark as it sounds, and is much more interesting than it seems. In fact, if you’ve ever struggled with a database, like Microsoft’s Access, you may be forgiven for throwing your hat in the air.

First principles first. When we begin playing around with computers, we become aware there are two types of memory — the stuff that disappears when the computer is turned off, or during a power cut, this is Random Access Memory (RAM); and secondly, the hard drive onto which we save our work to preserve it when the computer is shut down.

We learn to be wary of RAM because most of us will have lost chunks of work when something goes wrong. We place much more faith in the hard drive, even though they can go pop too.

Hard drives are run by databases — a form of software that organizes data so that it can be retrieved from a number of different angles. Databases are the worker bees of almost every software application. They purr away in the background while we type — paging, fetching and carrying all manner of information at our bidding.

Syntagma is powered by WordPress software which operates dynamically, making constant calls to a serverside database to construct pages on the fly. It can be a slow process sometimes and is prone to error for the slightest of reasons.

So how is it that a Google search produces millions of results in a fraction of a second? We know they have all of the internet on millions of computers in various datacentres around the world. Could it possibly be done with a massive distributed database threaded over countless Dell boxes?

The answer, obviously, is no. But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast.

I must admit I was slightly dumbstruck when I heard that piece of information.

And that’s the shape of the future. Cloud computing, as it’s called, rather poetically, makes a local hard drive redundant. In future, if Google gets its way, we will work almost exclusively through our browsers, with applications in the “cloud”, that’s to say online in a form of super-RAM memory. Hence, the death of the database as we’ve known it.

The British Government is addicted to creating endless databases containing every fact about us. Most of them don’t work, and they leak information faster than the Colorado River leaks water. Ministers might like to consider cloud computing as a cheaper alternative.

Of course, it may seem a bit risky to entrust all your information to a single company holding it in the most fleeting form of remembrance possible, but that’s what the future looks like.

Imagine not having to keep offsite backup copies of everything on a second drive or memory stick. Think how cheap computers will become if they don’t need hard drives or massive operating systems, like Windows. Conjure up a world where everything can be done on a small box — any small box, anywhere in the world — and with the minimum of equipment and maintence. In fact, think smartphone, enlarged for more comfort and ease of use.

Clive Sinclair used to claim that you could run a nuclear power station on his little ZX80 computer back in the early 1980s. I always refused to believe that, but he may have been right. In the next decade we’ll be able to run the world from a BlackBerry.

Clouds and blackberries. William Wordsworth would feel very much at home in the 21st century.

John Evans

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I’ve been playing with Google’s shiny new browser, named Chrome, for a week or more. Initial impressions are excellent, despite the obvious fact that we’ve only got a small part of its capability at this stage.

Chrome has the same elegant, simple design that Google is famous for, and it’s much faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox. Indeed, it renders Syntagma sites better than Firefox does — one of the reasons I stopped using it a year ago. By contrast, Chrome delivers a seamlessly fluid performance over a range of functions.

Syntagma in Google’s Chrome browser

Like most Google products its browser comes with a broader philosophy, or masterplan, than the functionality suggests. While any browser will render internet objects for viewing and manipulation, Chrome is much more ambitious.

Ultimately it’s intended to replace many features of the operating systems on computers with what has become known as “cloud” computing — using applications and services already web-side, not embedded on a local hard drive.

Google says, “We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”

Significantly, Microsoft has huge vested interests in boxed software and desktop products in general, from which the bulk of its income derives. It’s finding it all but impossible to substitute browser versions of them and still make money. A clash with the new Google worldview — which aims to strip the Microsofties of their dominance — is about to break out in earnest.

Google believes Microsoft may fire its first broadband broadside by switching off adverts in IE8 sometime soon. Internet Explorer Version 8 is still in Alpha mode and is, reportedly, hopelessly mired in problems — shades of Windows Vista — but when it comes it could contain a bombshell for Google.

Since Google is still a monoculture based on search and its accompanying advertising, that would hit them where it hurts most. The share value of the company would drop overnight and the sense of invincibility that Google has enjoyed on Wall Street and everywhere else would be shattered, maybe for good.

Hence the company has got its retaliation in first by bringing out its own browser — which has been hinted at for years. It has also encouraged Mozilla, an open-source firm that produces Firefox (the geeks browser of choice), while promising a new cloud environment based on Chrome and its web-based apps: Google docs, spreadsheets and presentations, directly challenging Microsoft Office. And there are many other new experiences under development in Google’s locker.

A lot of us in web publishing still haven’t forgiven the Californian crew for their treatment of small-to-medium internet publishers last year, many of whom were driven out of business by crashes in PageRank. But Google’s sense of adventure and all-embracing strategic coherence means you can’t hate them for long.

Chrome should be on everyone’s computer, simply because much of what the Googlers are doing will only be viewable in their rapidly developing cloud browser.

Sooner than we think, businesses will be eliminating their expensive data centres and embracing cloud computing. Internet sage Bob Cringely of PBS believes that “relatively few organizations really ought to have their own data centers”.

Chrome is the future. It’s not fully with us yet, but will be in the next decade, which, astonishingly, is only a little more that a year away.

Syntagma never says “I told you so”. It’s an irritating phrase that adds nothing to a debate. It’s also a pyrrhic victory when the bad times roll.

We’re talking about the American economy, of course — now in recession, as we’ve been predicting for months — and the British and European financial positions, which are trailing some way behind the U.S., but about to implode too.

We’ve been on the case since last June when the ominous tag “credit crunch” started to be bandied about in response to falling American house prices.

As online publishers we are partially protected from the ravages faced by bricks and mortar operations. Even so, Google responded to the same data last year by dumping lots of small publishers using its AdWords/AdSense programs and its range of offshoot partnerships.

ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan believes that “the dip in Google’s paid clicks was intentional, part of a strategic plan designed to deliver better, more-precisely targeted ads” and tends “to reflect macroeconomic conditions” — an acknowledgment that suggests Google isn’t recession-proof.

The knock-on effects lowered the earning power of a whole raft of mid-sized publishers who operate below the glass ceiling of scalability needed to challenge the giant press barons of the print media.

Given the power of this pincer movement, how should internet marketers and publishers ride out the troubles ahead, which may even include another dotcom crash?

Here at Syntagma we are developing two new business models which don’t depend exclusively on Google rankings and big investment in assets. We have also moved to conserve cash, now the most sought after commodity in global financial markets. Forget equities, bonds and angel lending. Asset-backing is truly out of fashion. Only cash and gold will do during the next two to five years, or maybe even longer than that. Japan took more than a decade to haul itself out of its banking crisis and the profound deflation of the 1990s.

I really don’t see how mid-sized businesses, with heavy debt, and/or lots of equity in the hands of VCs, can get through this otherwise.

The Fed’s dramatic easing of monetary policy, which still has some way to go, is barely making an impact, although the usual lags apply. In the 1990s, Japan found that zero, even negative, interest rates could not persuade its reluctant public to splash out in the shops. Longer term rates in the U.S. are already close to zero.

Ben Bernanke is apparently studying the Japanese experience of zero rates right now. Surely a sign of what’s to come.

The game now appears to be out of the hands of the authorities whatever they decide to do. Bernanke deserves credit for at least trying. His next move will surely be to throw the kitchen sink at the problem and let the Devil take the hindmost. This is no time for musings on “moral hazard”, the hazard is not inflation but deflation and slump. Massive U.S. Government loans to individual defaulters can’t be ruled out and may be just around the corner.

Compare that to the lethargic approach of the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. Still holding rates at 5.25 percent and 4 percent respectively, although the BoE has little room to manoeuvre thanks to Gordon Brown’s obsession with public-sector spending.

The first casualties could be some major institutions in America and monetary union in Europe, where the euro currency is looking very vulnerable. At least Brown got that right.

Syntagma predicts we are going to be amazed by developments in the not too distant future. The world may look a very different place when we come out of this, and it won’t necessarily be all bad news. Bubbles have to burst. Nature demands it. And the end of the eurozone would be a big plus for European freedom.

Nearly a year ago I wrote a post called These are the good times. They were and still are, uncomfortable though the ride may be.