Random Acts of Reality

I really like I.T - Information Technology, after all I've been using it since I was around eight years old. However, in those thirty years of using computers I'm also fully aware of some of the problems that I.T can make manifest.

Especially when you bring in the cheapest contractors, don't supervise them properly, don't consult properly with the people to be using the system and then start cutting budgets halfway through the project.

*cough* NHS *cough*

I mean, if you can't get contractors who are skilled enough to stick linoleum to the floor, how can you trust your commissioning people to find someone good enough to do invisible and arcane things with computers.

Therefore you end up doing daft things like sending letters with confidential information to the wrong people - as, despite what the 'Connecting for Health' person says, without serious thinking I can imagine two ways of a member of the public getting confidential and potentially damaging information because of these letters.

(And notice how the CoH speaks as faceless unit - the spokesperson doesn't have a name in that article)

Actually this is perhaps why we stick with outdated software - official web browser of the NHS? Internet Explorer 6.

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But I'm no Luddite - when a system works well, it works well.

Take my mum - she's currently under the care of a consultant and the consultant is juggling her medication for her. Slowly increasing the medication while looking for improvement or side effects.

Does my mum need an appointment to do this? No. The Consultant has an email address that we can send updates to, and the Consultant can suggest dose changes.

It works really well.

The problem only occurred when my mum went to the GP surgery (that has been there for some years) in order to get a refill of the prescription.

My phone rang that morning...

'Hello, it's the GP surgery, you mum has come in asking for more pills but we have no record of this - but she has told us about the emails from the consultant - can you fax the email to us please'.

Well, I haven't owned a fax machine for quite some time.

'Could I not forward the email to you? I have it on the machine I'm sitting in front of right now'.

'Sorry, no - our email isn't working yet'.

So I had to print it out and drive down to my mum's place (only five minutes and I did get a cup of tea for my trouble) with a printed out email in my hand. All because their email wasn't working yet.

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So, you can see how it works - someone embracing technology as an option (I know that email isn't hugely secure, but the important thing is that we had a choice about whether to use it or not), while another part of the NHS can't get it's email working.

Situation normal then - the luck of the draw.

As I am a complete nerd, I have email alerts set up for various topics spoken about in government. Often I don't have the chance to read them but, being stuck alone on station last night, I had the time and the good luck to read on such discussion.

This was a discussion about encouraging people to 'self care' their minor ailments. There was no mention of ambulances, the discussion centred mostly on the role that Pharmacists, GPs and Practice Nurses have to play. After all the government has no idea what us ambulance people do - I'm sure they think we only go to car crashes, heart attacks and the sort of thing you see on 'Casualty'*.

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Never mind, although I do have one comment to make on the discussion.

'It is worth listing the minor ailments that I mean. They are generally part of everyday life and include backaches, coughs and colds, headaches, toothache, indigestion, skin problems, allergies and some respiratory problems.'

Hold on! I've been to every single one of those minor complaints, normally as a 'Cat A', high speed response. Around 80% of calls to us via 999 are for these very things.

The discussion continues,

'In many cases people manage these minor ailments already through self-care using an over-the-counter, or OTC, product, but research conducted by the Proprietary Association of Great Britain indicates there is often a significant level of dependency on the doctor.'

By doctor they also mean 'Call 999 because they don't want to wait for a GP appointment, then moan when they reach A&E and have to wait for longer than five minutes'.

'But it's serious' they look up at me and whine when the nurse, quite rightly, puts the poor helpless little flower out in the waiting room while trying to deal with the people in majors who are genuinely sick.

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Needless to say, reading this gave me a good laugh...

You can read the whole thing here.

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*'Trauma' is being shown on British TV at the moment and the first episode was last night - I'm yet to watch it, but from the reaction of my American colleagues it should be entertainingly awful...

(Slept too late - so no time to blog for both Paper Not Included and here - so here is what I've written over there)

Publishers are missing the two important things that they should have for every ebook release.

Ease of access and wide access.

Ease of Access
Why do I use iTunes to download my music instead of torrent sites? Why do I pay for albums instead of typing "band name + torrent" into Google?

First - because it is wrong and illegal, but secondly and perhaps, for many people, more importantly it's because iTunes is easy. I can buy an album with one click - I don't have to worry about it being in an odd format that my iPod won't play, I don't have to worry about it being a fake file or it being a low resolution thing that sounds bad.

*Click* = *bought*.

I don't have to type in my credit card details whenever I buy something, I don't have to log in with a password - I boot up the software, press a button or two and suddenly the file is downloaded and synced to all my devices.

It's this ease of use that makes Amazon so attractive to use - Find the book, press the 'buy it now' button and it uses your stored credit card to purchase the file and then send it down to all your 'Kindle' devices (be that Kindle, PC or iPhone - still waiting on that Mac option folks...).

In contrast look at Waterstones site - I have to type in my account details to log on to the site, then find the book using the frankly awful search engine (want to look for ebooks? well you need to do an 'advanced' search, and then we'll still return paperback and hardback results), then add it to your basket, then view your basket, then checkout, then type in your credit card details (plus expiry date, and security code). Then, and only then, are you able to download the books you want.

It's actually simpler to google for a torrent.

(I won't go into the problems of DRM, as that's a whole other discussion).

So, if you are a non-Kindle user, you are stuck using an awful website.

Wide Access
What is the other reason for going to the torrent sites? Regionalisation.

All my friends are blogging about a great book that's been released in America, they all love it and the subject matter is right up my alley.

I go to buy it and, lo and behold, 'this book is only available in the US'.

Now, I could wait, in the hope that they will eventually release it in the UK, and hopefully I won't have forgotten all about it in the year that this takes to happen. When I do forget about it maybe the publisher will pay all over again for the marketing that will raise it's profile on my radar.

Or I could physically import the dead tree edition from America, pay excessive shipping, import taxes and hope that when it is delivered it's not been dropped into the moat at Kellett mansion.

What is more realistic, and simpler option, is to search for a torrent of the file download it and hope that it is either a decent scan, or the ebook with the DRM stripped out. Then should the book ever be released over here - buy the actual legal copy in order to reward the author and publisher.

And that's if I (a) remember, and (b) am honest.

Are you starting to see why regionalisation of books is a really bad idea. It is pretty much always possible for me to get your book via torrent, and no draconian Digital Economy Bill will stop the committed pirate, especially when 'committed' means 'able to click a button or two'.

A Proposed Solution
As I have mentioned in the past, the real game-changer about Apples iPad is the iBookstore (or however it is capitalised) - a simple and easy way to download books, with a decent economic model for the publishers and simple syncing with a device.

Sadly it seems obvious that Apple will restrict their books to iPad DRM format - thus leaving the Sony Reader, and countless other devices, out in the cold. You won't be able to read your iPad books on anything other than an iPad.

This is my suggestion - and it's for all the publishers in the UK, if not the world.

Beat iTunes.

Get together, and get together quickly before the iPad gains too much traction - form a jointly owned company, association, or whatever. Create a piece of software that is cross platform, both on the user's end (PC/Mac/Linux/iPhone/Blackberry/maybe even Xbox and the like), and on the formats that it supports (iPad, Kindle, PDF, EPUB, Mobi, Plaintext).

Make it amazingly simple and easy to buy a book - 'reduce the friction' as I believe they call it in the business lingo world. Make it so easy to buy a book that an impulse buyer, like me, can easily slap down my money and have the book sent to me within seconds without having to type in my credit card details for the umpteenth time.

Do away with regionalisation with ebooks. If you are spending some of your marketing budget on internet awareness (and if not, why not? Internet users read almost by definition), then why are you saying that you don't want the money from people in America, in Europe, in the Southern hemisphere?

Sure - you won't make the money on selling the regional rights to a publisher in country X, but won't you make up that money by expanding the market and from word of mouth marketing (and remember, those world royalties are going straight to you, not via someone else who takes a cut - disintermediation). Plus ebooks can be 'in print' forever - check out that long, long tail.

I'd also say do away with DRM, but that's a discussion for another day.

If you create an iTunes for ebooks - then you control how your books are sold, not Apple, not Amazon, but the publisher. Split the cut however you like, fiddle around with minimum and maximum prices to reach the ideal selling point, suck money directly from my credit card as I always have the purchasing client to hand and clicking on one button gets me my book.

Is it really that difficult to build a bit of software that is,

Simple enough for my mum to use.Good, effective search.Frictionless purchasing and downloading.Multiformat.Multiclient.A large and persistent library.Without pointless barriers due to geography.

If publishers do this I can guarantee that the percentage of ebook readers that resort to torrents will drop. They won't go away (because for some people free is all they can afford), but it would stop people like me from wondering if breaking the law on this one occasion is maybe worth it.

Hell, make it simple enough and more people will download ebooks - and with a per-unit-purchase price of pretty much zero, that's all profit.

And if publishers don't want to work together then at the very least Waterstones need to start from the ground up and completely revamp their web experience - perhaps starting with a cross platform piece of software that will act like iTunes...