Before I begin, let me just get one thing clear: electronic books are not a new idea. They have been around since 1971, way back in the era of vinyl records, the Vietnam War, and flared trousers. That was the year Michael Hart typed up the Declaration of Independence and made it available to users of the Sigma V mainframe computer at Xerox’s Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. The Declaration was the first ebook in what became known as Project Gutenberg, an online depository of 30,000 or more public domain ebooks typed and proofread by users and offered up free in a variety of formats. So ebooks have been around for a long time, but it is only at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century that large numbers of readers have begun to take them up.

Up to now two things have been standing in the way. It’s not only that reading devices had to become good enough and cheap enough to replace ‘dead tree’ books, but people had to be comfortable with carrying electronic gadgets around: we had to change too. Now though e-readers are good enough to replace paper books, at least in some situations, and the mobile phone long since cleared up the problem of gadget carrying for most people. The era of the ebook is upon us and since art and technology go together like beer and crisps it could prove to be an epoch-changing moment in literary history.

Currently ebook reading devices fall into three broad categories: dedicated devices such as the Kindle, Sony Reader, and Nook, whose primary purpose is reading; then the smart phones, running software such as Stanza, which organises ebooks, storing and presenting text in a format suited to the small screen; and finally the ‘Tablet’ category, represented by Apple’s iPad and a raft of similar devices from other less glamorous manufacturers.

Dedicated ebook readers, exemplified by the Kindle, and the Sony Reader, all have one thing in common: their screen. These devices seek as far as possible to replicate the experience of reading a real paper book and do so using a technology known as e-ink. Unlike a computer screen, which is backlit and projects light out at you with an intensity that can give you eyestrain, e-ink technology provides a screen that is ‘reflective’. Just like paper you need to shine light on it in order to see it. The quality of the screens varies between devices, but in decent light all give a fairly good approximation of a printed page. They allow you to place multiple bookmarks, to make short notes, and, in the case of the Kindle, to synchronize the device with ‘Kindle’ software on other devices automatically, so whatever you happen to have with you—Kindle, computer, or phone—you always open the ebook on the same page as you left it.

I can’t help feeling though that these limited devices, easy on the eyes as they are, will probably turn out to be a dead end or at best a niche. Page turning is often slow, colour is possible but still quite expensive, and there remains the problem of buying another device to have with you which does only one thing. They do have great battery life, but how often do you find yourself weeks away from the nearest power outlet? And if that happened a lot, would you buy one of these things, or a paperback copy of Moby Dick?

All the dedicated ebook readers really have to offer over the old tech paper book is their lack of bulk: they can contain hundreds, if not thousands of titles. That’s handy enough. Had the Kindle been available in the 1980s, when I was at school and university, I probably wouldn’t now have one shoulder slightly lower than the other. But it doesn’t contribute much to the future of writing. In most situations paper books are good enough, so you have to do something more than just replace them.

And that brings us neatly to ‘smart’ phones like the iPhone, Google’s Nexus One, and a myriad of other phones and handheld devices that feature relatively large touch screens and allow you to install software known as ‘apps’. My own experience with these devices is quite longstanding and mostly positive. I read books on a Palm handheld as far back as 2003 and in 2008 I began using an iPod Touch for for the same purpose. I don’t use it for all of my reading, but I am able to go away for a weekend without a bag full of books. At last reckoning I had over 300 books downloaded and ready to choose from, packed into a device that fits in the pocket of my jeans.

Software like Stanza, and the Kindle application developed by Amazon, make buying, downloading, and reading books very easy, given the limitations of a screen smaller than the palm of my hand. Where these devices really come into their own though is when books themselves are made into standalone applications, as happened with Wolf Hall not long after it won the Booker Prize. Book ‘apps’ include not only the text of the novel itself, but critical reading, biographical material, images,  video and up to date news about author tours and other events; they turn books into more than simply an engagement with text and page—though they offer that too—but a broader experience of the book and its context. For magazines and newspapers this kind of approach is even better, since the small screen is more suited to occasional and short reading sessions.

The third category of device goes some way to resolving these issues. When Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s iPad device in January 2010, he did so from beneath a graphic of a road sign, pointing to ‘Technology’ in one direction and ‘Liberal Arts’ in the other. Apple, he implied, stood at the point where the two met. Apple isn’t the only one, but the bigger screen and more book-like size and heft of the iPad makes it and other ‘tablets’ a much better prospect for reading books than their smaller smartphone cousins. The additional benefits of a device that besides books does email, calendaring, web browsing, as well as all kinds of other media, make ‘tablet’ computers an alluring prospect for readers in search of something less bulky than a bookcase and more appealing than a dog-eared paperback. Offering the possibility of books containing more than just text and still pictures, our definition of what a book or a magazine might be is also set to change.

I am enthusiastic about ebooks and optimistic for the future opening up for readers, writers and publishers, but none of this is without drawbacks. Digitization brings with it fears of copying and theft and such fears lead executives in large corporations to make stupid mistakes in their efforts to protect ‘their’ content from those who might use it without paying. We have already seen Amazon remove books from Kindle devices without informing the owners of those Kindles that they were about to do it; the irony was that it did this to copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, hinting at a future where history really could be rewritten or erased. And then there is Digital Rights Management, which makes life a misery for anyone hoping to play bought and paid for ‘protected’ music or films on ‘unauthorised’ devices. DRM is being applied to ebooks too and the worrying thing is that DRM usually ends up inconveniencing honest people—the best customers—more than it does the content thieves.

But all of these things are the workings out of a technology and a market in its infancy. What bothers me more are thoughts to do with the familiarity of physical books in my own life and what the world might look like with fewer of them about. Like many readers of this magazine I live in a house overflowing with books and have trouble imagining what it would be like without them. I adopted ebooks as an adult so I’ll never be entirely comfortable with them and I am a little bit older than that first ebook created in the computer lab at the University of Illinois. So naturally I worry that without physical books around children won’t be able to take one down from the shelf and ask their parents “What’s this one about?” The books will all be hidden in digital files on the parents’ book reading devices. But that’s not how it will work out. My daughter, aged 6, already makes little connection between physical media such as DVDs and the images on the television screen. She knows that the content exists ‘out there’ and has nothing much to do with what you use to get at it. She was utterly appalled when she discovered you couldn’t easily select ‘chapters’ on a VHS tape and she’ll probably be equally horrified by the idea of taking up wall space with books she will never read again.

• Finish off writing entries for the 100 American Crime Writers and 100 British Crime Writers books which I handed over to Steven Powell and Esme Miskimmin when I was at a low ebb late in 2009. Steve has put a lot of work into the Venetian Vase blog, and it’s becoming quite a nice thing.
• Teaching–among other things–a course on the History of American Ideas (up to about 1865) at the University of Liverpool.
• Overseeing English courses in Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool.
• Once the crime fiction pieces are done I’m planning to get back to the Scoresby project, finish off my outline, and start writing. Very excited about this.
• I’m also going to revisit my PhD thesis on Raymond Chandler. I think there’s a book in there somewhere, and dammit I aim to find it.
• Put together some teaching materials in the form of a series of short non-fiction e-books. This is partly because I need to get the material together, and partly because I want a trial run to see how e-books work from a production point of view. I’m probably going to begin with a short annotated and introduced collection of Edgar Allan Poe Tales, to go with my Poe lecture. There will be Melville and Thoreau material coming along too, if all goes well.
• Start working on a series of short pieces on researching and writing essays and articles, to go with a study skills/composition course.
• And somewhere, somehow, I need to think about what happens when my contract at Liverpool ends in January. There will be some occasional teaching, but I’ll need more work. A return to freelancing? We’ll see.

No promises, but those are the plans. There are a lot of ‘starts’ there, so it will be interesting to see which ones work out.

Caught in the Ice, 1830, by Thomas Henry Binks

Like modern oilmen, Arctic whalers took oil first from where it was easy. They began with Greenland and eastward towards Spitzbergen. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century whalers in that region caught 50 percent more whales than in the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay to the West. By the late 1820s, though, the whales had almost been wiped out in the Greenland fishery, and like the deep sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, whalers were prepared to take more risks. In the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay the weather was less predictable, the ice more likely to trap you, and crush your ship.

In June and July 1830, after several years of poor catches in the Greenland Sea, the Davis Strait was packed with vessels. Whaling, especially Arctic whaling, was always a risky business, and some ships were lost every year, but in 1830 the weather in the Davis Strait was appalling. Violent storms pushed ice into the Strait, crushing ships and lifting them out  of the water.

That year the British whaling fleet lost 19 ships out of 90 in the Davis Strait. These included William Scoresby Jr.’s former ship Baffin, and the John, once captained by his brother in law, William Jackson. In 1830 the John was based at Greenock and her crew had a reputation for trouble. In 1829 some of them had refused to sail on a voyage of exploration in support of Captain John Ross and his ship Victory. The story of what happened on board the John in 1830 is not at all clear, but what is known is that when she was wrecked on September 24th, she was commanded by one of the officers, that her captain was dead, and that the mate and several of the crew had been set adrift in a boat. The John was the last whaler to sail out of Greenock.

Each of the 19 wrecked whalers had on board over fifty men, and for a while around 1000 were camped on the ice, drinking ale, wine, and rum plundered from the wrecked ships. This drunken way-below-zero jamboree was known as the Baffin Fair and went on for several days until the wrecked ships had been emptied and burnt. Free from the discipline of their ships the men were out of control, but when the food and drink was exhausted most were picked up by other ships and surprisingly few died. Basil Lubbock, whose book The Arctic Whalers is one of the best on the subject, estimates ‘eight or ten,’ did not survive, some of whom were deserters from French ships, and had been wandering on the ice even before the storms broke.

Besides the 19 ships lost, many more were damaged and 21 came home empty. After the 1830 catastrophe, whaling in the Davis Strait declined by about two thirds, and to make matters worse the American deep sea whaling industry had started to dominate oil production, making the Arctic fishery less attractive. Many British whalers turned to killing seals instead.

The image above can be downloaded from the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull.

The great things about the E72 are mostly in hardware, though there are a few software features that are pretty compelling.

1. It has a terrific hardware qwerty keyboard, which means you can text while flying a light plane under electricity pylons without taking your eyes off the terrified onlookers.
2. It has excellent battery life measured in days rather than hours and the battery is removable, meaning you can fiddle with the compartment cover at moments of tension, thus dislodging the battery and switching off the phone without realising, so you fail to answer when your wife calls, and she spends an hour standing on a wet railway platform.
3. The 5 megapixel camera produces decent results in good light and it will print over wifi to a networked printer, making it the next best thing to a Polaroid camera on home turf. And no shake and wait either.
4. The OVI Maps turn by turn navigation, which comes free with Nokia smartphones, is superb. This phone has replaced my wife for all navigation-related activities and yet provides sufficient ambiguity to allow for petty and concentration-sapping arguments in heavy traffic and at dangerous junctions. As satnav goes it’s just about perfect.
5. Add to this apps like Joikuspot, which turns the phone into a Mifi-like wifi hotspot, Skype, which can use the front facing camera for some much-needed nasal hair time, and the built-in office software–email, Documents to Go, an app that converts text in images to text in, well, text–and the E72 is a powerful and useful tool.

I like this phone a lot. It is powerful, well made, and, running the latest version of the Symbian OS, solid and dependable. It’s not as flexible as the iPhone, and the layers and layers of menus and pages you have to navigate to do anything out of the ordinary remind me horribly of Windows 3.1, but as a communication device it works very well. Texting and emailing are far too easy, and it can make calls and everything. What really lets it down though is the software for sharing the data with a PC, and for installing updates and apps.

iTunes comes in for a lot of stick for being bloated, buggy, and restrictive. Even so, iTunes is a smooth highway compared to the ploughed field that is Nokia’s confusing and over complicated Ovisuite. Fortunately I only need that for updating the phone software. With the help of a phone-specific plugin, the Mac’s in-built syncing service, iSync, takes care of calendars and addresses over Bluetooth, while Nokia’s excellent Multimedia Transfer software deals with music, photos and the rest.

As with a lot of things in Africa, the influence of Europe is everywhere. Brewing in Africa is mostly done by a small number of large brewing corporations, mostly with European origins. There are exceptions, including–at a pinch–South African Breweries, which from its 1894 origins in Johannesburg as Castle Brewery, became so large that when it acquired Miller Brewing in 2002 the new company took the name SABMiller, the second largest beer producer in the world. Castle Lager is its iconic African brand and it sells very well indeed: the growing African market outside of South Africa accounted for 13 percent of the group’s earnings in 2009-2010.

The predominant brew produced by these companies–Carlsberg, InBev, SABMiller and the rest–and the local breweries they own, is lager, often in styles derived from European brands. However Guinness is also popular and is brewed under licence in several African countries, a legacy of Britain’s influence on West Africa. Interestingly though, many of these beers are produced using local ingredients, including sorghum grass. Nigerian Guinness, for example, branded as Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, is made from unfermented Guinness wort shipped from Dublin, augmented by wort from locally-sourced sorghum and maize. And there is some traffic flowing the other way. For example, Tusker is a rather pleasant Kenyan beer making inroads in British supermarkets with the help of its giant parent company Diageo.

Traditional brewing does exist in Africa, but it seems (and I’m willing to be corrected on this) that it is more or less limited to home brewing carried out in remote rural villages, or in people’s homes in city slums, where ‘big name’ beers are impossibly expensive. These brews are made with whatever grains are available, including sorghum, maize, and even millet, and sometimes then distilled to even higher concentrations. Methanol, a lethal form of alcohol that can cause blindness and death, is quite often present in these concoctions, though it is not produced by fermenting grains in the usual way.

The dominance of global beer producers came as something of a disappointment to me in my search for a Cameroonian beer, though given the size of these companies and their history, going back to the nineteenth century, of swallowing up smaller brewers, it wasn’t all that surprising. And there is still a glimmer of light. Billy’s investigations at Victoria chez Tah-Ndi offered the tantalizing prospect of being able to find “33″ in France.

Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English public school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of telling the truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladies in remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment. Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a lie. I may wear another man’s coat, steal another man’s wit, apostatize to another man’s creed, or poison another man’s coffee, all without ever telling a lie. But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his “side” when he is engaged in “playing the game.” He takes sides in his Union debating society to settle whether Charles I ought to have been killed, with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with which he takes sides in the cricket field to decide whether Rugby or Westminster shall win. He is never allowed to admit the abstract notion of the truth, that the match is a matter of what may happen, but that Charles I is a matter of what did happen—or did not. He is Liberal or Tory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race. He knows that sport deals with the unknown; he has not even a notion that politics should deal with the known. If anyone really doubts this self-evident proposition, that the public schools definitely discourage the love of truth, there is one fact which I should think would settle him. England is the country of the Party System, and it has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

Read the whole opinionated thing over at Project Gutenberg.

IPA has been in this culture-changing position before. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was the ale that travelled around the world, quenching the thirst of British soldiers in India and elsewhere. Sulphate-rich Burton water suits the large quantities of hops used as a preservative in IPA, making their bitterness more appealing. This happy coincidence made IPA key to the rise of Burton on Trent as Britain’s brewing powerhouse.

As a twenty-first century distribution centre Burton is nearly ideal, being right in the middle of the country. But in the years before the railways, ale had to travel from landlocked Burton along the river Trent to Hull or by canal and road to Liverpool. Traditional ales did not travel well, but the quantity of hops used in IPA to help it survive the journey to India was also useful on its 100-mile journey to the coast. Burton IPAs were introduced into port cities and allowed Burton brewers such as Bass to compete with local brewers in other regions. By the 1840s, when the railways had begun to make national distribution easier, Burton brewers such as Bass already had agents in many of the major port cities. As other brewers scrambled to compete, the national spread of Burton-brewed ales was responsible for a change in tastes across the British Isles so that by the twentieth century brewers routinely ‘Burtonised’ their brewing water.

A similar shift in taste took place in the twentieth century. Since the late 1960s British drinkers have swung away from traditional ales and settled on lager as their beer style of choice. Most of these lagers are bland, nondescript and at best inoffensive, but they are certainly popular. Carling, which is brewed, ironically enough, in Burton on Trent, is Britain’s best-selling beer. In the last few years though, things have been changing. In the face of rising commodity prices, rising taxation, declining pub sales, and downward pressure on price from the supermarkets, traditionally brewed ales have been making a comeback and small brewers seem to be springing up everywhere. In fact sales of ‘real’ ales are rising despite an otherwise flat or falling overall market. Where there is quality, the effects of financial crisis and fiscal meltdown seem to be felt least of all.

So what about IPA and where might it stand in the apparent trend back towards real ale?

Not long ago I had a conversation with a group of friends and the subject of beer came up, as it often does. One of the women asked what that delicious lager was that they had been drinking a few weeks earlier and interestingly the ‘lager’ in question turned out to be Innovation, an award-winning, hoppy American-style IPA brewed by Adnams. One of the great things about Innovation, and many other ales of its type, is that it can stand being drunk straight from the fridge without losing any of that wonderful flavour, making it ideal for the exact situation where lager has dominated. Curiously, while the big name lagers are mostly bland affairs, aimed at the undiscriminating palate, what this little anecdote suggests is that big flavours are not necessarily a problem.

This is a small point, but an interesting one I think. The woman who asked the question is not an ale drinker and would turn down a pint of bitter. But she loved Innovation and what’s more she remembered it, even if she didn’t know what it was. Crucially, she would drink it again, if she saw it. If brewers could get IPAs of this type in front of a enough drinkers of premium lagers I think we might have a real cultural shift on our hands. A problem for smaller and independent brewers is that two generations of drinkers have grown up with the idea that lager is more refreshing, more ‘easy drinking’ than other kinds of beer. Hoppy, zesty IPAs could be the ales to change that perception.

The vast majority of PhDs–mine included no doubt–lie unopened and unread in one of the British Library’s vast warehouses. In truth, few are worth reading in their raw form, though many are later rewritten as books. PhD theses are pedantic and technical, written for the examiners to prove the writer’s ability to corral a set of knowledge and sustain an argument. Books are written for their audience, whoever that may be, but PhD theses are no fun at all. They are written to meet a set of academic requirements, not for wide public consumption or the all-seeing eyes of Google and Bing.

It is natural to be a little bit afraid of having such a stunted, constrained, and raw piece of work on display, but the real issue here is one of choice. What I find irksome is the assumption that everyone will be happy to have work published online even though it was never intended for publication. This is work some writers may no longer endorse, or feel comfortable about. There is a way to opt out, but it depends on authors knowing they are involved in the first place, and university libraries do not seem to feel obliged to tell them. There is also the question of whether the choice needs to be a binary one. Why have PhD authors not been given the chance to license their work, allowing different levels of freedom to share and copy, rather than just the option to remove their work from the digitisation scheme?

The current copyright system clearly doesn’t work well with this new environment in which vast quantities of data are being made public, and the Library’s attempts to reassure with talk of copyright agreements, and tracking the recipients of downloads, miss the point entirely. Since most authors have not granted permission for this kind of distribution it is possible that the participating libraries themselves are the primary copyright abusers, but in any case, hard-line copyright statements are not really in the spirit of open access.

The expectation of wide availability will change the nature of the PhD thesis, and that is probably a good thing. In an open access environment there needs to be a reconsideration of who this work is for. But before that can happen we need to find a more sensible way of licensing this material, perhaps using Creative Commons licenses on all new PhDs as a matter of course. Trying to ignore the issue (and the rights holders), and hoping for the best, as the British Library seems to be doing, is not good enough. Like most people in this situation I don’t mind my thesis being part of the process, and I will be glad to get hold of an electronic copy when it becomes freely available. Even so, it would have been nice to be asked first.