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10
Jul 11

Why you shouldn’t buy the News of the World today

Nothing in its life became it like the leaving of it.

We all know the story: 4000 people’s phones hacked. Milly Dowler. The murdered Soham girls. Families of dead soldiers coming back from Afghanistan.

£100,000 paid as bribes to the police and a Met Police investigation that manifestly failed to find the truth.

And evidence growing daily of a huge cover-up by News International staff. Thousands of emails deleted and police misled. They even hauled off one staffer’s desk to a solicitor’s office and refused to let the police see it.

And yet today the News of the World has five million copies on sale, twice its usual circulation.

If there’s one word to sum up the final issue of the News of the World, it’s “unrepentant”.

Squint and you might find it among this grand celebration of journalistic trash. There’s a five-sentence apology of sorts buried in the long leader column on page three that spends far more space recounting notable stories preceding News International’s purchase of the paper in 1969 than it does tackling the reasons for its sudden and inglorious death.

“Phones were hacked”, it says in passive-voiced weasel words that surely must make it into the next edition of Mistakes Were Made, the classic text on cognitive dissonance.

As in all the worst apologies, the scale and persistence of the News of the World’s criminality is entirely glossed over. Like Nixon in Watergate, the cover-up can do more damage than the crime. It’s not just the phone hacking but the alleged bribery of the police and destruction of evidence that could see executives James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks face criminal charges. News International is rapidly becoming the media’s Enron moment.

In a last-ditch attempt to manipulate the public’s emotions and go out with a bang rather than a whimper, the News of the World has cynically chosen to offer the profits from its final issue to three charities.

Barnardos, the Forces’ Children’s Trust and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity have a lot of explaining to do to their staff and supporters this morning. By taking the News of the World’s tainted cash their names are indelibly written in the final chapter of a legitimate news business that became an organised crime syndicate. Their support has been instrumental in ensuring that this final edition of lies, evasions and distortions was not only produced but widely read. The other charities that accepted free advertising in today’s issue are equally culpable.

We should reject utterly the convenient lie that the News of the World was a great newspaper that, in its own words, lost its way.

The News of the World stood for all that was worst in British journalism. Intrusion not investigation. Cynicism not critique. Prurience not propriety.

The worst failure of the News of the World was not what it did outside the law but what it did within it. Newspapers that leave their readers less knowledgeable, less genuinely critical and less civilised have no place in our society.

If you’re just curious to see what they’ve written today you can read it online. If you want to support charity, donate directly.

Don’t give the Murdochs and Brooks the satisfaction of a record final sale of their tawdry, dead rag.

Design theory / Simplicity — Comments Off
19
Jun 11

Lightness — a design direction for everyday life

A sense of lightness is what I appreciate most in the designs that I enjoy. It’s what I strive to create in my own work too.

In our increasingly frenetic world, things that let you do what you want to do with the minimum of obstruction, frustration and delay are needed more than ever. Like Don Norman’s invisible computer, this is design that all but disappears when you use it. It gets out of your way and defaults to shutting up. Its sophistication is not in trying to be smart, much less in trying to be impressive or entertaining. It’s subtle, humble and discreet, working in the service of you the user rather than trying to draw attention to itself. Most of all it is design as our servant rather than our master.

Dieter Rams says:

Never forget that a good product should be like a good English butler. They’re there for you when you need them, but in the background at all other times. Besides a few millionaires in London, most of us don’t have butlers.

The butlers of today are our products and our furniture.

Lightness can be measured as value for effort. The less effort you need to expend in learning, maintaining and satisfying the product you’re using for a given amount of genuine benefit the better. If you’re flying through the things you want to do without obstruction, that’s lightness. If it feels like you’re wading through treacle, that’s not.

Lightness is an imperative. We’ve got better things to do than to perform incantations and rituals just to take care of the mundane details of everyday life. Our energies should be directed towards curing the world’s ills, being with our families and making sense of it all, not coaxing printers to print, navigating endless telephone menus and jumping through bureaucratic hoops. Life is far too short to be a slave to a system or to a machine.

Here are a few examples of things that embody lightness, to a degree at least:

Gmail was revolutionary when it first launched. Aside from a generally slick user interface, the two features that really struck me as important were a huge storage quota for your mail and effective spam filtering. Being liberated from having to worry about whether you were running out of space for your mail really changed the way that people thought about webmail. It also led to other webmail providers following suit by increasing their quotas too. Removing 99.5% of spam from your inbox was another relief. Spam is something entirely incidental to what users want from email. Gmail showed that the spam problem was a solvable one, at least at the user’s end. Gmail is light because it lets you focus on your mail rather than the things — storage space and spam — that other systems forced you to think about just to be able to do your mail.

First Direct is a phone and web-only bank. It’s open around the clock, so you never have to worry about opening hours if you want to call. First Direct’s service is so resilient that it has been continuously available since it launched in 1989. When they say they’re always open, they mean always. First Direct is light because it fits itself to the customer rather than the other way around. The customer doesn’t have to memorise or look up opening hours. Customers can get on with their lives, knowing that they can always phone their bank in any spare moment they happen to have. The idea of 24-hour service doesn’t seem so strange in the age of the Internet but First Direct were well ahead of the game with building a very different relationship with their customers than was traditional in retail banking.

Dyson’s DC35 is a rechargeable vacuum cleaner that’s optimised for mobility. Which is more convenient — plugging in your cleaner when you’re using it or plugging it in when you’re not? The DC35 is both slim and light so it’s not a burden to carry the DC35 up stairs or around the house. The lightness of the DC35 comes from its literal light weight. It’s a physical product that you use while moving, so the lighter the better. Cleaning becomes a quick and effortless job rather than a tiring chore.

In urban design, decluttering aims to remove unnecessary and obstructive street furniture from pedestrians’ paths. Decluttering advocates like Living Streets reject the idea that pedestrians can and should be funnelled around a city like vehicles in the name of safety. People like to follow their desire lines, taking the most direct route from one place to another without having to negotiate a maze of barriers, bollards, cobbles and kerbs. A decluttered street is light because it removes physical obstructions and reduces delays and pinch points, leading to a sense of freedom of movement.

A webmail service, a bank, a vacuum cleaner, a street. These aren’t the kinds of things that many people would think of as requiring very sophisticated design approaches. This isn’t stuff to write home about. Most likely they would only draw attention when they’re wrong in some way. The inbox running out of space and full of spam. The bank that’s never open when you want to call them. The vacuum cleaner that you don’t want to haul upstairs. The street that throws up obstacles in your path rather than just lets you move. This is the mundane stuff of everyday life and much of it needs a great deal of improvement.

There is hope. The big four technology companies — Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft — all embody lightness in some of their products. As most of us are plugged into at least one of these companies’ products for much of our time, this is encouraging. These aren’t niche players. If the big four get lightness right it will be hugely influential across our broader culture. There is a possibility, perhaps even a hope, that at some point we will hit a tipping point where things in the main Just Work and our focus can return to dealing with the real issues of life rather than the contrived problems of lazy and thoughtless designers and bureaucrats.

As designers, it’s the lightness of people that we should we working towards most of all. We’ll try to take the weight from your back and clear the obstacles from your path so that you can move freely wherever you want to go.

Local Government / Usability / Web design — 2 Comments
10
May 11

Council website adverts: A design perspective

Anyone can design a website, just like anyone can take a photograph. But good web design, like good photography, is really, really hard to do.

And the evidence is all around us. Most websites aren’t that great, even those from well-resourced organisations that can hire teams of people to work on them.

Council websites are just about the hardest kind of website to design. Councils are large organisations that deliver an extremely diverse range of services within a sensitive public/political context. And they have to serve the whole community, not just most of it. And so while it’s undeniably true that many if not most council sites have a long way to go before they realise their full potential, I have every sympathy for those who are trying to deliver such complex designs with often very limited resources.

Good design means getting the big ideas right and then sweating the details. These are both really tough jobs and you don’t have forever to do them.

You don’t need to be an extreme minimalist to understand that every time you add something to a website you take something away. You increase users’ cognitive load. You draw their eye. You displace other page elements, or if you’re adding pages, you add another item to your navigation and search results. It all adds up.

I’ve never seen a website that was improved by adverts.

Every great website has come about because people worked hard and smart at stopping it being crap. They had the balls to say “no” more often than they said “yes”. They trimmed out flabby content, sharpened up the writing, weren’t satisfied with second-rate images. Engineers worked to progressively trim fractions of a second from the page load times, tweaking the front-end code, the back-end application and the server infrastructure. Titles and headlines were rewritten. Everything was meticulously researched and tested.

It’s hard to see how slapping a couple of ad blocks on the page is going to make this job any easier. And it’s not like the average council website is so fast, clear and simple that it can afford to take any kind of usability hit.

Ah, but they do it in the private sector. Indeed they do.

And their websites are undeniably worse for it. Of course they’d rather not do it, but if selling ad space on your site is necessary to bring in essential revenue to run it, you don’t have a choice.

The best private sector sites running adverts are very different from council websites. Take The Guardian. Although this is a big and complex site, essentially all most visitors are doing is finding and reading news. That’s just a single task. Council sites have to support hundreds of tasks. And The Guardian has design and development resources several orders of magnitude greater than any council. All their content is produced by professional writers and photographers, too.

So councils have the challenge of producing some of the most complex websites imaginable. But they also have the advantage that they’re funded to do that. They don’t need to raise revenue through the site itself. They can concentrate their resources on producing the absolutely best user experience possible without having to shill for a few pennies on the side.

Councils should fight for every inch of quality on their websites. Adverts are a completely unnecessary and harmful distraction from the real task at hand. Make your site great and the benefits will far exceed any cash you can drum up by encouraging people to click away from it.

Local Government / Web design — 4 Comments
10
May 11

Complaint to Nottingham City Council about Google AdSense adverts

I am very unhappy with some of the adverts that you are running on your website. Many of them are directly exploiting poor people such as the advert for “claim bankruptcy” that I found in your advice and benefits section today. (Click image above for full size view)

I wrote about this issue over a year ago and it’s also been featured on The Guardian’s website.

When are you going to stop running adverts that harm your residents and the council itself?

Local Government / open data — 10 Comments
28
Apr 11

Boris says bye-bye to indie Boris Bikes developers

Barclays Cycle Hire app iTunes screenshot

9 May 2011: Some of my assumptions in this post are wrong so please read it in the context of Emer Coleman’s comment below.

Courted, used and discarded in less than a year. That’s Boris’s and Transport for London’s attitude towards independent app developers for the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.

Let’s take it from the beginning.

A month before TfL launched their new cycle hire scheme, Boris was very keen to get independent developers on board. Why? Some deep commitment to digital diversity or small government doing what it does best and leaving the rest to the market?

Not really. Just that in 2010 if you’re launching a public cycle hire scheme in a major world city you need an app. And there wasn’t any budget allocated for one so the open data line was expedient.

Let’s hear some of the bull from back in June 2010:

In build up to the launch of the Mayor’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme on 30 July, Transport for London (TfL) has relaxed its terms and conditions to allow commercial use of official data – opening the door for developers to provide accurate and reliable information about the hundreds of locations where hire cycles will be available, smart routes around town or proximity of docking stations to Tube stations and places of interest.

Of course this wasn’t actually true anyway. TfL didn’t release any live machine-readable data about bike or dock availability at that point. In fact, they still haven’t.

More bull from TfL:

Independently produced apps will complement the wealth of information that TfL is already generating to keep users up to speed about the scheme.

So what happened? Indie developers got on board only to find that they had to screen scrape data from TfL’s web map, the only publicly-available source of data. No real API, no service level standards, no support. And very often crap data.

The incident where TfL’s map started serving up data from the Montreal cycle hire scheme being just one case in point.

The indies have muddled through, producing some good apps that very often have been held back by poor and unreliable data. When it comes to realtime information services, your app is only as good as your data.

People have invested time and money in these apps, largely in the hope that TfL would see them right soon enough.

All the while, developers have been pressing TfL for a real API. The story has always been that it’s coming… one day.

I think it’s reasonable to say that indie developers have made a big contribution towards Barclays Cycle Hire’s success. There aren’t unlimited bikes and you need to be able to find them. It’s handy to have a timer to help manage the costs. And you need a map on the go just to find the docking stations. You need an app.

TfL have been happy to take the credit for the indie cycle hire app and analysis work that they’ve done next to nothing to support.

And now we get the final confirmation of where TfL really stands on indie developers and open data: This week Barclays launched official iPhone and Android apps for the scheme.

These free apps (with all of Barclays/TfL’s marketing support behind them) wipe out the largest markets for indie apps at a stroke.

Moreover, Barclays own apps will doubtless be using a private API to which they have privileged access. So their apps get good quality data while everyone else struggles along with the leftovers.

I’m told, unofficially, that an official cycle hire API is coming soon. But I’ve heard that story before.

When it comes — if it comes — it’ll be useful for the people doing data analysis and building cycle hire data into novel apps and games like Chromaroma.

But for the mass market — indie developers making and selling standard find a bike/dock apps — TfL just doesn’t need you any more.

The parallels with Twitter’s attitude to its API are clear: Having built a successful service on the back of indie developers’ labour, it’s now time to take the good stuff in house and reap the rewards. At least Twitter provided a proper API.

The question remains: Who’s driving Barclays Cycle Hire, Barclays or the mayor?

Perhaps the clue’s in the name.

Citizenship / Local Government / open data — 1 Comment
20
Apr 11

Waste minimisation and the quantified self

Last month, Sutton Council was looking for ways to save £925K a year in waste collection costs. There was an online discussion where residents were asked to come up with ideas for making savings and also give their views on suggestions made by the council.

Some of the ideas such as reorganising waste collection shifts to enable the council to halve the number of vehicles are efficiencies that would have a relatively minor impact on residents. Others inevitably are focussing directly on how much of their household waste is being recycled by residents and how much is being sent to landfill.

Rewards for recycling

Rewards for recycling or fines for not recycling enough are among the options. Introducing penalties for bad behaviour isn’t a very popular idea among the public and also in many councils who would rather have constructive rather than punitive relations with their residents. Moreover, there are many practical difficulties in running a punitive scheme. It’s easy enough to put your waste in someone else’s bin unless every bin is fitted with a lock. A trial in Norfolk failed due to numerous technical problems and also led to a 250% increase in fly tipping.

Windsor and Maidenhead are in the process of rolling out a borough-wide recycling rewards scheme after a successful trial with 6500 households.

You can get fantastic rewards at participating businesses like M&S, Legoland, Magnet and Windsor Leisure Centres or you can donate your points to the RecycleBank Green Schools Scheme.

Chip and bin

As with the Norfolk scheme, Windsor and Maidenhead are using so-called chip-and-bin technology. Residents’ recycling bins are fitted with an RFID chip identifying the household to which it belongs. The bin is weighed automatically as it’s emptied into the collection vehicle and the weight is added to the appropriate household’s account. RFID is a short-range radio system that unlike barcodes doesn’t require manual scanning and enables bins to be identified automatically as part of the emptying process.

While we wait to see whether Windsor and Maidenhead’s scheme will have a positive long-term impact on residents’ recycling habits, there’s another approach we could consider. Instead of the council weighing your bin, why not do it yourself?

The quantified self

We’re all familiar with large organisations collecting data about us, whether it’s some part of government, or the supermarket recording our every purchase for their loyalty card scheme. Many people are sceptical about or outright hostile to the increasing amount of intelligence gathering directed at us as citizens and shoppers. Whether well-intended and well-managed or not, this database-building nonetheless chips away another little bit of our privacy.

But technology observers have recently been following the trend for some people to collect this kind of data about themselves. This concept of the quantified self pulls together a diverse set of self-monitoring and self-improvement practices in which people collect data about themselves, analyse it and use it as evidence to support decision making and behaviour changes.

Some quantified self (QS) applications need you to type data into a website. Want to ramp up your drinking? Try DrinkingDiary. Sex life too hot to handle? Bedpost can help you cool it down. Others use common gadgets like smartphones. Runkeeper will track how far and how often you run, where you’ve been and will let you share your progress with others in its own community.

Some QS apps are sophisticated product service systems that come with their own custom hardware that takes the pain out of data collection. Fitbit gives you a tiny clip-on device that works as a pedometer to track your exercise levels while you’re awake and monitors your sleep time and quality while you’re in bed.

The Withings Body Scale is no ordinary bathroom scale. It doesn’t just let you weigh yourself, it wirelessly and automatically transmits your weight to a central database, from where you can monitor your progress on the web and through various mobile apps.

So if we can weigh our bodies, why not our bins?

DIY chip and bin — the pilot project

My own “pilot project” for tracking my waste disposal has so far taken around ten minutes of my time and cost £3.50 in hard cash. The money went on a portable luggage scale that I picked up in my local newsagent and the time went building a simple Google Spreadsheet and form that lets me easily type in the weight of each bin bag before I put it out into the bins. Here in Sutton we’ve got a brown bin for landfill waste and a green bin for recycling. I’m weighing both. When I fill in the Google form the numbers get automatically added to the spreadsheet along with the current date. Then I can just total up the columns and see how much I’m landfilling and recycling over time. It’s a good start.

Despite its low cost and relative simplicity, my system requires a fair bit of effort to get started and to diligently weigh and record each bag as it goes out to the bins. But what if we could buy kitchen bins that did the weighing and recording for us like the Withings Body Scale? I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we can. Technologically it’s almost the same product, though the software would need adapting to the different context of having two or more bins recording weights of different waste products rather than a single scale recording many people’s weights. This isn’t rocket science.

But will you behave better?

What’s likely to be much harder than collecting this data is using it to help people actually change their behaviour. Someone who goes to buy or contrive a weighing bin is at least starting off with some motivation and a good intention. Sustaining that might be hard. As with many fitness apps, a social networking component where the user could share and compare their data with others in similar households might provide sufficient motivation and social reinforcement to keep going. A web-based system could send occasional suggestions for ways to waste less and recycle more, even in the form of advertisements for eco-friendly packaged products like those in Amazon’s 100% recyclable Frustration-Free Packaging.

Twenty minutes into the future…

Now imagine what could be done if this system had access (with your permission, of course) to your supermarket loyalty card data. Suggestions on how to substitute poorly-packaged products for comparable ones based on your actual shopping habits? Suggestions on how you could buy larger packs of existing products that would have proportionally less packaging? Having access to this info on your smartphone while you’re in the shop? Discount vouchers as a little extra nudge to get you started? It’s all perfectly feasible.

If people can do data for themselves, do councils still have a role to play? One way might be to sidestep the whole issue of people getting their own weighing bins and providing bin weight data collected through chip-and-bin straight to residents without operating a local penalty or reward scheme. Residents could then participate in any third-party reward scheme that they chose, most likely operated by a supermarket or another retailer. People would appreciate the choice and flexibility of being in control of how their data was used and could pick a reward scheme that suited them best. Retailers would have greater incentive to work with their suppliers to improve packaging. Councils would benefit from lower landfill taxes and greater recycling rates without going to the trouble of running their own reward schemes or getting out the thumbscrews.

Whose data? Our data!

The biggest barrier to making this happen isn’t the technology. We’ve already got that. The problem is getting the organisations that collect data about us to give us access. We need a new deal with the organisations that know more about us than we know ourselves: If you want my data I get to use it too and I get a secure way of sharing it with trusted third parties that can do something good with it that benefits me. If you want to log my phone calls or my purchases or the weight of my bin every time you collect it — show me your API. Quid pro quo or GTFO.

We’re starting to make good progress with the open data movement to get government to release its non-personal data for everyone to use. The next step is to get equal access to the personal data that government and business holds about us so it can work for us as well as it works for them. Then we can have an information society in which everyone benefits rather than an information technology society that just reinforces the status quo. It might start with our bins but it won’t end there.

Citizenship / Local Government / open data / Sutton — 4 Comments
29
Mar 11

Sutton Bookshare is not a library

Sutton Bookshare is a project that I’ve been designing for Sutton Council. It’s a website that lets local residents list their books on a website and then share with each other.

Bookshare is part of a wider project called Sutton Open Library that’s about opening up the library service to innovation. The whole project is funded through a grant from NESTA (a charity distributing lottery money) under their Make It Local funding scheme.

As well as the book sharing website, Sutton Open Library also opens up the main library service’s database so that independent software developers can access it and build their own apps for it.

Is Sutton Bookshare an attempt to cover for library cutbacks?

Many people have asked this question. It’s a fair question to ask.

While I work temporarily as a contractor for Sutton Council I do not speak for the council. So these are my personal views.

It would be very hard to see how Sutton Bookshare could substitute for any significant part of the library service. It has certainly not been designed with that aim in mind. In fact, the whole design direction of the project has been led by the principle that Sutton Bookshare is not a library. Every time I start transplanting library concepts into Bookshare I remind myself that Bookshare is unique and different and needs to work in a very distinct way.

One of the aims of Sutton Bookshare has been to make books that aren’t available in the library available for people to borrow. Most of my own books aren’t in the library service, so if you’re interested in design theory, urbanism and software development you now have access to books that you didn’t have previously.

Another aim of Sutton Bookshare is to build and reinforce personal relationships and social networks. Libraries can do this to an extent through clubs and other activities but the core library services are about borrowing items from the library, not other people. When you lend or borrow something in Sutton Bookshare you don’t just exchange a book, you get to meet someone who lives or works locally and almost by definition has a shared interest with you.

Sutton Bookshare also improves the library service. When you look at the page for a book in Bookshare you get a direct link to that book’s page on the main library service’s catalogue. This gives you options: Borrow it in Bookshare or borrow it from the library. For many people it will be more convenient to borrow it from the library. Bookshare provides another way to find books that are in the main library service.

What Sutton Bookshare doesn’t do

Sutton Bookshare isn’t a library.

Bookshare only lets you borrow books, hence the name. No CDs or DVDs.

Bookshare doesn’t give you a desk where you can sit down and work for a few hours in a quiet atmosphere.

Bookshare won’t let you catch up on the day’s newspapers or recent magazines.

You can borrow my books but you can’t pitch up in my living room for the afternoon. Sorry about that.

Open data makes the libraries better

The open data side of the Sutton Open Library project is all about improving the library service. We’re doing this by giving software developers the opportunity to build apps that help people find books more easily. This is nothing to do with cutting back the library service. It’s about making the library service better. Sutton Council has been fortunate to be able to attract outside funding for this work that will not just pay off in Sutton but will help to set standards and make similar work easier in other councils.

All software developed under this project is free and open source. Anyone can use or modify it themselves for any purpose. The code is here on Github.

So what about the cutbacks then?

Like all councils, Sutton Council is reviewing its services in the light of funding cuts from central government. This includes the library service. If you’re a local resident and you want to get involved in the discussions about the future of the library service you can start here on the Speak Out Sutton website, the council’s consultation site. I have no more information about this process or influence on it than any other local resident.

But it’s my view that the scale and nature of Sutton Bookshare makes it a useful supplement for the library service but not a substitute for any part of it. My hope is that Bookshare becomes a useful thing in its own right. It’s more like a club than a public service, albeit one that’s organised by the council rather than independently. I also hope that the open data work on this project will make libraries more accessibile than they are at the moment.

A postscript for Amanda Craig

I’ve just listened to the discussion on BBC Radio 4′s PM programme with Sutton Council’s Daniel Ratchford and the author Amanda Craig.

Amanda seems to hold some odd views about books.

The first is that books are far too precious to lend. While I’d agree that books are definitely valuable in the sense that they’re useful and enjoyable, they don’t do any good sitting on your shelves. So I’ve listed 130 of my own books and while I’d definitely like them back, if I lose the occasional one then I can stand the loss. I offer things to share because I know that most people are honest and responsible. If you believed otherwise you probably wouldn’t engage in almost any kind of relationship, personal or commercial.

Amanda also thinks that sharing books is tantamount to stealing from authors. This is because when you borrow a book from a library the author gets a small payment (the Public Lending Right) but when you share a book with a friend the author gets nothing.

I think this is terribly narrow-minded.

Sharing books on a relatively small scale doesn’t threaten authors. People stopping reading books threatens authors. Sutton Bookshare is a small project that in its own way will help people discover and read new books. Authors will benefit because those same people will be far more likely to visit a public library or buy books subsequently. It’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that someone might borrow one book by an author on Bookshare and then buy another.

When you’re looking at a book page on Sutton Bookshare you’re also three clicks away from buying that book on Amazon. Bookshare links directly to Amazon’s search for that book.

The threat to authors comes largely from other things. It comes from the time people choose to spend doing things other than reading books because they now have more options. Watch YouTube or read? Fool around on Facebook or read? Play computer games or read? Listen to internet radio or read?

A project like Sutton Bookshare and Sutton Open Library is the wrong target. We’re getting people hooked on books not taking money out of authors’ pockets. Authors, libraries and of course readers will benefit.

I’ve always spent a lot of money on books. I probably always will because it’s very unlikely to be convenient or even possible for me to get all the books I want through borrowing from people or libraries. Authors should be scared of Facebook and World of Warcraft not book sharing.

Adrian ShortDesign, citizenship and the city