British book fanatics will soon be able to get their hands on Amazon's popular Kindle electronic book reader, after the company unveiled an international version of the gadget. In an announcement today, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos said the Kindle will be available worldwide on October 19, selling through the company's American website and shipping to the UK for $279 (£175) - although import duties will push the price up to around £200.

Although customers will have to order from the United States for the time being, Bezos said in a note to British customers on Amazon.co.uk that the gadget would eventually be sold through the company's British outlet. "In the future, we plan to introduce a UK-centric Kindle experience, enabling you to purchase Kindle and Kindle books in sterling from our Amazon.co.uk site," he said.

So - as an avid ebook evangelist and crazy - will I be pre-ordering the Kindle?

The short answer is no.

The reason that I am excited about the Kindle being made available over here in the UK is that Amazon sells a huge range of books. In the US their website has a huge number of books available for the device. In the UK the number of ebooks that are on the Waterstones site is... well... less than large.

(Also I could really whinge about how Waterstones has mismanaged the ebook market - and that competition will be good, but that is a post for another day - and another site).

So, why am I not going to buy the Kindle as soon as it's available? It comes down, once more, to the amount of content that the site will sell - have enough UK publishers made the decision to release their books in an ebook format, or will they continue to sit on their hands?

I'm sure that if the sale of the Kindle takes off, then more publishers will make ebooks - but for sales of the Kindle to be significant you need a large amount of content. So it's a circular market that might not take off because publishers, or Amazon don't take a leap of faith.

(Personally I'd like to be able to download the books from the US site - ignoring regional releases, just like I can order American physical books and have them imported)

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(While looking for the above article I stumbled across this article and video - it's where I live. In the video the narrator mentions that the Fiddlers is no more. The reason it was pulled to the ground? Too much drug dealing...)

Dear prospective Conservative government.

Please fuck off you bunch of evil shitbags - all your expenses claiming, chauffeur-driven, second home owning membership should be ashamed of yourself.

Work longer, get paid less?

True, this doesn't compare to the plans of the past where you wanted to tattoo HIV positive people and put them in concentration camps but what sort of effect do you think this will have on the recruitment and retention of public sector workers?

Unlike you MPs us public workers don't tend to have the ability to take second or third jobs as 'consultants' or 'directors' - I work twelve hour shifts on vehicles that are falling apart, without the kit or training that I need for a wage that most sensible people would think is small for what we do.

Perhaps I should go and be a banker - or maybe an MP, then I too can only turn up to work 39% of the time.

OK... rant over - terribly sorry about that.

Yesterday I pointed out some of the things that I think the LAS are doing wrong with respect to the post-qualification training of ambulance crews.

Today I hope to be a lot more positive and provide some solutions.

The one solution that I'm not going to discuss is the need to provide many more formal, multi-day and single day, training courses as I think that goes largely without saying.

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The first problem is that we are still intent on chasing the pointless ORCON target, with too many calls, calls that are inappropriately triaged and not enough staff and ambulances training takes a back seat to pleasing the government.

One thing that has been mentioned a lot internally of late is that there are 400 new staff joining the service. If this is true then there should be enough staff to enable in-service training to really take off - if not then how have we managed to cope with the current number of staff?

Increased numbers of staff means that perhaps we might be able to take crews off the road for protected training days - days where Control won't be ringing constantly to see if the training is finished.

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One day a month should be a protected training day. Lets assume twenty weekdays in a month - that means that 1/20th of staff could be trained every day. Surely we have enough capacity for 1/20th of staff to be off the road at once - with 400 people joining the service and plenty of people wanting to do overtime to pay their mortgage there shouldn't be a reduction in active road staff.

We should employ people who have a background in education to come up with a syllabus or framework for training. The syllabus should be reviewed every few months to take in new research and practice methods.

How much could you fit into twelve days of training throughout a year? Make them twelve-hour training days and you are looking at 144 hours of training a year. That should be enough to keep us up to date as well as reinforcing skills that we don't practice that often.

How would we pay for this? If we removed a few assistant to the assistant of the assistant director of operations (East London) and returned them to the road we would not only save money, but also get a few more road staff back.

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The officers who provide this training should be educated outside of the service - they should be put on education courses that aren't connected to the NHS. This is how you bring in new ideas on educational theory.

Why, for instance, aren't the current training department investing in e-learning that staff can do on their own time? Why aren't they doing a podcast for crews to listen to as they commute into work? Why aren't they building a library of texts and research that we can use? Why aren't we all given an ATHENS account so that we can look up things ourselves?

Our service phones are capable of playing MP3 files - why aren't we using that to deliver training?

Should I really have to resort to looking up things on Wikipedia on my iPhone during my shift?

We need fresh new ideas that stretch the method of learning from the current 'Powerpoint slides being read out in a classroom' into something more engaging.

Why aren't we spending time in hospital to learn more from our colleagues there? I know that my experience of working in a hospital all those years ago makes me a better EMS.

An example of how this works really well are the heart attacks that we take into the angioplasty labs. When you take in your first one the staff ask if we would like to stay and watch - then they would talk us through what they were doing - and crews enthusiastically embraced this. It was interesting, useful knowledge presented in a really good way.

Then the crews, normally a cynical bunch, return to station and talk about how 'cool' it is and share their expanded knowledge with enthusiasm.

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I've often called for the ORCON target to be scrapped - but for that to happen I think I'd need to kidnap the minister for health and demand it before I start sending him back in small pieces.

We should set up an internal standard for educating our staff - all staff should have X amount of hours training every year. That no more than 2% of training days can be cancelled. That staff should expect professional tuition. Standards that show everyone that the service is serious about training and maintaining it's staff.

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It's not enough to throw education at people and expect it to stick. At least once every year staff should be assessed on their skills and knowledge and (with no risk of disciplinary action) should then, if they are found to be below standard, go for further training.

Currently if you have poor practice it is not recognised until a patient complains or dies. Then the person is disciplined and is either sacked or given 'advice and guidance' which means re-training. By assessing people regularly you can prevent these adverse outcomes and the need to 'punish' staff.

I've seen people with their hand position in the wrong place for CPR, I've seen people placing the leads for an ECG on the patient incorrectly - by assessing people we would be able to pick this poor practice up and correct it, hopefully before it becomes a problem.

I emphasise that this mustn't be a disciplinary procedure - instead it should be a way to re-train people before they end up being disciplined for poor practice.

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By reaching out to other parts of the NHS we should get better at getting feedback to ambulance crews - was that patient I brought in getting the right care from me or did the doctors and nurses at the hospital just roll their eyes at my treatment of them and say nothing?

It is part of the job that I have only a limited time of patient contact and no real way of knowing if what I did for them was the right thing to do. The patient vanishes into the hospital and unless I make a real effort (and probably breach data protection legislation) I have no idea if my treatment of them was correct.

We should build a pathway from the hospital back to us road staff so that we can gain confidence in our treatment of patients and also so that any training issues can be flagged up.

It shouldn't just be restricted to hospitals - we should be sent out with social carers, district nurses and community psychiatric teams. We should be entering GP surgeries and learning about their jobs. Why aren't we going into medical education institutions to share our knowledge with the students there? The learning could go both ways there.

At present some of our patient report forms are audited - the last time I looked I'd had three report forms audited over the last two and a half years. The only feedback that I got was in a meaningless 'compliance' percentage, which if you look at it closely is incredibly statistically flawed.

(For example - for someone with a diabetic problem you get marked down if you don't treat for hypo- and hyperglycaemia at the same time. Which is impossible as they are mutually exclusive conditions. Also the marking criteria is out of date as the treatment has changed).

What we need is more regular feedback on our report forms by not forcing the team leaders who are supposed to do this onto the road to make ORCON targets.

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We have an internal magazine - mostly it concerns itself with ambulance crews who have delivered a baby, or the survivor of a cardiac arrest meeting the crew who saved their life. Lots of little pieces about a crew treating someone for smoke inhalation following a house fire. Only a small part of it's content is concerned with training issues.

I would suggest that this balance needs to be flipped around. It's true that it's nice to celebrate our successes, but once you've read that type of story once or twice it gets old fast. Instead the training department should have a larger say in what goes into the magazine. New policies should be highlighted and case studies and foundations for home study should be more available. Isn't that more important?

We get a printed bulletin every week, but we don't always get it delivered to the station, nor do we always get the time to read it, there is only one printed copy per station (although it is also on the internal website) - meanwhile the internal magazine is sent individually to each member of staff. Which of these two approaches is more likely to reach the road staff? And which one is filled with 'feel good' stories instead of more important clinical updates?

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Touching once more on communication - how can I learn about best practice, or even just simple little tricks from my fellow road colleagues? Currently there is no way to communicate our knowledge between us.

As an example I met an FRU from our of area on a recent job and he tied a head bandage in a new way that I'd never seen before and it worked really well. Without that chance meeting how else could he have shared that knowledge?

Our communication at the moment is very 'top down', what we need to have is some way of communicating around our own level and an easier way to communicate back up the management structure.

The easy way of doing this would be via an internal forum - we are many staff spread over a large geographical area - isn't that what internet communication was designed for?

Where is the internal training blog that allows comments? Where is the wiki of best practice? Where is the forum where ideas can be shared?

I can tell you from experience that blogs, wikis and forums are incredibly easy to set up and with the proper community rules are also easy to maintain.

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So, in summation, what we need is protected training times that can't be cancelled, a and high standard for our education. We should use all the methods that modern teaching uses, including learning at a distance, e-learning and podcasts or videocasts that can be viewed on station or at home.

We should partner with hospitals, GP surgeries and medical education establishments to expand our experience beyond the back of our ambulance as this is something where knowledge could flow both ways. We should make feedback, both internally and externally, much simpler and encourage this discussion as much as possible.

We should use our existing communication pathways to better educate staff - there are huge problems at the moment due to the large area that we cover although by setting up the communication tools we can pretty much guarantee education.

Finally we should put education as a much higher priority than it is at the moment - without education all we road staff feel that we are doing is 'stopping the ORCON clock'. With education you will be able to get a highly motivated workforce that will result in improved performance, and more importantly, improved care.

Am I a taxi driver with bandages whose job is to get to a location in eight minutes, or am I a well trained, well equipped professional with the ability and knowledge to provide effective medical care in emergency situations?

At the moment I feel like a taxi driver.

Today I am going to tell to you about in service training, and where I see the LAS as failing - tomorrow I'll give my ideas for how we can improve this situation.

Across the NHS workers receive in-service training where they learn new skills, refresh old skills, get updated on new equipment and policies and even get assessed on how well they currently perform those skills.

In the LAS that just doesn't happen.

I went looking for my 'continuing professional development' folder so that I could tell you the last time I had some training. I can't find it, I suspect that it is buried somewhere up in my loft, which gives you an idea of when I last used it.

I have a clinical guidelines book - it's dated 2006.

I honestly can't remember the last bit of training I had - I think that it was some years ago and was about how to escape from an attacker.

Actually that isn't true - the last training session I had was on how to use the new radios, I had this training a few weeks after the radios had been 'rolled out', lasted an hour and we were constantly interrupted by Control asking when our ambulance would be available to go back on the road. This was the third time I'd tried to get trained, the first time I tried to get trained it was cancelled ten minutes into the session, the second time it was cancelled before I arrived at station.

My last CPR training was when the number of compressions per breath was changed to 30:2 (whenever that was)- this was given to me in a ten minute presentation from a team leader.

The last time we were given a new drug to play with I had a single sheet of A4 paper which I was to sign and return to say that I had understood the information on it.

Policies change and unless I see the one bulletin on station directing me to the incredibly poorly-designed internal website (that I seldom have a chance to check because we are so busy) I'll never hear about it.

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The problem is that a well trained staff doesn't help the service hit it's governmental ORCON target. Remember that the ORCON target means that reaching someone who is dead beyond any hope of resuscitation in under eight minutes is a success, while reaching a patient in eight minutes and one second yet saving their life is a failure.

When our REAP level goes too high, due to a high volume of calls, or the service not meeting our ORCON target, training is one of the first things to be cancelled. Sadly 'too high' is the normal REAP level these days.

Training is not given the priority that I think it needs - the service wants ambulance crews to leave patients at home (it saves us money and time - meaning that we can get back on the road to continue hitting that ORCON target). But how can crews be confident about leaving patients at home when our post-qualification training is so woefully inadequate?

Since leaving nursing can you guess how many times I have been taught to wash my hands? Handwashing is incredibly important in infection control and you need to be taught how to do this properly, even assessed using a gel that glows under ultraviolet light. There is a specific, effective way to wash your hands that is taught in hospitals in order to make sure it is effective.

I have, since joining the ambulance service, never been taught how to wash my hands.

We have new vehicles being rolled out across the service, there are some big changes as to how the equipment on them is to be used. The training session for these new vehicles takes two hours. I've attempted to get trained on these vehicles on four occasions - on all four occasions the training has been cancelled.

The reason for this training to be cancelled? Someone in Control has decreed that you can't be trained during the rest-break window of your shift.

If we don't get a rest break then we get paid £10. If we are being trained for two hours of that window then the chances of us having a rest break are reduced and the service will have to pay us £10

So, we don't get trained because of the expense of £10.

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When I started in the ambulance service we were hit over the head with sixteen weeks of intensive classroom training that turned plumbers, housewives, carpenters and office workers into ambulance people. It wasn't much fun but it seemed effective - we were taught by ambulance people who'd become training officers.

I'd like to tell you how the training has changed, I think it's now more central and people are trained over the period of (I think) three years to be paramedics. Carpenter to paramedic in three years is... quite fast. You could do it in the 'old days' but by then you'd have had around three years 'on the road' learning the basics of your craft, not around a year.

My knowledge of the current training is informed only by the students who are coming out of the training school - and it's not good. Courses are rewritten as they are being taught, days back in the classroom to consolidate knowledge gained on the road are cancelled (most likely due to trying to reach the ORCON target), students are coming out of training to do practical placements with some rather strange ideas of how we work on the road.

We sometimes get students being put on a placement with us - my crewmate is a paramedic and she is supposed to educate the student in how to practically do our work. She is supposed to have a PPED course under her belt, a course that teaches her how to teach student paramedics. She doesn't. She's asked to be put on this course for a number of years (longer than I've been working with her) and she keeps getting no answer.

How is this being fair, or maintaining the quality of training, for the student paramedic?

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I've personally noticed that my skills have decreased since joining the ambulance service. My knowledge of drugs has started dripping out my ears, my understanding of medical conditions is decreasing and the physical skills of medical care are atrophying.

The reason is that, for 80% of our jobs there is no need for an ambulance, nor for hospital treatment. We arrive, I chat with the patient and then tell them to take a seat in the ambulance. By rote I check their blood pressure and pulse and then we take them to hospital. With such an influx of uncomplicated cases (drunks, colds, runny noses, babies with a high temperature) it is obvious that there is going to be a loss of skills.

Unfortunately, with no training or regular assessment, this skill decay goes unchallenged.

I try to keep my skills up, but with no support from work it's incredibly difficult - so I find myself turning to American EMS sites and podcasts to try and maintain some sort of education.

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One of the ways that you build a motivated work force is through training - something that isn't happening. We get up, turn up to work and do our best to work 'safe'. In this case 'safe' means working so that we don't get any complaints or lose our jobs.

There is no enthusiasm to learn more about our job, about medical conditions or how to do things more effectively.

Hardly anyone reads research on pre-hospital care. After a twelve hour shift I'm seldom in the mood to hit the books myself. The service doesn't provide any encouragement for us to learn on our own, we don't have any libraries, the internal website doesn't have any links with e-learning or educational sites (not that I think any UK based ones exist for ambulance workers) and we don't have any protected time where we can feedback with our peers.

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So, in summary - I think that in the pursuit of pointless targets we do not get the training that we deserve. We do not get the training that the public would expect us to have. Training courses are incredibly rare and are cancelled more often than they are run. What post-qualification training we do get is on an ad hoc basis and doesn't take account of modern training techniques.

Current training of trainees also seems inadequate and it seems that all that is wanted is 'bums on seat' (although this is only my impression that I've had from the students I've spoken to).

There is no counter for skills decay, nor any assessment of the skills that we do occasionally use in order to make sure that we are providing best practice.

In essence I feel like a taxi driver with bandages - not someone educated to provide pre-hospital care beyond the very basics.

Somewhat of a ramble I'm afraid - my brain is shredded at the moment.

Another TV medical series, another missed opportunity. I'm yet to see the first episode of NBC's 'Trauma', mostly because I'm not American, but I have read some of the responses to the first episode, from the short 'Funniest damned EMS show since Mother, Juggs and Speed. Wait, you mean it's not a comedy?' to the longer review on JEMS

'I also realize that it's 2009, and writers and producers like to inject sex into every episode, and have characters with cocky, rebellious 90210ish cast members who bring a host of personal problems to work, but this series bubbles over with a cast that should be stationed on Wisteria Lane, not the streets of San Francisco. The premiere of Trauma doesn't begin with a well-dressed crew checking their drugs and equipment before their first run. It starts with the sights and sounds of the boyfriend/girlfriend crew having sex in the patient compartment of their rig. Then, before you can get the words "I can't believe it" out of your lips, you hear the dispatcher (who obviously knows the way the crew starts their shift), tell "Naughty Nancy" Carnahan to button her blouse and respond to an emergency call.'

Even the NAEMT has penned a rather strong letter to the producers,

Why is it so hard to write a decent, realistic TV drama about emergency or pre-hospital care?

I think that there are two reasons, first that TV producers think that viewers are stupid, secondly that the writers carry paintbrushes.

I remember, as a child, watching Rolf Harris on a Saturday afternoon creating works of art using 4" paintbrushes. Big sheet of paper, slopping the paint everywhere and then, as if by magic, a painting would appear.

Big tools, used well to create wonderfully subtle works of art.

Writers today also use those 4" brushes, but they use them not for portraits, but to paint walls. Huge strokes slabbered on with no finesse. Before I visited NBC's character biographies I could guess the characters 'personalities'. You'd have the maverick, the womaniser, the hard as nails female, the unsure rookie, the heartless administrator, the drinker/gambler/philanderer. The list goes on. Oh, and we must not forget the racially diverse cast of good looking people.

Look at those character types, you can see them appearing in pretty much every show.

For another non-medical example of how characters need to be drawn in these wide strokes look at the new TV series 'Flash forward', based off a book by Robert J. Sawyer - in the book the protagonist is a physicist. In the TV series, an FBI agent. I'm guessing that it's easier to create an interesting FBI agent (with an alcoholic past natch) than it is a sympathetic physicist.

Writers seem to be using these shorthand clichés so that they don't confuse people, and because they are so easy to write for.

It's the same with the 'plots' that they find themselves in - after watching one TV programme too many I have come up with a variation on Chekhov's gun. 'Chekhov's pregnancy' - 'If there is a heavily pregnant woman in the first act, she will get trapped in a lift/locked building/under rubble and will then give birth'.

(Needless to say, on TV pregnant women race through the stages of labour in fifteen minutes, not the more normal twelve hours or so)

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So that's the writers, but why do they write such rubbish? Well I sincerely think that it is down to the TV production companies wanting to keep things simple. A writer once told me about his great script that got cut to shreds because the producers wanted 'people in tower blocks to understand it'.

It's that talking down to people that really gets on my nerves - that we can't have TV that is well written, that shows that not all politicians are corrupt, that all doctors are worthy, that all journalists are sleazy and will stab anyone in the back to get a story, that the police have a heart of gold, that nurses are sex maniacs or that all married men desire extra-marital sex.

Does TV really have to be all broad strokes and dumbed down? Can we not use TV to show people the subtleties of life rather than a Daily Mail diet of 'X is Good, Y is Bad'.

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And yes, 'Casualty' does still make me grind my teeth - 'blonde sexbomb'. 'joker', 'socially awkward nerd in glasses' who, in the their second episode tell us what their personalities are by talking to a psychiatrist. Next series I think they'll stop giving the characters names and instead they will instead walk around carrying placards with their character traits written on them.

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What you need is an ambulance worker who likes little old ladies, not because he cares for his elderly grandmother, but just because he finds them sweet. Who dislikes drunks, but secretly enjoys picking them up because they are an easy job that he doesn't need to talk to them while they sleep on his stretcher. Who sees that the ambulance targets are crap but is powerless to do anything about it, and who isn't a 'joker' and 'maverick' a 'bad-ass with a heart' but is just a normal person doing an unusual job.

One of the jobs that we do from our station is inter-hospital transfers, this isn't unusual - most ambulance stations have to do their fair share of them. What is unusual for us (and our sister station) is that we have one of the shortest transfers possible.

The map you can see is our local hospital, at one end of the red line I have expertly drawn is the entrance to the A&E department, at the other end is the 'Gateway surgical centre' (GSC) [PDF]. The GSC is where the planned surgical day and short stay cases are handled.

It is apparently a very green building.

That red line, the length of our transport is 400 metres. I measured it.

When a patient suffers a set-back from their planned surgery - for example they get an infection or they start to suffer angina pain they need to go to the 'big' hospital.

And that is when we get called.

The GSC calls 999 and asks for an ambulance to take their patient to the 'proper' hospital.

All of which is dependant on there actually being an ambulance available - which there isn't always. If we are busy then they have to wait, but if they tell us the patient has difficulty in breathing or chest pain then they get a 'cat A' response.

If there is a shortage of ambulances then little old Doris having a heart attack will not have an ambulance because we are moving a patient 400 metres down the road.

You would have thought that, while they were planning the WiFi, the rain water collection and the heat recovery, they may have given a though as to how to move a patient 400 metres without the need for a frontline emergency ambulance.

I mention this because of a recent job I had transferring someone from the GSC to the A&E department, and the attitude that met me when we arrived.

We'd been called to a member of staff who had been taken unwell, so we dutifully blue lighted the 400 metres to go and pick them up. We pulled our stretcher up to the ward where the patient was, rung the bell to be allowed access onto the ward and waited for the door to be answered.

When it was finally answered* by a nurse I wasn't met with a 'hello', or a 'welcome'.

No, what the nurse said to me was, "Oh, it's you - you took your time".

I looked at my crewmate - did I really hear that correctly? Was a supposed professional being dismissive towards me?

'Did I hear that right?', I asked my crewmate. She nodded yes while picking her jaw up off the floor.

Well, I had to challenge that statement - we'd only got the job three minutes earlier, so Control must have been holding the call for people who were ill, but not within an actual hospital.

The nurse wasn't interested in talking to me. So I did what I do when I get annoyed at nursing homes. I become Extremely Competent And Professional.

So I tried to get a history, none of the staff there seemed to know what had happened. I asked what the patient's observations were - all I got was 'they are all right'. When the staff suggested that I couldn't be trusted to handover to A&E that the patient had been given a painkiller I mentioned that, unlike them, I'm allowed to give drugs without a doctor's say so.

I just kept asking them reasonable questions that they couldn't answer to let them know that I knew what I was doing, even if they didn't.

(At least they had done a blood sugar measurement - they told me that three times. It was one of the few things they did tell me about).

In part I suspect that it is because they haven't the faintest idea what we do, in part it's because they don't often deal with ambulance crews, in part it's because they don't deal with 'emergency' situations and in part I think there is an element of looking down their nose at us.

After all, we are just there to transport a patient for them, it's not like we know how to look after people.

The thing is, "Oh, it's you - you took your time", is something that I would be surprised to hear coming from a member of the public, but to hear that from a nurse - who we are here to help just pushes my buttons.

It was quite amusing to see the expression on the A&E nurse's face when I handed the patient over to them and told them what had been going on.

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*In the past I've resorted to going through the hospital switchboard in order to phone the ward and let them know we have arrived in many of the hospitals I frequent

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I'm not dead, nor giving up blogging - I've just had a fair bit going on in my life at the moment, hopefully things will have settled down for a bit.

Thanks for all the comments on my last post - all very helpful. Although it seems a bit off that I have to rely on a personal blog to get feedback on a clinical issue, but that's a tale for another day...

Due to me avoiding a et of nightshifts by burning some of my annual leave, I have around two weeks off work. As this is so close to my other holiday I'm running a little short on 'tales from the ambulance', and so I'm afraid that for the next couple of days I'm going to write about whatever interests me.

I apologise in advance - but I'm not just an 'ambulance driver' you know...

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I was having a little to and fro with @Charlesarthur yesterday on twitter; I was bemoaning the difficulty in buying ebooks (after struggling with the rather poor showing of such sites in the UK and then cursing the inability to 'import' ebooks from the US), he on the other hand was suggesting that the format isn't proven yet - much like betamax, minitape and eight tracks.

The discussion started when I started whinging that there isn't a simple 'iTunes' like store for ebooks that might help wipe out regionalisation, encourage reading and drive down the prices of ebooks while also making impulse purchasing more likely. Most of this was prompted by the headache of usability and stability that is the Waterstones ebook site.

[The price of ebooks are often the same as the same title in hardback. This strikes me as incredibly dumb as the cost to 'make' each unit of book is practically zero (that's price per unit, not overall price as you need to take into account copyediting, advances, promotion and the like). Additionally the purchaser cannot do as much with an ebook as they can with a physical product - due to DRM the customer can't lend it, nor sell it on. So why so expensive?]

The price issue is one reason why the Friday project cut the price of many of their ebooks to less than a pint of beer. Well worth a test purchase to see if you like the idea of ebooks. For example you might like 'In Stitches' or the really rather good 'The Equivoque Principle'. [disclaimer - The Friday Project are my publishers].

But this discussion was a really good one, I learnt a few things and then, by talking with someone smarter than me, it led me to a flash of insight...

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Digital media has come after pretty much all the recent innovations in other media formats. Before MP3 there were CDs, still the standard for music distribution. Before .avi/DIVX/.M4v DVDs were the standard for movie distribution (I'm ignoring bluray as it's not taken off massively at the moment). Books have pretty much always been text on paper from before computers were a glint in Mr Babbage's eye.

Now, the important thing about the video and music formats is that when you move to digital you can bring your 'old' media with you. You can rip your CDs into a digital format that your computer and iPod can play. It took a bit of time but all my CDs are boxed away in my loft and now reside on one of my network hard drives. DVDs are much the same, it is easy to convert them from a physical disk into a digital file that you can play on your computer, laptop or mobile phone.

If I had the inclination I could convert all them into a digital format.

Both of these shifts in format from physical to digital are trivial to perform (even if it is illegal under British copyright law). You put a disc into your computer, click an import button on a computer programme and -pop- your media is now digital, portable and able to be backed up.

Books however are different.

To convert a book to a digital format there are two ways to go about it - You can sit at a keyboard and type it all in, or you can destroy the book by feeding it sheet by sheet through a scanner, then run OCR software that will do it's best to convert it into a text file, then you copyedit it for the errors put in by the OCR software. Both of these approaches need you to physically be at a machine working on converting the book into digital. You can't press a few buttons and leave it running overnight.

So, the problem with ebooks as a format is that you can't bring along your old media. I have shelves of books, my loft is full of books - I have more physical books in my possession than at any other time in my life. I'd love to be able to convert them to a digital format, but it's just not realistically possible.

Instead, my only realistic and legal, option would be to purchase them again - which, for a few books, I'd be willing to do. But not all of those books are available in the UK in an ebook format, and those that are cost the same as a hardback.

Part of what let the iPod and other digital music players take off was the ability to play your old media, unlike the move from vinyl to CD there was no need to re-purchase your media. Do you think that iPods would be as popular if in order to use them you had to buy all your music yet again? And most of it wasn't available?

If there is anything that is going to hamper the ebook market from growing it is this lack of portability from your old format to a new one.

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The solution to promote ebooks and prevent people from visiting torrent sites is quite simple.

When you buy a physical book from Waterstones (who are the big player in the UK ebook market) they give you a coupon or code which allows you to download that book for free, or at a greatly reduced cost, onto your reader. While it is true that some people will then give away the book, I would suggest that not many books are only ever read by one person in their lifetime anyway. And wouldn't you rather have customers coming to your e-store and then coming back for return business rather than visit the torrent sites for illegal copies of your book?

The alternative is to treat ebooks like a poor relation of physical product and then get stuffed when Amazon release the Kindle in the UK and Amazon starts offering a lot more stock for less money.

"The Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, his follow-up to 2003’s smash hit The Da Vinci Code, has become the top-selling item on Amazon.com. The e-reader edition is outselling the hardback copy of the novel, which had previously become the sixth best selling book of 2009 on pre-publication orders alone.

Commentators are wondering whether the book is heralding a new era in publishing. While Amazon is offering almost 50 per cent off the hardback copies, $16.17 instead of $29.99, the Kindle edition is available at just $9.99 – and there is no wait for delivery."