I'm mentioned in this column for 5th estate,

Scott Pack, publisher of The Friday Project, shares this philosophy. Acquired by HarperCollins last year, The Friday Project operates under an innovative publishing model - releasing titles under Creative Common licenses and distributing digital copies of books for free. According to Pack, they “have always experienced positive sales as a result of giving away free books.” When the Friday Project made one of their most successful titles, Blood, Sweat and Tea, available as a free downloand from their website, sales immediately jumped. The results of giving away free books has been so consistently positive, in fact, that Pack plans to find even more for creative ways to give the follow up, ‘More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea’, away for free. “We are looking to make More Blood…available for free on any platform we can, as well as creating an Issuu widget so that anyone else can share it as well.”

Which is good, it's always been my belief that giving away my book leads to more sales and it's nice to see that we have the numbers to prove that. If it didn't sell more I don't think that Harper would let me release book two in a similar way,in fact in a way that makes the free download even more attractive and easier to obtain.

I'm really happy that Scott is handling my book.

Playing For Change | Song Around The World "Stand By Me" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

As highlighted by RRD

Some quick comments to two pieces of ambulance news.

A chief constable has said he fears an injured person will die in the back of a police car heading for hospital due to poor ambulance response times.

Mick Giannasi of Gwent Police, was commenting after it emerged 92 people had to be taken to hospital by his officers over six months.

In December 2008 alone, police cars were used as a last resort 41 times because ambulances were not available.

I'd like to see the LAS figures on the number of calls that come to us from the police, normally assaults, that have 'no units to send'. The police are just as busy and stretched as us, and often our jobs overlap - it's just a matter of numbers that we sometimes end up doing each other's work. To be honest, given the exceedingly minor injuries that a lot of 'assaults' cause, it would seem a waste to have an ambulance pick up someone with a few scratches, of course using a police car in such a case, while quicker, is still not an ideal use of resources.

But picture the uproar from the headline 'Assault victim told to make own way to hospital'. Even if such an assault is a scratch the bad PR isn't worth it - which is one reason why we take everyone to hospital.

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A Derbyshire man is angry his 98-year-old mother had to wait several hours for an ambulance, on two occasions, after injuring herself in falls.

Brian Beardsley said his mother Agnes had lengthy waits for an ambulance called by a doctor at her Ilkeston care home on 4 March and 27 April.

Mr Beardsley says the waits were not acceptable for a 98-year-old.

East Midlands Ambulance Service officials apologised for the delay but said they had to prioritise 999 calls.

Mrs Beardsley, who has a history of falling, suffered head injuries during three falls in one day at the Victoria Care Home on 27 April.

Paramedics were on hand in minutes for two but for the third she had a lengthy wait.

Sadly the number of ambulances available are not infinite, and so all calls have to be prioritised - in this case the patient had been seen by a doctor who said that a four hour wait was acceptable, and she had to wait twenty minutes longer than that. I'm trying my hardest to see how this is 'news'. Note that when a doctor hadn't been out to see her first that 'Paramedics were on hand in minutes'. The flip side of the story is of course 'My husband died of a heart attack while ambulance crews dealt with a minor injury already seen by a doctor'.

It's lovely to be hated so much.

Due to being off sick I've been spending a lot of time in bed (as animals in captivity are wont to do) and the reason why I've been waking up at 10am is because that is when the alarm has gone off for me to take my pill.

Except this morning, which explains some of the early morning blogposts. Instead I was woken up by a polar bear.

I was dreaming about attending the Eurovision song contest, Ewan Spence was there (as he is in real life, doing a sterling job blogging and reporting it) and I was with him. Then we went outside where I was attacked by a polar bear that grabbed at my legs.

This woke me up and was, I suspect, a dream brought about as a consequence of the restless legs I've been having.

So I wrote and read some blog posts from bed for two hours and then nodded back off to sleep.

Where in my dream a polar bear was attacking my house and managed to drag off my father (who I haven't seen for over twenty years, and have barely thought of at all in that time). This time it was the alarm that woke me up, not the bear nibbling on my legs.

Is the universe trying to tell me something, something obvious like 'avoid polar bears', or do I just need one of those nice jackets that does up at the back? Does the inclusion of Ewan mean that his 'marketing' is working so well he has seared himself on my subconscious?

I just don't know - all I do know is that I'm avoiding the zoo for some time.

I finished a computer game the other day - Saint's Row 2 on the Xbox 360. This is a very rare event, normally I'll play a game for around 2/3rds of it\s length and then get bored and play something else. Either that or I'll get stuck and give it up rather than throw the controller across the room.

(I found that the best way to play Saints Row 2 is to play like some sort of 90's comic book villain - it makes the insanity of the game more... 'real' is the wrong word, maybe 'internally consistent').

Meanwhile I haven't touched World of Warcraft in the past few weeks - in part this is due to frustration at my inability to complete one of the yearly achievements due to a 'Player Vs. Player' component and partly due to a realisation that I wasn't hugely enjoying the game anymore.

During this extended period of time off work (something that I can see ending soon) I could have spent a lot of time grinding my way through Warcraft, even taking part in more 'end-game content'; something that is difficult for me to do normally due to the need to play with other people - co-ordinating these meetings is a bit of a pain when your workday finishes around 19:00, frequently later and nine other people are relying on you.

But instead I found that I was looking at my time in Azeroth (the WoW gameworld) as being like a job, and a not very enjoyable job at that.

I think I understand why I have fallen out of love of Warcraft - in part it's because it doesn't provide what I'm looking for.

Essentially I am a 'role-player', I like to play a role of a character, my aside about playing Saints Row 2 as a comic book villain is telling in that I was playing a 'role' rather than just using my game character as a proxy to shoot my way across the game world.

In my MMORPG I'd love to actually play a character with a bit of a backstory and drives and ambitions that form how that character looks at the world - When I started playing WoW for instance, my Paladin character was a disappointment to his family and so he busied himself looking for the Progenitors of the Azeroth world, being a replacement for a more normal drive to please his parents.

In the latest expansion to WoW the backstory has a lot of content about these Progenitors - so you would think that this would make me happy.

Sadly, while trying to listen to a very 'lore-heavy' NPC talk I was constantly being harranged by the group I was with that I was wasting time in listening to the speech and that I should start killing monsters again.

It would seem that Hell is, indeed, other people.

In these multiplayer games the chance to play a role is often spoiled by other players who just wish to rush through the content and grab the rewards. Even in a game server that is explicitly reserved for role-players.

This cannot compare to the single-player game where, while there is no audience, to watch your role-play, at least the world can remain fairly consistent within your own head. With no computer controlled character breaking character and telling you that you are 'n00bish'.

So, I suspect that I'll be cancelling my WoW account, as an open-ended game the chance to sink hours of time into it when I am gaining little pleasure means that I'm paying to to work, not have fun.

Instead I shall concentrate on some of the single player games that I have sitting on my gaming shelf. Next up will probably be either 'Mass Effect' or 'Fable 2', both games I seem to have stopped playing at that 2/3rds mark.

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The other reason to drop WoW is that it's all about the questing - where is the game where I can work towards being the best woodcutter I can possibly be without having to become a 'hero' and beat up monsters?

I would guess that EVE-Online might be the closest one can get to this idea, but is also another huge time-sink, and is perhaps lacking a little in the 'game' component due to the concentration on the business simulation.

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Incidentally, the complete soundtrack for 'Beyond Good and Evil', one of my favourite games is available here - 'Beyond Good and Evil', besides being an excellent game (currently on Steam) was one of the first games I played where the in-game music completely blew me away.

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Which makes for all sorts of interesting if you can get your own book out from, say a USB memory stick, and into the real world. I may have to have a wander down there and see it in action myself one day.
I see this as a precursor of all things 3D printer-y.

High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else. The internet is a marvelous tool and clearly it is the informational delivery system of our future, but thus far it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin –namely the newspapers themselves.

In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.

Which is similar to what, in part, I was aiming at here.

Today will probably be 'lots of links' day.