Author: Andrew

  • Printed book sales are up. No wait, they’re down.

    The much reported pre-Christmas ‘fightback’ by printed books in the UK sales war against their ebook darker side appears to have lasted just a week. If, that is, there ever was a fightback in the first place. Just a week after The Bookseller reported printed book sales soaring to a three year high, it followed…

  • Is a smartphone running Ubuntu the only device you’ll ever need?

    Canonical’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, announced on Tuesday that its Ubuntu operating system has been modified to run on smartphones, opening up the possibility of using the same operating system on phones and PCs. A key selling point of Ubuntu for phones is the ability to dock an Ubuntu smartphone with a monitor and keyboard. It…

  • Netbooks were a flawed concept but so are tablets

    The announcement that Asus and Acer have stopped manufacture of netbooks (Sayonara Netbooks, Guardian 31 December 2012) brings to an end a promising but flawed experiment in low cost, high portability computing. They were an interesting, but insufficiently flexible tool, that has been overtaken by tablet computers in the consumer’s quest for highly portable computing.

  • Why I’m not Loving Miss Hatto

    Judging by the reviews, it should have been easy to love Loving Miss Hatto (BBC1 Sunday 23 December), Victoria Wood’s drama inspired by the story of classical pianist Joyce Hatto. Glance at any review (examples are The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and Huffington Post Uk) and you have to conclude that anyone who didn’t find…

  • The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Slow Journey

    Deep into the first hour of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – I think it was towards the end of the dish washing scene – I began to wonder if even a hobbit might find Peter Jackson’s film a little on the slow side. At 170 minutes, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a very…