Last night I managed to do something I've never done before, and delete the task bar from my laptop. This mystified the Systems Administrator, who asked what on earth I'd been doing, and I said nothing except try to open Windows Explorer. The SA had to resort to the nuclear option of temporarily removing the battery. The SA is not a fan of Windows 7. One friend who is a Mac user says we should convert, but I couldn't face the hassle, unless I had to.
What I was trying to do was get into Amazon to buy something for my Kindle. I was given the Kindle in the autumn for my birthday, and was thrilled with it (when the bewildered eastern European delivery driver finally managed to find our house), but the other books I was given at the same time kept me going until December, and the SA and I have a pact not to buy ourselves books in the run up to birthdays and Christmas, so once I'd finished Andrew Rawnsley's history of the last years of the Labour government on the Kindle I didn't like to get anything else.
I did download some poetry, some free and some very cheap. Cheap poetry on Kindle turned out not to be a good idea, as the budget edition of the poems and prose of Ernest Dowson dispensed with the lines in the poetry and ran each verse together into a single paragraph. I think that is down to inappropriate use of text recognition software, as distinct from scanning images into electronic book form.
Amazon are missing a trick when it comes to sales for Kindles, though I dare say they are working on it, because it still doesn't seem to be possible to buy a download as a present for somebody else. A download purchased on my Amazon account is directed to my Kindle, and I can't find any option to present it to another person instead. Amazon will let you print or e-mail gift certificates, and being able to do the same thing for an electronic book should be the next logical step. True, you rob the recipient of the pleasure of choice compared to a gift certificate, but that's the case when you give a physical book, and part of the fun of giving and receiving books is hitting the right note, thus demonstrating how carefully you have observed and understood your loved one's tastes.
I decided to follow up the Andrew Rawnsley with Alistair Darling's memoirs. Poor Alistair Darling, I don't think he has made it big time in the political biography stakes, as Back from the Brink is already down to £2.09 as an e-book. The SA would like to read that as well at some point, and another area where Amazon ought to up their game with Kindles is that there needs to be a way of lending e-books other than by lending the reading device. The SA and I share quite a few of our books, or at least we do in some subjects. History, politics, food and some aspects of urban design are joint enthusiasms, though I won't be clamouring to borrow The Kronstadt Revolution when the SA's finished it, and the SA's familiarity with my gardening books stops at checking the covers very carefully to see which ones I've already got. There was a new history of East London that we both eyed up and neither bought, in case the other did, and a book about skyscrapers that the SA thought about buying for me but felt embarrassed that it might really be a present to self. The covering phrase when presenting a parcel of probable mutual interest is 'this is a bit of a present for both of us'.
Addendum A late straggling Christmas card arrived this morning. From the annotations on the envelope we gathered it had reached us via another house, whose occupants had kindly bothered to stick it back in the post with a note saying it wasn't theirs. Our predecessors probably thought the name they chose for this house was very appropriate and charming. It is appropriate, though a bit naff, and it is unfortunate that there are at least two other houses with the same name in nearby villages. Add in the English tendency to name a road after the place it goes to, and there's ample scope for confusion. I was slightly indignant the card went astray as it had our full postcode on the envelope, but looking at that carefully I though the sender had probably written H as U.
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