The Crawfs have been slumped in family consumeristic torpor, the children with assorted electronic games and I with my excellent new Skeletool.

Not so impressed with the Sony Reader. This is an idea which should be good in a few years’ time, but not yet (compare the early greyscreen must-have Palm Pilot with an i-Phone now). If you are thinking about buying books to read, go and buy them rather than this costly gizmo. Books (it turns out) have several advantages – they tend to be light, not too expensive and fairly easy to read.

True, the Sony Reader comes with 100 free classic books and it is not that easy to carry those around in book form in one briefcase. Yet do I really want to read these classics? Alas, not most of them. Nor do I want to waste time grappling with the gruesome Waterstones website to find other books to download. Sony seem to have tried to recreate in digital form the ‘book experience’ – as the i-Pod shows, the trick is to do that and redefine it too.

Most of our Christmas gift shopping this year was done on-line – anything to avoid the revolting car-parks in Oxford. Amazon, IWOOT, Photobox, John Lewis and a couple of other websites served us well. Easy-to-use sites, fast delivery, speedy light-touch service when (rarely) something was not quite right.

Is shopping as we have come to know it (large ‘shopping-centres’) basically an information deficiency problem? As the Long Tail phenomenon develops, what will be the social consequences of more people (ie the e-savvy ones) tending to opt out of actually going to or working in shops? Will so-called public spaces tend to get even worse?

See eg this: Blog and community first, selling things second. Voice builds trust and trust sells stuff. 

Enough ad hoc Christmas retail musings.

Cheery seasonal news: the phoney Kwanzaa holiday cult of recent years is going, if not quite gone.