UK Booksellers diss the Google Book Settlement

The BA reaction is summarized on the Bookseller web site:

The trade body warned that the arrangement could create "a de facto monopoly" and "have a hugely damaging effect on the publishing and bookselling industry" if adopted in the UK.

One can hardly blame the BA, since booksellers would appear to be thoroughly disintermediated by the Google type of digital book platform (to declare an interest: the Exact Editions system is very similar in this). It is indeed hard to see why we will need high street bookshops if book distribution goes completely digital (hard to see why we will need Blockbusters or CD shops if film and music distribution goes completely digital). One does not see many typewriter shops these days. Sewing and knitting shops no longer carry as many printed patterns as they once did.

But will book distribution go completely digital? I wonder whether the bookselling outlook is really quite so gloomy. It is conceivable that traditional bookselling could continue in parallel with digital distribution. Several of our magazine publishers distribute what we call 'combined subs'. The print subscriber also gets a digital subscription. One reason this works is that the products are really rather different. Print magazines cannot be digital magazines and vice versa. The customer who gets both editions is actually getting something more useful, not a mere duplication.

We think publishers and booksellers should try selling 'combined' book and digital offerings. Whenever you buy a book and register your ownership you would obtain access to a personal subscription. Or the mechanism could work the other way round, digital offers could be used to promote hard copy sales. Proof of purchase of a digital edition would entitle you to a discount on the book {at Borders, Waterstones and participating booksellers}. That could help the traditional bookshop to retain its traditional showcase role. If the combined book+digital offer catches hold perhaps the digital delivery of books will help bookshops to sell more books. The publishers however have the whip hand in this. Its unlikely that the booksellers could set this system up without a publisher lead.

iPhones and Projectors

The iPhone is a surprisingly good reading platform. The touch interface works wonderfully, both in sliding digital pages and in shrinking or enlarging them; and the brilliance of the Apple design means that no one needs a user manual. Even with its very small screen area, broadsheet digital editions are easily read. The main snag holding us back from awarding Apple the universal digital reading device accolade is its limited battery life. iPhone users get used to coaxing and feeding the machine but it would be nice not to be aware of this.

Yes the screen is certainly small, but I am now used to peaking at my iPhone and to reading solid text off it; however it would be good to be able to project a sharp image on to the wall. How about this?




According to Engadget the Optoma PK-101 will cost about $500, weighs 120g and it throws a sharp and bright 60" image (can't be too sharp if its 480x320 pixels?). But I can see this becoming a must have add-on to the iPhone. If the Vodafone 3G connection in London were just a little bit faster, a little bit more predictable, I would feel happy about projecting live demos from my iPhone when we visit partners. That would be a wee bit cooler than the usual PowerPoint.

The iPhone Ocarina

A YouTube is worth 1,000 words




The video clip shows you how it works, and its great fun to play with. Costs 79 euro cents. Very easy to get started with little breaths.

Perhaps the cleverest aspect of this invention is the way Smule have made the toy viral. The app also lets you see any other ocarina players out there. There is a navigable 'earth' interface that allows you to zoom in and select named ocarina players. The app politely invites you to switch 'location services' on when you launch it.

Its a beautiful toy, a brilliant design, a very sweet application. It also leads me to wonder how inventors are going to start thinking about the social interactions we have with literary objects, books, magazines and documents when we access them from mobile devices as smooth and seductive as the iPhone.

Regulating the Google Settlement

While it is a very good thing that Google and the authors and publishers are not going to be involved in years of fruitless and expensive litigation, there may be some awkward consequences. The draft settlement stops the head-on dispute, but the compromise does appear to have some rough edges. Signing off on this settlement is going to be a tricky problem: no judge will want to be blamed for approving a system which violates public trust or creates a de facto monopoly. A lot in the settlement is indicative and provisional and interim (they don't quite say "If this doesnt work both parties agree that we will whistle up something else", but they come damned close to doing so on more than one occasion). Who, at this stage, knows how the various business models will work out (take a look at Georgia Harper's speculations on pricing "bins" here)? Will a poorly crafted and hastily approved settlement create as many problems as it solves?

But one of the clear things is that there is going to be a Books Rights Registry. This doesnt wait for the judge. It is already whirling into action and authors and publishers are addressing it. This agency is something that the books world needs and it has precedents and cousins in the many 'collection societies' that look after dispersed copyright interests (eg in music, graphic art, xerography etc). So we have a new 'Rights Society' one which serves the interests of authors and publishers in the management and exploitation of digital texts (so far only in the US, but the same model will doubtless be rolled out in other jurisdictions -- think about it: we just called up 150 or more digital collection agencies in different jurisdictions and languages). Google is paying $34.5 million for the creation of the first Books Rights Registry (whose ongoing operation will be funded by a levy from the rights managed) and it would seem highly likely that Google is already building it. That Google is doing this is in many ways a good thing -- what an appaling prospect if the publishers were to try and build such a system! But there are dangers and ironies in a situation where Google as the commercial fox, the first and prime exploiter of the distribution opportunities flowing from the settlement, is also designing the chicken wire and building the coop in which the hens will be housed. It is a bit odd for a commercial operator to building its own regulator. Yes, I know that the 8 directors of the Registry are all appointed by the publishers and the authors (4 each). But directors decide the issues that havent already been decided, its the architect and the plumbers who get the building to function. Odd, but possibly unavoidable in these strange circumstances.

Google, unlike the publishers, the authors or their agents, is capable of rapidly and elegantly building a databases system which maps and regulates the incredibly complex real world of copyright exceptions (I recall Frances Haugen's comment about Google's management of 'amazingly complicated' viewability restrictions). Google's code already understands much of the bizarre detail of the world of rights and Google also understands how these rights might need to be exploited (or 'circumnavigated' the international ramifications are quite mind-boggling) so their system is more than likely going to work. This is certainly an area in which code will become law.

But all this makes me wonder whether the judge who signs off on the settlement will really devote a small portion of his/her time to the 300 odd pages in the settlement documentation. A lot of that documentation will and should evolve in the light of experience. She should really be looking very carefully at the API which the Rights system will incorporate and the principles which underline the API. Devising the principles which should govern this API and crystalising the objectives that the Rights Registry should foster is a matter on which the judge can make a real impact. These are matters of principle and public good, barely touched on in the public documents about the settlement, where we need judicial oversight. Perhaps she will spend some of her time looking at the Android constitution and I hope she will require that the commercial exploitation of literary rights is as open and at least as un-Google biased as Google has promised to make the Android playing field. Some of the Android slogans work rather well for our vision of digital books: 'Books without borders', 'Books can easily embed the web', 'Books are created equal', 'Books can run in parallel'. Digital books should do all of that and if they run on Android devices as well, who knows all books may soon be 'available' anywhere for everybody. Nearly all available for free search..... but that is not yet enough.

Whitelines

Whitelines is the UK's premier snowboarding magazine and it has joined our shop.

• ToC
• Time lapse photos that give me a shiver (snow boarding without a shirt)
• Can you see him here?
  

The Long Run

My colleague has just reminded me that the blogosphere is waiting to hear whether I completed the New York Marathon last weekend. Yeah right! But since you ask, I did, and great fun it was. Apart from the last two miles in Central Park when my legs decided that they were really not intended for such distances.

I knew that the flight home was going to be a challenge; the idea of sitting upright for seven hours with 'wooden' legs was not an appealing thought. However, as 'luck' would have it when I arrived at my seat there was someone already in it. I think the air hostess could see the terror on my face when I heard the words 'jump seat' being muted and quickly suggested that I take my seat - or bed, I should say- in 'Upper Class.' Never before has the idea of stretching out for hours on end seemed so appealing. That's not to mention the unlimited champagne, of course! And access to all kinds of magazines and newspapers. Not able to find the rack of papers, I asked the air hostess on three occasions if I could have a newspaper and she enthusiastically said she would bring me one before promptly forgetting each time. As an imposter in 'Upper Class', I didn't feel that I could ask again. All I really wanted to do, of course, was see whether I had made it into The New York Times along with thousands of others who had completed the 26.2 miles in under 5 hours.

Too bad that a digital version of The New York Times wasn't available to be accessed from my screen before take-off. Virgin really should think about offering such a service to their premium customers. I'm sure their clientele would welcome access to a collection of searchable newspapers and magazines.

I did finally get to see a copy and found my entry. The listings give your name and your age and are organised in order of times. I proudly showed one of my kids on my return, thinking he would appreciate the effort that had gone into just completing the course. He was quick to point out, however, that I was pipped over the line by two seventy year olds! Must do better next time, I guess!

Hard Times for Print Media

The combination of a fierce recession and a big shift in advertising budgets towards new Media is making life very difficult for newspapers and consumer magazines. Take this article in this week's Advertising Age, Will Print Survive the Next Five Years?

In the worst-case scenario, however, advertisers won't come back. The downturn will drive them into the arms of efficient electronic media that can better demonstrate a higher return on investment. Auto looks likely to behave that way. Marketers will get the hang of building friendly social networks and advocates around their brands, undermining their interest in the trusted brands of newspapers and magazines.

The hemorrhaging of jobs will scare the print industry's top talent into other businesses entirely. The focal points of culture and commerce will swing further from faded institutions such as newspapers and magazines. The print products that continue will rely on smaller audiences than ever.

Portfolio is chopping out its web team, and "doubling down on its print edition" but it still has not launched a digital edition. What is the point of doubling down on your print edition if you dont offer it through the web? Where is the sunlight? If you look around the newspaper and magazine industry pundits optimism is very thin on the ground. The problem is that the industry has not yet appreciated that the web can be used to deliver the magazine, it has made the terrible mistake of trying to repurpose its content to a format and a package which will attract the same audience as the print product. As though mashing up a print magazine as some kind of web service could conceivably deliver the same audience and the same commercial benefits. Oddly enough this last week's announcement from Google and the publishing industry really tells the magazine industry what it should have been doing in the last five years. Books are now to be sold as web services. Magazines should be sold as digital subscriptions for the audience that uses the web. This audience is growing and will value the fantastic advantages of web delivery (speed, archives, searchability, omnipresence and multiple access). None of the major consumer magazine companies in the US or the UK has an effective program of digital subscriptions and paid digital circulation. If they had been building this for 4/5 years they would by now be seeing 20% or more of their ciculation coming from digital only subscribers, at much higher margins than can be realised by a print product.

The gloomy pundit will point out that it is still not entirely clear how digital magazines can deliver the advertising benefits which make consumer magazines highly profitable (circulation revenue is not the 'cream' of the magazine business -- the cream comes from ads). But magazine experts are being too blinkered if they write off the potential for consumer magazines delivered as high value advertising through digital editions. One can begin to get the flavour of this digital potential if one looks at the free sampler that we now have running for Dazed & Confused. On this page note the discreet link to chanel.com, or the Blackdice ad with its phone number. Within the index of advertisers there is a wealth of linkage that can be used to generate instant targetted responses for advertisers. That is a nexus which the magazine reader and the advertiser need to see integrated through the digital magazine.

Wii Magazines

Reading The Spectator on your TV



If buying a Wii to improve your fitness and well being is not enough for you, its also quite OK to buy a Wii so that you can project your magazine subscriptions on to the TV in your lounge or kitchen.

Just a reminder that digital editions benefit from being pure web solutions. If a digital magazine or book runs on any standard web browser then it should run on any new web-connected gadget or device that appears in the consumer market (with the emerging Android open standard there are going to be quite a few). Take home lesson for publishers and aggregators: there is no need to develop and support different versions of your content for a multitude of platforms. Just make sure that your content is available on the web through a standard web browser. That is what software compatibility now means.

Minor Monthly

Minor Monthly joins our shop:

• ToC
• A diesel in a Morris Minor?
• Some Danish Minors
  

Ecological Approval

Speaking of the ecological impact of print (which we just were): we have had a nice bouquet from Ecovelo:

The Exact Editions interface is one of the best online magazine interfaces I’ve seen, providing the ability to zoom each page and navigate through the document using embedded hyperlinks, spread thumbnails, and navigation buttons on the interface. In my opinion, the EE interface is even better than a high quality, fully bookmarked and linked PDF document. The page scans are relatively high resolution and hold up well to magnification, and the reading experience is as good as, if not better than, the experience of reading traditional paper magazines.

But you must read the whole thing. Alan and Michael think that digital magazines have lesser ecological impact than print magazines, and bikes are a low impact way of travelling. That must be right.

Printable PDFs

We recently enhanced our service so that a complete issue can be printed from a PDF file. We have offered page by page printing from the begining, but many publishers do not like the idea of a complete magazine issue being printed from a single downloadable file (the worry is piracy, with one person taking out a subscription and then sending out scores of PDF copies to all his/her friends). I am not sure how valid this worry is, but it is a real one for some publishers. So the option to have a printable PDF of a complete issue is now available on some of our magazines. It will remain a publisher-dependent option. Athletics Weekly is the first magazine to have opted for it.

The PDF is taken at a reasonable resolution, but it is not high-res and so the user can download an issue without undue drumming of fingers on the desk or undue strain on bandwidth (yours or ours). We also omit the external links. The PDF alternative will probably be most useful to subscribers who like to read the magazine on the train or in a plane. It will also be useful to those subscribers who like to use our service so that they can print out the whole magazine --- but when I see those requests in the support log files I tend to grit my teeth. My puritanical, ecological streak is aroused by the thought of such wastefulness. Lets hope our provision of this alternative file format is not damaging to the eco-sphere......

Diver

DIVER joins the Exact Editions magazine shop. The free trial issue has:

• Urchin sex
  
• Mask tests
• and ToC
  

Enhancement for Screen Readers

We have upgraded our service so that we can generate a text version of pages which we present as facsimiles (JPEGs in the browser). This has been on our 'to do' list for a long time and now that we have it the 'screen readers' that help the visually impaired to navigate and search web pages can get a grip on our service.

The text-only version of any particular page is accessed by clicking 'Show All' on a grey bar near the bottom of each page. Our import process has been changed so that we can rebuild the text in an appropriate order as we extract words from the PDF files supplied by publishers. The process is not 100% perfect (mainly because magazine layout can be very free form) but the result is quite readable and will be useful to many with print disabilities. We expect to be able to tweak some improvements as we move forward. Files in the archive will gradually be converted, meanwhile you can see it in action from today with the French version of Le Monde Diplomatique, Taste Italia, and The World Today.

Try this Recipe for Spinach Dumplings

A screen shot of the recipe's final stages as the text version is presented on screen.



The resource can also be used to cut and past a quotation from the magazine into a document (previously users could only 'clip out' a selection from the JPEG or retype).

Google Book Search Settlement

The rumours of a settlement were correct. The publishers and Google have settled their law suit (the agreement is here). That is a very good thing and it opens up a new chapter in the development of publishing and digital libraries. The main thing is that digital libraries are going to be incredibly important and a large part of our cloud-based knowledge systems: furthermore they will be run along the lines of the Google Book Search system (database-driven, page-oriented, url-guaranteed, access-managed and to a considerable extent free). There are plenty of interesting blog comments: the Laboratorium, Peter Suber, Medialoper, PersonaNonData, and TechDirt.

There are winners and losers in this settlement, and I agree with the Medialoper view "the only entities that don’t seem to have fared so well are parties who weren’t involved in the suits"; by and large the settling parties look like the winners (Google, publishers, authors and libraries). But I wonder whether there is not an element of a 'winner's curse' about to descend on Google. Some parts of the settlement outline a fantastically complicated and ingenious business model for our future access to digital books. Very specific mechanisms for the pricing of books and the regulation of access, access to content within books, and access from within institutions to digital resources. If you read the stuff about 'Pricing Bins' and 'Pricing Algorithms' (pp49-50) you will get a good flavour of the extraordinarily detailed prescriptions.

A lot of this setup and this detail really needs to be established by innovation, by experiment and by markets, not by a court approved Settlement to a private dispute. Google may find itself subject to a lot more regulation and attention whilst it attempts to make these business models work (many business models or modes of exploitation are encompassed in the agreement). The settlement appears to be highly transparent and open, but it is not so transparent how the split between authors and publishers and other rights holders is intended to work. That may be a rather crucial consideration which may now be the subject of discussion between the Authors Guild and the AAP!

New York...New York...

I am hoping to run the New York marathon this weekend. The training has just about gone according to plan, but with only days to go until 'the day' I am suffering from all sorts of niggling doubts and looking for any information, anywhere that will give me comfort that, miraculously, it will all be OK on the day.

Yesterday evening I took a train out of town to see a youth production of an obscure play. Someone I know was in it so it was more out of support than anything else. Having dashed home from work I found myself at Clapham Junction ready to board the train with no reading material. I dived into the nearest newsagent and searched for one of a number of running magazines that can usually be found on their shelves. I thought the journey could be usefully employed getting last minute running tips.There was not a single copy of any of them to be found despite the newsagent being crammed full of magazines on everything from railways to rustic living.

As I sat on the train reading one of those gossipy weeklies full of pictures of WAG's and their friends, I thought how wonderful it would have been to have had access to all of the running magazines and to have been able to cross-search them from an iPhone or wireless laptop. I could have searched for 'positive thinking' and 'marathons -made -easy' or 'ways to reach the finish in under four hours without feeling exhausted!' Guess I'll just have to rely on Lucozade.

Google Book Search Rumours and Rumbles

A week ago there was a report in the Library Journal that the publishers and Google were going to settle their copyright dispute very soon now. No further news on that so far -- and if there was going to be a friendly settlement the Frankfurt Book Fair would have been a good place and a good time to smoke the pipe of peace. My own hunch is that Google will gain more by prolonging this argument than by settling it, so I am not expecting an early compromise. Perhaps there was no subtance to the rumour

The rumble, of elephants crashing around in the forest, is another matter. Something is really happening with HathiTrust, which sees a score of top american university libraries collaborate to produce a giant shared digital library. See an early interview with John Wilkin, its director in the Library Journal. Why elephants? Hathi is the hindu word for elephant, and the name was chosen because elephants remember, elephants are large and they are strong. The focus of the consortium is on preservation and access. On being there when Google has gone. They are already doing some important things which Google Book Search does not do (like being open and informative about what they have). Major university libraries have staying power and I bet this organisation will prosper.

Google Book Search is still the elephant in the library, but the existence of this consortium shows two things. Three years ago major libraries were saying that they could never do the kind of thing which GBS contemplates. Now several of them are collaborating in a much more ambitious project than anybody would have dreamed of in 2002. When we have a universal library in the 'computing cloud' there will be not one, but many literary digital platforms. There will be a whole herd of digital literary elephants kicking around. There will be a lot of platforms to choose from, partly because there is a lot to be done and different ways of doing it. The second and immensely encouraging feature of this new consortium is that it is obviously condoned if not encouraged by Google. The members of the consortium are almost all working with Google and it is to be concluded that Google is keen to see 'collaborator/competitors' in the digital book space that Google has pioneered. Good for Google and good for all of us. The universal library will be open because there will be a herd of elephants. Google may be the dominant male, but not a monopoly .....

Web Services

We are a web service in the strict sense. We deliver a service through the web to subscribers and to publishers. We turn print pages into web pages and organize, search and serve them; and that is all we do. We are a set of pure web services but the funny thing is that we have never hosted our own web services. We never even thought about buying or owning our own servers, let alone running them. Sure we have some physical machines in the office, but nothing critical runs on them. We don't own any hardware that matters. Why buy when you can rent?

From the moment we founded the company and for some years we were happy customers of Vanillamachines (one of the biggest Linux box collocation services) and they gave us a very reliable performance, though nobody from Exact Editions ever set eyes on the 'machines' that we were renting from them. I was never too sure whether the actual boxes were in Texas or the UK but it was vaguely comforting to know that there were some air-conditioned boxes of blades somewhere that were in some sense ours (three or four of them I believe). But a few weeks ago we moved over to the Amazon computing cloud (EC2 -- Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud), and I do not think that anybody outside of Exact Editions will have noticed, and the strange consequence is that our computing is now entirely virtualised. We are using the Amazon computing cloud and there are no physical boxes that anybody could point to and say 'that is where the Exact Editions service resides'. For sure we have a number of 'virtual boxes' in the Amazon cloud, that seems to be the way that Amazon are able to monetize and charge for their commoditised service, but there is no determinate corresponding set of physical chips running our code. For me, the most convincing moment in this transition occurred when our Technical Director noted that, immediately following the transfer, our main database seemed to be running a bit more slowly than he would have liked. He decided to double the size of the virtual server for a day to see if that made any difference. It did. Search and rendering was a lot faster, and as a result he decided to make the upsizing permanent. For an additional $300 a month, (some such relatively modest fee), we had doubled the scale of our database machine and could upsize or downsize them whenever we chose. If we decide that we need so many mega-teraflops for a couple of days, Amazon's computing cloud will allow us to comfortably and temporarily use them. Its this just-in-time flexibility that is so impressive about the Amazon service.

Mind you, perhaps I would have been a bit more nervous about the switch to Amazon's cloud if I had known that they were still in beta. Only today has the beta label been removed from Amazon web services. I guess they did this because they noticed our successful transfer? [feeble joke]

I still occasionally meet publishers who ask if they can host their own Exact Editions service. In future I will have the perfect and honest answer to this request: we don't even host our own service......That is the real beauty of cloud computing. You don't need to host your own. Let the cloud take the strain.

Shopping Around

The Exact Editions service started with an 'aggregation' model for digital subscriptions to magazines. There is an Exact Editions shop where you can buy most of our magazines. Then we added 'shops' for magazine subscriptions in Euros, and another for Australian magazines. As we have started working for book publishers we have worked with a different model. We are building shops 'per publisher' branded for each publisher. There are now shops for Berkshire Publishing, Debretts, Alastair Sawday's, Profile Books, Time Out and recently Gower. There is a page on our service where all these shops and more can be referenced.

The book publisher's shops are branded for the individual publisher. Different shops, different publishers, different languages, different currencies -- but for the individual who buys a subscription there is only one account, one service. All his/her/its content goes in the same account ('its' for the institutions -- did not earlier mention the various 'institutional shops' we now support). As was to be expected, users are now buying collections of mixed magazines and books in the same shopping basket. This ability to buy, search and read books and magazines in the same way from different publishers will become an important factor in our appeal to small and medium-sized publishers.

Here is a mixed shopping basket, which has the 'look and feel' of the Gower shop because the two Gower books were those most recently added to it.



What you cannot do at the present time is buy books and magazines priced in different currencies in the same shopping basket. Mind you, this isnt a real limitation because you can buy in different currencies from the same account. PayPal or your credit card can see to that.

Browsing but not Reading

We are now delivering a service for magazines in the Dazed group which allows users to browse these magazines for free, but not to read them properly. The browsing is limited to the two-page per screen view, at this resolution most text is unreadable but the pictures are fine. As each new issue is published it will be available in this browse mode until the succeeding issue appears. Here is the current issue of AnOtherMan. The site is simply branded for the magazine's style



This is an open account, but you need to be logged into it and the issue in it will be available for a limited period, so to see the links that follow in this discussion you will need to be logged into here (http://www.exacteditions.com/sample/anotherman), and when the next issue jumps into that account the links will only be available to magazine subscribers).

There are two principal justifications for offering free previews at the browse level for a magazine of this kind.

(1) Like all the Dazed magazines AnOtherMan is visually gorgeous and the publisher believes that as users become familiar with the quality of the photography and the advertisements they will be more likely to subscribe. And the 2-page view works nicely since many of the double page spreads are compelling, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, and Paul Smith. Or Lucien Freud, and Viggo Mortensen. One could say that making the current issues open to this free browsing is a bit analogous to the 'sampling' which is possible in a newsagent. However since the online browsing is unlimited it is considerably more generous (this issue is a whopper at over 300 pp).

(2) The second reason for putting the browseable version of the magazine completely in the open is that it will encourage usage of the advertisements and response to them. Although the format is not really readable, it is completely searchable. So if you are looking for the Belstaff leathers and after browsing the magazine you decide you will actually buy one, you can click on the url or the phone number to place your order. See the corner of p83.

AnOther Man

Autumn/Winter 2008

Page 83

La Politesse Française

I should declare myself a Francophile from the outset. I love the food, fashion, literature, mountains, beaches, cafés and the language.

I love the turn-of-phrase. The way something so simple can sound so beautiful. So, last year, when Le Monde Diplomatique asked us to deliver the French version of their publication in addition to the English edition, I was delighted!

Part of the service offered to all our publishing partners, is to manage the customer service queries relating to the electronic publication. This mostly consists of forgotten passwords. On the whole a query comes through by e-mail, it is answered and the customer quietly carries on with accessing their digital subscription. Except in the case of the French subscribers. On a frequent basis after helping them out, they will write back and thank us. And its not just a simple ' merci beaucoup', but a wonderful ' merci de votre gentillesse' { thank you for your kindness} or 'bien à vous { good wishes to you}.We are often wished a pleasant day or evening and always addressed with such politeness - 'Bonjour Chère Madame/Cher Monsieur'

An institutional customer mistakenly addressed me as 'Monsieur' today - easily done given that my name, Daryl, is more prevalent as a male name and Daryl Hannah, the actress-come- mermaid, seems to be the only other female whose parents chose such an ambiguous moniker.

In my reply I pointed this out, by signing myself off as Madame Daryl Rayner. I promptly received a very polite note back apologising profusely.It did not require an apology at all , but how polite I thought! Good manners are certainly alive in French cyberspace.