I looked at one of these mythical iPads in the city yesterday. It was chained to a bench and surrounded by teenagers, and by the time I got my grubby mits on it it was plain that a thousand mits of equal or greater levels of grubbiness had been there before. The screen had been near-obliterated under a a hundred thousand fingerprints, and I had to resist the urge to wipe it down before I had a play.

I had to say, I didn't experience any of the "magic" I was promised by Lord Jobs. I put it back with a 'shrug' and a 'meh', still convinced it's just a big brother to my iPhone.

There's been some hooplah lately in the blogs I read about giving your work away for free. Arguments for, against and sideways abound, and it's getting so that use emerging authors feel totally lost when it comes to advice about promotion and free stuff.

As I see it, there are two basic arguments, and a whole host of nonsense:

Giving stuff away for free can raise your profile, help build a following, get people interested in your work. It lowers the cost of entry for people to try your stories and writing, which will (assuming you've given them the good stuff) lead to more readers, and hopefully paying readers. Giving stuff away for free snarfs your first publiaction rights, so your chances of a traditional publishing deal with that material are pretty much lottery-level.

There's been a lot of carping that the idea of 'first publication rights' is antiquated, and doesn't fit with today's online era. That we authors need to show publishers the error of their ways in adhering to this outmoded idea. Excuse me while I snort into my coffee.

One of the best and worst qualities of the internet is that everything you do reflects on itself. If you run a business, and step out as a voice for that business, then anything and everything tied to that voice reflects upon that business. That means that good things can spread quickly, and that people may take notice if you have something important to say.

It also means that any unprofessionalism immediately attaches itself to your business. You must always be in your business-hat. A case in point, on the blog of an agent I follow occasionally. An author made a very polite query to the 'boss' of the agency (who maintains the blog) about the status of his partial-submission, because he'd not received a requested update from the agent handling the submission.

The agent sent back a very curt and rude email, culminating with "You are welcome to pull your ms. from the pile or wait your turn."  The author, not surprisingly, pulled his MS, and the agent (apparently surprised) then wrote a blog post, including posting the entire email exchange (with names and titles nearly-entirely redacted) online, without permission of the author.

Even if your internet addiction is slightly more under control than mine, you've probably heard of Apple's forthcoming iWannaBeAKindleKiller. It's typical Apple - a sexy, sophisticated, super-hyped and scandalously-priced version of something we already have.  It's got Amazon backing nervously into a corner, offering authors a whopping 70% royalty on kindle books (with enough caveats to sink a canoe); rumours running wild about deals with HarperCollins to set the prices and add-ons of the ebooks; and Sports Illustrated's infomercial about the revolutionary format the tablet offers magazines.

I admit, the Sports Illustrated video had me earmarking part of my creditcard balance for one. I'm a sucker for gadgets, and much as I dislike Apple's business philosphies, the thought of that sleek little gizmo sitting in my bag was jumping gleefully on the I WANT button. The hype is that Apple's about to revolutionise the publishing industry, just as they did the portable-music and smart-phone ones. And yet...