My, hasn’t time flown? I sat down to update my blog this after­noon cer­tain in the know­ledge that my last entry was about a month ago. It turns out I pub­lished my retire­ment speech in mid August.

I thought it would be worth­while provid­ing an update on my books. Several people have been kind enough to ask after them. As you know, I’m intend­ing to release them as free ebooks, but one or two prob­lems have cropped up in the course of mak­ing this hap­pen. The main issue is that releas­ing Deja Vu (orFlashback, or The Amber Rooms) for the Kindle — my pre­ferred ebook reader — seems to require a US bank account. That is, it requires a US bank account if I want the book to be the ebook store, which I do. Stephen J Sweeney has poin­ted me in the dir­ec­tion of a pos­sible ser­vice that might let me do this and keep the books free; I’ll get round to look­ing at that in the New Year.

One option is to leave the ebook files as naked links, here on my webpage, but I doubt most people would find their way here and have the tech­nical know-how to trans­fer the con­tent to their device. The store is still the best way to go.

Meanwhile, there are some­what irrit­at­ing defi­cien­cies in the file formats used by ebook read­ers and the vari­ous tools that a user can use to cre­ate them. To take one example, I used Apple Pages to cre­ate an ebook of Deja Vu and it rendered fine on the iBook applic­a­tion for the Apple iPad. Then Apple released an update to the applic­a­tion and sud­denly the ebook has extra line spaces. Go figure.

Am I writ­ing fic­tion? That would be telling. I cer­tainly have more time for blues gui­tar, learn­ing a bit of pro­gram­ming, and con­cen­trat­ing on my aca­demic career. Happy New Year to one — and, indeed, all.