Advice to young people: don't worry about learning to type. Learn to spell. Learn punctuation and the basic rules of grammar.

Until recently, I spent the best part of twenty years in newspaper journalism (in the UK), and was involved in recruitment and training of young journalists for most of that time.

About 15 years ago, we noticed a pattern of rapid deterioration among job applicants: despite having an impressive collection of school qualifications and college degrees, they couldn't write. Spelling and punctuation seemed a huge mystery to them.

So we introduced a set of (very) basic spelling, punctuation and grammar tests for interviewees. About 50 per cent of candidates had frighteningly low scores in the tests. And most were utterly horrified when they were told they were doing a spelling test...

If I was in a particularly cruel mood and was having a bit of fun with our trainee journalists, I might ask them to tell me, for example, about possible uses of the semi-colon, or indeed whether the semi-colon performs any useful function in modern English (a hot topic in certain academic circles). I never received a sensible response, of course.

I remember one particularly depressing day when a student was doing a bit of work experience with us. The standard of his writing was so bad that I felt compelled to point out to him that he would never get a job in journalism if he couldn't write.

He looked at me with a worried expression and said: "Isn't that what grammar and spell checks are for?"

I'm not making that up...

Amazon, Sony, and all the rest of the players need to realize that, in the world of business, just because you own the bat and ball doesn't necessarily mean you also get to make up all the rules.

-40hz (August 27, 2009, 02:26 PM)

Well, actually, you do get to make up the rules. You can manufacture anything you like (within the law) and put whatever you like in your EULA (within the law). Then the market decides whether it wants your product. And although I wouldn't touch the Kindle with a bargepole because I don't like their approach to DRM, it seems to be selling very well. Obviously, many people don't care about DRM.

DRM (particularly in the music market) is simply an illustration that there are a lot of not-very-intelligent people working in the industry. It took them the best part of a decade to work out that the only people inconvenienced by DRM were the honest people who paid for the music anyway. The thieves carry on thieving regardless. I stopped buying music CDs when some particularly draconian types of DRM prevented me from making copies of discs for use in the car. I wasn't playing that game. My CD collection is frozen in time about three years ago. Once I stopped buying discs because of DRM, I just lost the habit of buying discs completely, and it never came back.

But most of the music companies seem to have realised their error and are offering non-DRMed product. It's just a mystery why it took them so long.

i use my laser printer a lot still.  I prefer reading papers in printed form then on screen.
however i must say that i have been looking at the handheld ebook readers lately .. my conclusion is that when they come out with one with a full letter page sized screen, i might take the plunge.

-mouser (August 27, 2009, 05:58 AM)

Same here. Last year I bought a laser printer because I was printing so much stuff to read. I can't stand reading on an LCD screen, even though I've got a decent one.

And like mouser, I am waiting, impatiently, for the first affordable, high-quality Letter/A4 eBook. I expect it to handle PDF/txt/doc etc, RSS feeds, magazine and newspaper subscriptions (I can still see a future for eBook magazines and newspapers)....

By the way, old (and little-used) office printers seem to sell for a fraction of their original price on Ebay. They get dumped because of these wasteful rolling replacement contracts that some big companies use. I bought my HP Laserjet for £80 -- a tenth of its list price. It has a print engine capable of churning out 25,000 pages per month. It had printed just 10,000 pages in its previous life. And the print cost per page is a fraction of the printers aimed at home users.