on 7 November 2008I’m not, as a rule, an avid reader of the magazine The Bookseller, what with not being a bookseller and all, but my attention was caught by a story from its Frankfurt Book Fair edition.
Odd city, Frankfurt. It’s full of very tall buildings that manage not to be very exciting, although the Trianon is notable for its Alice in Wonderland quality of always seeming to have one more side than you thought. In this way (the not being exciting, not the topological illusiveness) it resembles American cities such as Austin, Texas, which is likewise notable for having plenty of skyscrapers but no places of interest except bars and an art museum. Of course, Austin lacks the excuse of having been bombed.
I once had a stopover in Austin and asked at Tourist Information how long it would take to walk to the art museum. To walk to it? I might as well have asked how long it would take to build a scale model of it out of Weetabix. Nobody had ever tried. Eventually they guessed 20 minutes. It took more than an hour, and they forgot to tell me the museum was closed. I’d obviously blown their minds with my crazy British ‘walking’ shee-yurt.
Everybody walks in Frankfurt. I used to have a friend who lived there, near a suburban railway station. You had to cross a road and then a footbridge over the tracks to get to the platform. People would stop at the road and wait patiently for the pedestrian crossing to beep, despite the total lack of any traffic. Then, to avoid the 100 yard detour over the bridge, they’d sprint straight across the railway tracks. I asked my friend about this and he spread his hands to indicate the warning-notice-free expanse of station. ‘It is permitted,’ he reassured me. I’m not suggesting all this had anything to do with being German. I’m just saying.
The Bookseller story that caught my eye was headed ‘No UK Kindle Before Christmas’. On second reading, this sounded pleasantly like a lost Mark Twain story. On first reading, I’d misread it as ’ukkin Kindle, and wondered if Amazon had become a little tetchy on being asked for the five hundredth time when its inexplicably popular Star Wars-looking eBook reader was going to be available in Britain.
What Amazon really said was even more interesting. Asked to explain why Kindle was taking so long to reach the UK, Brian McBride, the boss of Amazon over here, explained that it was because they couldn’t get the wireless network access organised. ‘In the US, [we can use] one carrier,’ Brian told The Bookseller. ‘In Europe it is a minefield, as there are so many operators. If you buy a Kindle in the UK and want to read it on the beach on holiday, unless we have signed deals in Spain it is not going to work on the beach.’
After reading this I spent a while musing on Brian’s words, wondering what his native language might be, and considering whether it would be worth putting him in touch with some neurologists, so that they could try to find out how the thinking part of his brain got detached from the part that looks at maps. It would be like that marvellous book by Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, but rather something along the lines of The Man Who Mistook Not Working In A Different Country, Viz, Spain, Which Is Not, Last I Heard, Part Of The United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Northern Ireland (Which Would, If It Were, Presumably Be Called The United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Northern Ireland And Spain, But It Isn’t), For A Reason Not To Sell Wireless Capable Handheld Paperless Reading Devices, Even Though He’d Just Mentioned That The Ones Already Selling Like Hot Little Star Wars-Looking Cakes In Another Country, Specifically, The United States Of America, Have Access To Only One Network, Which Functions Solely In That Same Country, And Not In Bloody Spain.
Being a 21st Century journalist, I began and ended my research into Brian by looking him up on the Interweb, where I assumed, being an Amazon employee, he lived. It turns out he’s a US-born footballer who played for Fulham before upping sticks this year, Beckham-like, for the bright lights of Major League Soccer. (When I say ‘upping sticks’, this is not a reference to Mrs Beckham.)
Well, all right, that’s probably a different Brian McBride. Shame, really. If more US corporations were staffed by people with experience of playing the same game in different countries, they might be more sensitive to the kind of esoteric cultural wrinkle that can so easily trip up the unwary business leader, like the way British customers live in Britain, not Spain.
Adam Banks is not the junior hockey player out of the film The Mighty Ducks, in case there was any confusion.
adambanksdotcom Google Instant seems like the search equivalent of the Interrupting Cow knock-knock joke