I’ve been buying eBooks for a while and am constantly surprised by the price of the downloadable products compared to real books. I love eBooks and they are a bit cheaper (usually), but surely you should get more than a pound or two off? I’ve even seen eBooks that are more expensive than buying the physical product. Obviously this is an exception and doesn’t often happen, but is still an eye opener.

The problem is that I think publishers – like music labels – are stuck in the past. If the companies don’t start realising that eBooks are the way forward then prices will stay the same and piracy will become more of an issue. I buy all my eBooks because I love reading them and think the writers should be rewarded for their work, but I’m sure I could find many of them illegally if I wanted. The problem is going to get worse and worse unless the companies start rewarding customers for buying eBooks rather than punishing them.

The worst thing is that the UK always does so badly. I definitely agree that there is some tactical voting and we don’t have many “friends” to support us, but you can’t deny that the songs we put out are incredibly bad.

Take the airplane song of a few years ago (I don’t remember its real name – I doubt anyone does). It was an awful song, but why did it get to the competition in the first place? Surely we could find some band who’re willing to perform a half decent song that might actually get some votes and not be an embarrassment.

Maybe the problem is that any reputable artist isn’t going to want to appear on the Eurovision song contest. You can’t imagine any of the country’s biggest stars such as Adele wanting to do it – the only thing that could happen is to lose and end up with less reputation. It’s still a shame that we can’t find some unknown to do it with a half decent song though.

According to MS, their version of StreetView isn’t going to try and be as comprehensive as Google’s, and is instead going to concentrate on mapping urban streets where people are most likely to find something. This makes sense to me, as I bet huge areas of Google’s streetview are never looked it because they are too remote.

What I don’t get is how the companies make money with these types of services? Is advertising enough to recoup their investment? I understand that some people find it a useful tool for “scouting” an area and seeing where local services are before they get there, but surely the number of people who use the tool doesn’t make it worthwhile considering the cost.

Apparently, MS have said they they’ll need to collect WiFi data while taking pictures for streetview in order to combine it with “location based services”. I don’t know enough about it to comment, but this seems like it could run into similar problems as Google did. Apparently Google stored private information and Microsoft won’t, but it still seems very similar.