The Rocketbelt Caper is now available as an ebook. The new US edition of the book will be released as a paperback at the end of next month, but you can download the ebook today in Mobipocket format.

Mobipocket format ebooks can be read on a Windows PC, Windows Mobile, Palm Os, Symbian phone, Blackberry, Pocket-PC, Cybook, iRex, Iliad, and more.

I’m currently working on making the book available in ePub format, compatible with the Sony Reader, and also intend to make the book available on Amazon’s Kindle. I wrote about ebook formats in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago. As I own the digital publishing rights to the book, I’m attempting to blaze something of a solo trail through the world of ebooks, shoehorning my experience of running a publishing company / typesetting books etc into a digital context. I’ll post updates, and possibly some how-to guides, over the next few weeks.

The US edition of The Rocketbelt Caper, released in paperback on 29 June, has a new cover, and very slightly abridged/updated text, and it doesn’t have photos. If you want the colour photos and Frank Dickman’s Building A Rocketbelt essay then you’ll need to get the UK paperback.

UPDATE: The ebook is now available – FREE – in most popular formats here.

Books, Technology The Rocketbelt Caper

Broken Records
The Cluny, Newcastle

A promise of free Jack Daniels, and a five-star live review in the Guardian, found us in the back room of the Cluny to see Scotland’s most hotly-tipped musical act since that woman off Britain’s Got Talent.

Tonight’s festivities are being filmed for the JD Set, a TV show that airs on Channel 4 at the wrong side of midnight somewhere between a Hill Street Blues rerun and the See Hear edition of Hollyoaks. Support bands Odd-Shaped Head and White Belt Yellow Tag are local lads, and the audience seems to be made up entirely of friends and family. Oh, and only the David Gedge out of the Wedding Present. He’s standing in front of us, and then he’s onstage compering, and knocking out a version of Dalliance with WBYT.

Then Broken Records squeeze onstage. There are seven of them, and they make a big sound, swapping violins and keyboards and ukuleles to create what might be described as sounding like ‘baroque pop’ or, inevitably, ‘Arcade Fire’. It’s very dramatic, and the singer’s voice is ear-prickingly good, but are the songs strong enough to propel them to rock stardom? Difficult to say on a first listen, so let’s just see what happens, seek out more free JD, and stalk David Gedge.

Broken Records’ first LP will be released in the summer. Until then, there are a couple of singles on Spotify, and more tracks on MySpace.

Music Broken Records, The Wedding Present

Keen to ditch the downloads and access Spotify’s streaming catalogue via your phone or iPod Touch? Then you’re going to have to wait. Although Spotify has recruited programmers to work on iPhone and s60 apps, an official release is still some time away. (Sadly, the iPhone Spotify app demo on YouTube is a fan-generated mock up. See also this design consultant’s vision.)

However, there is a way of listening to your favourite Spotify tracks on your iPhone or s60 smartphone (most Nokias, lots of Samsungs, and a few LGs) without downloading. It involves ‘scrobbling’ your Spotify tracks to Last.fm, which is pretty simple if you’re already a Last.fm user, but if you have no idea what scrobbling means then read on…

The first thing you need to do, if you haven’t done so already, is to sign up to Last.fm. With all the recent hype surrounding Spotify, it’s easy to forget just how good Last.fm is. It’s essentially a personal radio station that builds playlists based on your listening habits. It does this by ‘scrobbling’, or identifying and tracking, each piece of music you listen to. Signing up is easy – just enter a user name, email address and password, and you’re away. And, of course, it’s free.

If you’d like Last.fm to scrobble the music you listen to on your computer or iPod you can download the Last.fm Scrobbler. The more tracks you scrobble, the better recommendations you’re going to get. (I’m currently at 20,284…)

To scrobble your Spotify listening habits, open Spotify, go to Edit and Preferences, tick ‘Enable scrobbling to Last.fm’ and enter your Last.fm username and password.

Next, you need to install Last.fm to your phone. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can download the official app, for free, from the App Store. Nokia and other s60 users need to download the MobblerLast.fm radio player. You can also get Last.fm apps for Google Android phones and the 3 INQ1.

The apps differ slightly by phone, but essentially you’ll now have a choice of personalised playlists, including a personal library made up of your scrobbled tracks, and a recommended playlist based on your scrobbled tracks. You can skip, ban, and ‘love’ tracks, and the app will continue to scrobble as you do so. If you’re new to Last.fm it’s going to take a few weeks to build up enough scrobbles to take full advantage of the service. So fire up Spotify and get listening…

(Bear in mind that streaming music obviously uses a lot of data, so it’s recommended you only use these apps on an unlimited data contract or your Wi-Fi connection.)

[UPDATE: The Spotify iPhone app is go!]

Music, Technology iPhone, Last.fm, Nokia, Spotify