More rightness from David Hepworth:
"I’m well aware that, as a best selling author told me recently, “Amazon are the devil incarnate” (he still sells his books through them), but until the armies of virtue get their finger out and start providing a better service, I'll keep using them. The way they have co-opted the nation's neighbourhood minimarts into a network of Amazon Returns Centres is a masterpiece of improvisation which completely embarrasses the traditional retailers, as is AutoRip, the Amazon service that allows you to download the MP3 version of a record as soon as you have ordered the hard copy. This is the kind of thing that builds loyalty. You don’t have to love them. You just have to need them."
"If there's one word I don't want to hear anywhere near the publishing industry for the next ten years, it's ‘creative’. The c-word is a free pass for charlatans; an excuse for sitting staring out of the window thinking beautiful thoughts with which to delight the world when you really ought to be getting on with working out practical solutions to practical problems, even if people don't know that they have the problems yet."
"During my ten year moratorium on the word ‘creative’, I would suggest replacing it with the word ‘ingenious’. Ingenuity is far closer to what magazines have always done and it's also far closer to what people value in their lives. Ingenuity is all about cleverness, practicality, neatness, economy and the smart short-cut. Mozart was creative. Jony Ive is ingenious. The successful application of ingenuity invariably results in products which make people say, "oh, that's clever". Ingenuity results in tiny things which bring about big changes."