I’ve always had a fondness for birds, and although I’ve never been birding I will always buy a bird book covering whatever part of the world I happen to visit (London and Wales is about it these days).

But I can’t get my DVD Guide To All The Birds of Europe to run on my MacBook Pro. After emailing the Bird Guides Support team I went on to their web site and it rather ominously says it won’t run on OS X 10.3. I’m on 10.5.5.

Now this little disk cost me £140, and if I can only use it as a coaster from now on I shall be seriously miffed. I could have bought a complete set of Cramp’s Birds of the Western Palearctic second hand for less. And kept it for the rest of my life.

The Bird Guides support team came back to me promptly and politely (full marks) to say:

I am sorry to have to tell you, but unfortunately since Apple have made this latest OS X10.5.x Leopard Operating system, our version 7 programmes will no longer work, even with our OS X updater disk.

The only way we can possibly suggest that you could still run these programmes would be to use Apple’s Boot Camp free download, and run the programme on Windows XP.

The only other thing we can do for you as a valued Customer is to offer you a special offer to upgrade, exchanging your old Version 7 Guide to European Birds to our latest Birds of the Western Palearctic version 2.0, with 970 species including of course all of the European Birds. The price of BWPi 2.0 is £139.

The publishing guru Mike Shatzkin proclaims that the printed book is obsolescent technology, and that ebooks will be the major publishing sector within 10 years.

This is the single most powerful argument against his premise. I can’t play my 78rpm records. I can’t play my 8 track tapes. I can’t play my Betamax videos. I can’t read my DVD Guide To All The Birds of Europe.

But I can still read the Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe that I was given when I was six years old. And I don’t care to shell out the same amount of money again two years after buying a product in order to carry on using it.

While we’re on birds, this is one of the most beautiful and harrowing pieces of writing I’ve come across this year: http://fretmarks.blogspot.com/2007/05/human-position.html

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