Delete This At Your Peril by Bob Servant

I had high hopes for Delete This At Your Peril and was really looking forward to reading it but the book turned out to be a massive disappointment.

I have been critical of quite a few books so far but in most cases it's like being critical of a professional footballer on TV: I can barely kick a ball so have no right to have a go. Likewise with books, I once did manage to write a few short stories in my Sixth Form days, but can count by published oeuvre at precisely zero words.

However I can put by hand up and say I could write something better than Delete This At Your Peril. The idea is nothing new - you basically make a fool of someone by sending them spoof letters and respond to the puzzled messages you get back with increasingly bizarre ones of your own until they finally twig you are a joker. I loved reading Henry Root's and Robin Cooper's  efforts, and laughed out loud a lot at those books.

This book though wasn't funny at all - much (I did finally smile in the last couple of chapters). Henry Root and Robin Copper wrote to well-meaning people; Bob Servant writes to Internet spammers who just want you to send them money. So the dialogue is just not interesting. Bob sends a load of nonsense about him and his mates in Dundee and gets a reply back often ignoring most of the content and just asking for his bank details. It just doesn't have the depth of the other efforts.

Delete This At Your Peril is frankly boring. I got sick of reading Bob's monologues. They were not funny at all in the main and the idea was not original and I honestly think I could do better myself and at least come up with something I found funny. I did laugh a little bit at the end so Delete This At Your Peril gets 2 out of 10 instead of the 1 I was going to give it.

Delete This At Your Peril concludes the Computing section, and I now move on around the corner to a new wall (fanfare) which begins with the Business and Finance section. My first book continues the Computing theme though as it is about an Internet company, Amazon.

I've read similar books to The Everything Store about big companies coming from nowhere, one of which is on this very bookcase in the library (Tescopoly about Tescos - highly recommended). I am not sure at this stage whether the book is pro-Amazon or anti-Amazon. I don't really care. I don't know much about how Amazon started, but I have been using it for 15 years and first bought something from it before Amazon.co.uk even existed, so I am interested because I have seen it come from nowhere from virtually its beginning. I can't say I'm exactly a fan of Amazon, but I do admire it's sheer success story and I'm looking forward to reading about it.

The Everything Store, at 550 pages, is the longest book yet, so I may be some time.....