A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again: trying to make an ebook

Remember those resolutions from a few days ago? One of them was to get off my backside and finally make a version of Diet Croydon available on Amazon, for people to download to Kindles. This is partly because I've recently discovered the Lulu e-book is horrible; the version I downloaded to check was in bold italics throughout, which is about as easy to read as this sentence. Mobipocket Reader is a special sort of hell. Fortunately, Amazon provides lots of helpful documentation for a struggling part-time author to use to get their book onto their platform.

Charles Stross, in his excellent blog, has written about why the business of e-books is not as simple as you might expect. This is going to be a worked example of finding that making an e-book really isn't as simple  as you might expect.

Amazon Web Services, perl and building applicatio​ns

Today I had nothing going on, so I went to the office and tried to build an application in perl to interact with Amazon.

Let's say that again, but try to be interesting:

In my copious spare time, I've been teaching myself to program by writing a script that will automatically buy me random things from Amazon.