Remember: I Don't Endorse the Sites, Just Link to 'Em

By now, you may have heard about the Waterstones employee who was fired by the British bookselling chain for blogging. Well, Neal Gaiman is rather surprised to find out the blogger in question is "Joe from Waterstones in Edinburgh, who has organised a number of excellent signings and events for me there over the last eight years, both in-store and out of the store, and who is smart, well-informed, opinionated-but-in-a-good-way and always really professional."

"He's the only reason I've always done a Waterstones signing when in Edinburgh," Gaiman continues, "rather than go to one of the other options. If I had a bookshop, I'd want him working for it. To say that I'm disappointed by Waterstones' action would be putting it mildly--they used to be an excellent chain of booksellers (for American readers, I suppose a bit like Borders) but they seem to have lost the plot over the last few years, and this is an astonishingly foolish and shortsighted thing to do. I'm extremely unimpressed."

This whole fired-for-blogging thing does sound pretty "foolish and shortsighted," but that probably won't stop it from sending a momentary chill down the spine of a certain anonymous Strand employee. On the other hand, he might get a decent blog entry out of it. Who knows?