Net Results: When it come to reading, to my mind, no season suits a book better than winter, with long dark evenings and blustery weather.
In celebration of winter wordfests, I've got two suggestions for some Irish tech-oriented book-reading.
Both books came out at the end of last year and both offer an insight into the emergence, development and wider societal effects of the tech industry in the Republic. But both are quite different in purpose and design.
The first is Adventures in Code: the Story of the Irish Software Industry (Liffey Press) written by Irish technology industry journalist John Sterne.
Mr Sterne set up the online newsletter IT's Monday - a subscription-based email service for the information technology industry - in 1992, when such a thing might have seemed rather unnecessary. "What IT industry?" must have been the view of many in the State back then, as we dragged ourselves out of the economic tarpit of the 1980s. He sold the publication in 2003, after becoming a ubiquitous figure on the Irish tech front.
This book is undoubtedly his labour of love - although one imagines that he also felt a sense of duty to get down on paper (after all those email newsletters!) the history and development of the Irish software industry, a sector interwoven with the multinationals and so important to the Republic's recent economic expansion.
It's a fascinating story and should be on the shelf of every aspiring entrepreneur and anyone with an interest in technology, or in what has happened economically in the State in the past 15 years.
He traces the software sector from its first glimmerings in the 1980s with companies such as Insight and RTS, then the 1990s pioneers, such as Iona, Glockenspiel, Aldiscon, and up to the present.
Mr Sterne's interviews with 50 industry figures keeps the tale lively throughout its 300-plus pages - but perhaps like me you'll wish the book came with a wall chart of the Irish software family tree.
All those spin-offs, serial entrepreneurs, and recurring figures and companies would be easier to grasp if you could see exactly who came from where and when. The second volume takes a look at what all of the above - the software industry, related sectors and their products - mean for the State.
The Information Revolution and Ireland: Prospects and Challenges, by Lee Komito (University College Dublin Press), examines how ICTs (information and communication technologies) are shaping and reshaping Irish society, culture, communities and, of course, the economy.
Mr Komito, a senior lecturer in the Department of Library and Information Studies at University College Dublin, begins his volume with the important point that, while it may be a truism that ICTs are causing significant changes to our society, little time has been spent deciding how best to plan the future with regard to those same technologies.
ICTs are already beginning to alter the way society, the economy, governments and citizens in general act and interact. But we tend to either panic about this or wave it off, assuming things will sort themselves out as we go along.
Mr Komito makes clear that either choice is foolhardy. An "information society" - in which society has access to tools that enable it to harvest and use vast amounts of information, but also where vast amounts of information can be harvested from its citizens - must be mindful of the technologies in its midst, how they can be used and misused.
It is not enough to assume others will do the minding, as the debate over the Government's interest in introducing electronic voting, identity cards, biometric passports and data retention from phone calls and internet use makes clear.
This book offers a context for understanding what is going on around us and why, and then considers the Irish situation and places it into a global picture.
Essential reading for anyone wanting to understand - in a strongly grounded Irish context - what ICTs do, what they enable, and how they can be used both positively and negatively.
