As well as a shared enthusiasm for leather shorts and coach tours, the people of Germany, Austria and Switzerland also love amassing collections of autographed celebrity photo cards. That's been a great opportunity for the region's little-known slalom snowboarders to raise their profiles by banging out a daft photo pose and scrawl all over them. This week we take a look at the best examples of this regionally specific bit of snowboard culture...

Now that we've saved Whitelines by taking the time explain to them why print is dead and what they need to do to save themselves, we figured the next thing we should do is critique the very first edition. We thought it might be interesting to see where it all went wrong, but what we found was a strange glimpse into a vaguely remembered part of our past...

After a number of years of reviewing books on this site, I think I'm probably now the world's foremost expert on ski resort based literature. Sit back and bask in my knowledge as I use all that experience to review four more snowboarding books...

A few weeks ago I reviewed two self-published books, one was great, the other incredibly dull, but as I mentioned I had planned to review three. This week we deal with that third book - Rants From The Mountain by Allan Saro. It's pitched as being a mix of advice for beginner snowboarders/skiers, a behind-the-scenes look at lift operations and the story of Allan Saro's season. That's what was promised, but what was delivered was something entirely different...

The rise of the internet has transformed publishing in the same way that it transformed the music industry. If you fancy becoming a writer these days, you're no longer at the mercy of a few big publishing companies and there's now a raft of ways that you can foist your book upon the world. Just like music too, some of this newly available product is great, but some most of it is absolute crap. We decided to delve into the world of self-published snowboard books by reviewing three of them. Here's what we found...

Over the past few days I've been slowly ploughing my way through this truly terrible book. It was one of the toughest and most miserable things I've ever done in the name of snowboard blogging. I didn't just have difficulties getting through the experience, there were times that I truly questioned my will to go on living. It's now my duty, as a warning to all of snowboarding, to share my experiences in the hope that others don't have to go through the same pain...

I'm from the Jaws generation, and I'm now forever cursed with an irrational fear of getting eaten to death by huge aquatic teeth missiles. As a result one of the things I've always really appreciated about snowboarding as opposed to surfing is the significantly lower risk of becoming a fish snack. Now either I'm not alone in my shark-based fear predicament, or someone who I've never met in my life really has it in for me, so severely that they have been studying my every move to find my single weakness and target that through the medium of a low-budget straight-to-video horror flick, because this summer sees the release of the almost entirely unanticipated movie Avalanche Sharks.

And Avalanche Sharks isn't the first horror movie to tackle the oddly specific niche of snowboarding and skiing. If you for some reason don't share my specific fear of sharks, maybe one of these other scenarios will do it for you...

I like to put these snowboard book reviews into themes, because no one reading something on the interweb wants to read about individual reads they aren't going to read, so I look to see if there are any interesting trends to be found that you might be interested in. This time out I ended up picking up all of the two non-fiction books that have ever been written about snowboarding tragedies to see what's going down in that genre. Cheery. There were two trends; the first trend was that every single one of these books is written by blokes named John, and the second was that that both stories were much more than just books, they had developed into fully blown multimedia experiences. So for people who don't like reading, this is the read for you. Stick with this and there'll be all sorts of opportunities to look at pictures, click buttons, watch videos, Facebook Like stuff and abuse people in comments sections...

Can you guess which snowboard video this describes?

• It starts with musical intro and a roll of the sponsor’s logos.
• After the opening credits it launches into the first segment featuring one snowboarder riding for the length of a song, it will be the second best snowboard section of the movie.
• Then there’s a short and mildly amusing candid interlude captured at some point during the filming process.
• The film then progresses into a series of sections, with an assortment of snowboarders, riding to a variety of tracks, with a few more short interludes.
• Then there’s a bit more of the same but a switch to Japan or the Southern Hemisphere.
• Next up it’s the slam section.
• Finally it all ends with the best snowboard section of the movie by the stand-out rider, which includes the biggest single trick.

Sound familiar? It should do because it roughly describes almost every single snowboard movie ever created. It’s what, for the purposes of this article we are going to call ‘the format’. ‘The format’ has been the dominant type of snowboard movie for over twenty years, and it’s been copied and rehashed to a point well past it’s sell by date. We've reached a situation where there’s now a whole generation of snowboarders that don’t know anything else but ‘the format’ and because of that it’s become even more pervasive. Is ‘the format’ something all snowboard movies are doomed to repeat forever or is there another way?

This week we review every single pro snowboarder autobiography ever written…

From the man who brought you, the first ever frontside double cork 1260, the seminal film Afterbang, the seminal film 91 Words for Snow, the seminal film Lame, a bunch of other seminal films (and no, not that sort of film), the perfect kicker and the winner of the converted iFPackaging Award of 2008, comes the much anticipated book Current State: Snowboarding. We got our hands on one this week and here’s what we made of it…

Earlier this year the Rom-Com Chalet Girl was released. At the time we didn't go to the trouble of reviewing it, however it recently came to our attention that this seemingly charming movie had a surprising muse. Back in 2008 another movie called Chalet Girl was released and although it went unnoticed and unheralded by the mainstream snowboarding and movie media, the similarities between the two movies are striking. Today we compare them…

After scraping the sordid depths of the snowboarding world with last week’s smutfest we’ve gone all highbrow this week and are reviewing a book. Wear that, newly acquired and now thoroughly disappointed audience.

Normally when we review books we judge them almost solely on the cover and although this one has a nice enough cover what really drew our attention was the weight…

As we continue deal with the impact of the latest economic problems it’s become uncertain times for the usually dependable investments of property, pensions and savings. So what can you do to secure your future? You might be considering an alternative investment opportunity like accepting email offers from Nigerian princes or setting-up your very own Maddox-style Ponzi scheme, but today we look at one option that’s a sure-fire route to success – producing your very own snowboarding super-grom. Snowboarding superstars can rake in millions of dollars a year and all you need to get started is a kid and a small investment on some books. Here’s a look at the best snowboarding propaganda for kids...

We’ve looked at a few of Hollywood’s attempts to produce a snowboarding themed movie before, but today we look at every single one.

Here are a few of the things you should know about before we get stuck in:

• We are only including movies where snowboarding is an important part of the plot, so we’re not including things like James Bond in View to a Kill, XXX and Jackie Chan’s Police Story 4 all which coincidentally have a short scene involving a snowboarding spy.
• Art is subjective, but because we like to impose order and objectivity we’ve used ratings from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to compare the movies and to categorically determine if snowboarding themed movies were getting better or worse over time.
• Keep an eye out for the one movie on the list is so bad it appears on the list of the worst 100 movies of all time on IMDb. That’s pretty good going because there are now over 755,000 films and TV shows on the site. Still at least surfing did worse because they have two on that list.
• There have been 20 snowboarding movies over a 24 year period how many have you seen?...

This is a movie that was released in 2002 and I’m amazed that I’d never heard of it until recently - It is epic. Set in the brilliantly named Karawanken Range in Austria and featuring Pete Sampras’ wife, normally reliable actor Rufus Sewell, and some bloke who used to be in EastEnders, it’s a budget version of Cliffhanger with going-down-mountains replacing the going-up-mountains format. The working tile was “The Extremists” but due to other events at the time that had to be dropped rapidly...

aka: Judging a book by its cover III

It’s our third book review and we’ve now used the weak ‘Judging a book by its cover’ pun two more times than we hoped to, but if there’s one thing we’ve found out about snowboard books it’s that the key to them is in the cover. And ‘The Way of the Snowboarder’ by Rob Reed doesn’t disappoint because this book has the shiniest cover I’ve ever seen. Its mesmerising sheen is simply awesome. If you want the most reflective coffee book possible on the subject of snowboarding then read no further because here it is…

The fascinating medical history of the most smiling man in snowbusiness

I've only reviewed one book on this site before and despite that book’s promising cover the actual ready bit was a bit disappointing. Thankfully Chris Klug’s ‘To the Edge and Back’ is the opposite; it’s a book with a bad cover that turns out to be a surprisingly good read...

This amazingly bad movie poster just appeared on Photoshop Disasters. 

Favourite user comment… “The more I look, the more it feels like I injected vinegar behind my eyes.”

Good news for us is that amongst all the visual mess there is some snowboarding to look forward to, although it would appear the guy is snowboarding on a shag-pile carpet. Here’s the trailer which sadly has similar production values to the poster and features a logo plagiarised from Indiana Jones...

A lot of companies have jumped on the snowboard merchandising bandwagon over the years. Strangely a little company from the land of bacon and no hills joined the party at one time. Here is LEGO’s contribution.