booktwo.org

I spoke earlier today at Tools of Change in Frankfurt. The short version is that many of the things we think about ebooks are wrong: but they are very interesting. The future of the book lies in its aura not in its copies, and that’s why I’m launching Open Bookmarks. For the longer version, read on… (As ever, far more was said on stage than these notes, but there you go).

4 things: introductions and what I do; the form of the ebook; bookmarks etc.; and an announcement.

Regular readers will know my history. CompSci / AI degree, into …

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I’m just returned from Scotland, where I swam in lochs and rivers and partook of nature. This was good. I also read: novels aside, I was immersed in Walter Benjamin and Montaigne’s Essays. Of the former, this was my first experience of reading on the iPad, and a very good one indeed. The highlight function in iBooks is addictive; the lack of an export function criminal, but there you go. Copying out, as we shall see, has its own rewards.

Both writers are prodigious, generous and, in their own way, quite funny, which makes them ideal holiday companions. I …

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I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people recently about how they bookmark stuff. It seems to be on a lot of peoples’ minds as more and more of our reading moves onto screens. So I thought I’d share a few things, and ask for some feedback.

Firstly, here’s what I do:

• I dog-ear a lot. I dog-ear every page that has something interesting on it (which is not always obvious when I return to it), and I dog-ear my last position in the book. Top corner. Sometimes I try to make the dog-ear point to the exact place

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Fernando Báez is the director of Venezuela’s National Library and the author of, among other things, a history of the lost library of Alexandria. In 2003 he was sent to Baghdad as part of a cultural commission to evaluate the damage down to Iraq’s—and the world’s—cultural heritage, having previously performed a similar, and similarly devastating, task in the former Yugoslavia.

The result of 13 years labour, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books (trans. Alfred MacAdam, Atlas & Co., 2008) is a compendium of bibliocausts, a necessary reckoning of not only what we have lost, but of the myriad …

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Back in February, I sketched out this idea on the back of an envelope. I’m pleased to say it is now a reality.

Bkkeepr allows you to track your reading and make bookmarks via text message and the web. It uses Twitter as it’s source, generating a timeline of everyone’s reading, as well as pages for people, and pages for books. Once added, users can add their books to the LibraryThing account, check library availability, and much more. There are also all the RSS feeds and widgets you’d expect.

I particularly like the bookmarking feature which allows …

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I’ve been thinking about how to create RSS feeds and achievements for pBooks, almost an API. Here’s a quick, on-the-way-to-work scheme. Think Foamee. Bkkeeper monitors your twitter feed for @bkkeeper notes – just text an ISBN and ‘start’, ‘end’ or a page number to your Twitter stream. On ‘start’, bkkeeper adds that ISBN to your LibraryThing account and fills in the ‘started on’ date. It continues to follow your progress as you read the book, then when it gets an ‘end’ message it fills in the ‘finished on’ date. Further enhancements could include blogging dog-eared pages – although limited …

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• Hack Attack: 13 book hacks for the library crowd – (Google cache as can’t find original)
• Ass Backwards Is Just Right in Paris [Subtraction] – Khoi Vinh reports on a very cool user enhancement to Paris’ Velib’. Still looking for lit-related ‘hacks’ like this.
• blog all dog-eared pages: Truth, Lies and Advertising by Jon Steel [anti-mega] – Not for the post, but for the approach. I like this way of saving and sharing what you’re reading – I dog-ear all the time, but rarely return to them.

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