booktwo.org

The book is dead. Long live the book.

“An independent site… a fun, casual take on bleeding-edge book trends and a fine eye for what’s out there.” Publisher’s Weekly

About this site

As digital technologies become ever more prevalent, we believe it is inevitable that the primacy of the physical book will fade, and the art forms traditionally associated with it will be radically altered also. But in what ways will the stories that we tell be affected by the ways in which we recieve them, and what new forms will arise? We don’t have the answer, but we’re looking forward to finding out.

Booktwo.org will be running a series of projects, and keeping up to date with regular entries in the notebook. A good place to start is the founding article, first posted at shorttermmemoryloss.com, and cross-posted here as Birth pangs of a new Literature – or just explore the archives.

Founded in September 2006, booktwo.org is young. Expect this summary, and the site it describes, to grow over time. Come back soon.

Speaking Engagements

I’ve started giving talks to publishers and others based around the kinds of things I discuss at booktwo.org. Here’s an example, which I gave to a group of international young publishers under the aegis of the British Council: Publishing in the Digital Age.

I haven’t been doing this long, but I really enjoy it. If you’d like to find out more, or invite me to speak, please email me.

About the author

I’m James Bridle. I’ve worked in publishing for not nearly enough time to be in any way authoritative about this stuff. Nevertheless, I have degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science, I have severe geek tendencies, and after several years in traditional independent (mostly fiction) publishing in the UK, I’ve become frustrated by the lack of discussion around this subject, and I want to make some noise about it. I have no plans to give up the day job, and I’m working to ensure I still have one in ten years time.

Update, August 2009: I gave up the day job.

My personal site can be found at shorttermmemoryloss.com.

Full disclosure

I have worked for a digital design and marketing consultancy, Apt Studio, which works mostly with publishers. Previously, I worked for independent publisher Snowbooks. I’m currently freelance, and you can find my CV here, and my portfolio here.

Technical stuff

booktwo.org is powered by Wordpress and hosted by the lovely people at Vision Internet. We believe in practicing what we preach, so this site is fully HTML and CSS compliant, things we believe to be very important. If you don’t understand why, keep reading the site: you’ll find out. We also try to keep up with and implement the latest developments in accessibility and connectivity, such as Microformats, OpenID and rich RSS. If there’s a feature you’d like to see, let us know.

Feeds

To stay updated with booktwo.org via a newsreader or feed aggregator, there are two XML feeds available in RSS 2.0 format: the main feed contains notebook articles and the secondary feed contains the ’stop press’ linkroll.

Main booktwo.org feed
Stop Press feed

License

booktwo.org is licensed under a Creative Commons’ Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works license. More information.