booktwo.org

I’ve been playing with Twitter recently (and if you’re a regular reader, feel free to join me). Initially, I thought it was annoying and intrusive - and it still is - but it’s also such a simple, open and versatile platform, that lots of interesting things can come of it. And nothing gets that much use from people unless it has something going on. Does it?

Some good examples of cool stuff made with Twitter include BBC News Feeds, Weather tracking, and Twitter Tube Updates.

So, in the interest of forcing lit into every crack of the e-ther, I present Swotter: a tool for reading books to Twitter, and through Twitter, to the world.

At the moment, Swotter is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, line by line, to Twitter and to all booktwo’s friends via the web, IM and SMS. Visit the booktwo twitter page to see what Swotter is up to and do make friends if you’re a twitter user.

If you’d like to know more about Swotter, there’s more information here.

Probably the presentation that got me most excited at this week’s Future of Web Apps conference was QuotationsBook, launched at the conference by QB founder, Amit Kothari to, it must be said, a fairly muted reception - this was a pretty flashy audience who expect a lot of innovation and slickness.

QuotationsBook is a neat quotation source, with some (but far from all) of the features we’ve come to expect from the sort of Web 2.0 apps featured at FOWA - bookmarking, easy sharing, and external embedding. A quick comparison with other quote sources such as Wikiquote, The Quotations Page (#1 on Google) and Bartlett’s for the simple but probably not terribly common string ‘publishing’ reveals the following results:

• Wikiquote: 1202 mostly irrelevant results, which you have to click through to read.
• Quotations Page: 1 result.
• Bartlett’s: 1 (rubbish) result
• QuotationBook: 38, mostly great, results.

These differing results are clearly the product of QB’s advanced thinking on how people use Quotes, together with a more serious approach than most quotes sites - instead of just pilfering other sites or waiting for users to add quotes, they re-indexed Gutenberg, for example. They deserve to do well.

What’s more interesting to me about QB, however, is it’s the first site I’ve seen to apply the principles of the semantic web to text. We’re all aware of the websites and applications that are transforming the way we access and interact with photography, video, music and other art forms, but there’s been very little done to upgrade the experience of literature. Apps like QB are among the first to think about what we can do with plain text, and that’s what makes them particularly exciting. I hope we can bring you more from Amit and the team soon.

The above image is from the Future of Web Apps conference which happened in London last week - unlike the Print Is Dead blog, however, I was there, and I know that Richard Moross of Moo’s next slide was “Oh no, it isn’t.”

Moo’s presentation was entitled “How we turn virtual stuff on the web into beautiful stuff in the real world” and explained how they’ve use the latest web technologies to redeply a 500-year-old industry: printing. Expect to see more of this - here and elsewhere…

[Photo courtesy of Pixelm's Flickr stream]

I wrote about Adobe’s Digital Editions, its Adobe Reader-lite for ebook fans, a while back, but until today I hadn’t tried out Microsoft Reader - and what a pig it is.

Admittedly, it’s designed primarily for PDAs (hence the Cleartype technology), but for the flagship eReader product from the largest software company on the planet, you have to be disappointed - and understand why so many people’s first experience of ebooks is such a turn-off that it colours their whole appreciation of the technology.

From the blocky icon to the blurred logotype to the bland interface, the whole experience says ‘cheap’, which can no longer be tolerated in applications just because they’re free. MS Reader is short on features (bookmarks, annotations, highlights) and the ’settings’ consists of five available type sizes - ’smallest’ to ‘largest’ - and the chance to go fullscreen. Despite this, Microsoft Reader-formatted books are amongst the most available and downloaded out there, along with MobiPocket and Adobe, so it’s no wonder people have such low expectations.

The excuse that ebooks are primarily for PDAs doesn’t wash - this is the future format of all books, not just the ones you want to read on the bus. Hardware is currently doing the job of transforming people’s perceptions of ebooks with the elegant Sony Reader, the recently-announced Readius and concepts such as the Turnover, but they need software to match, software that both replicates the experience of reading that most people are comfortable with (clear type, intuitive pagination or smooth scrolling, bookmarking and annotation) and expands on this to provide new features which can only exist in the new technology (glossaries, hyperlinks, personal indexing, to name but a few).

A week in, and the Million Penguins project has been pretty interesting. Penguin’s publicity nous has got them vast amounts of coverage and vast numbers of authors very quickly, although it hasn’t exactly made for a better story - reading it is difficult, and the mishmash of styles and story arcs makes for something approaching incoherence.

Nevertheless, it’s impressive that Penguin have stuck to it, and not thrown their hands in the air when the going got sticky - then again, they haven’t been showered with goatse images either. Instead, they’ve instigated a number of techniques, such as locking the wiki for a few hours each day to catch their breath, without interrupting the flow of the project. Preliminary results suggest that the open wiki as it stands is not the best vehicle for such an endeavour, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work for smaller-scale projects - as indeed, projects like We>Me seems to suggest. The collaborative novel is off to a rocky start, but it’s not over yet.

This morning, Penguin announced the launch of A Million Penguins, a wikinovel project in association with De Montfort University.

Students from De Montfort’s MA in creative writing form the basis of the projected community of writers, which will edit and expand upon the short first chapter provided over a period of six weeks. (I think six weeks - the timescale is a little unclear. Rather sweetly, they’ve left lots of setup notes on their blog, such as the inspiration gained from this Lost fan wiki.) The students will also form the core moderators of the project, which should help prevent edit wars.

The project is another brainchild of Penguin’s Digital Publisher Jeremy Ettinghausen, who’s also behind Penguin’s extensive Second Life presence and other forward-thinking projects. Viking editor Jon (no surname given) will be guiding the project, acting as a regular editor, giving ideas on direction and revision. Knowing what editing one author’s work is like, I don’t envy the job of doing the same for a potentially massive authorbase (we need some new mass nouns here). He’s certainly open-minded about the end product, as long as it doesn’t turn out to be a “robotic - zombie - assassins - against - African - ninjas - in - space - narrated - by - a - Papal - Tiara type of thing”. Shame.

The Guardian obviously obviously got the wrong end of the stick as it reports that “Ettinghausen is emphatic that the experiment has not been set up by Penguin as an online literary Pop Idol,” and Editor John also stresses that “the wikinovel experiment is not a place to prove to Penguin we should publish your book.” This is clearly more in the spirit of the networked book (or, dare we say it, Booktwo’s own, terminally alpha projects), and it seems unlikely that Penguin will get a novel out of it that they would consider publishing in the mass market - “To be honest, we don’t know exactly what is going to happen or how this will turn out”- all the more kudos to them for trying it, then.

I’ll be keeping a regular eye on the project, and trying to make sense of it as it evolves. I’m still looking forward to the network novel that won’t play merely with authorship but with structure too; that explores the potential of technology to change not just how novels are written, but how they are read. In the end, the product of A Million Penguins is unlikely to look very different to a regular novel - but it’s a great place to start.