booktwo.org

I’ve written about Google Book Search before, but it’s time to do so again - particularly after their PR barrage at the London Book Fair, some aspects of which I wrote up at the time.

For a while now, I’ve been broadly in favour of GBS, at least in as much as it’s forcing publishers to look seriously at digitisation strategies and becoming the driving force for change within the industry. Google’s PR drive has also stepped up a notch, with their flacks becoming increasingly informed about the book trade, a number of high-profile panels at book events, and a rapidly growing number of publishers coming on board. At the LBF, they convinced a fair number more.

So now, as is my wont, I’m the one getting nervous. This isn’t contrariness. I want digitisation to succeed, but I’ve got some worries about GBS, based on two main observations: Google Book Search isn’t the same as Google Web Search, and Google, if not actually, intentionally lying, is certainly wilfully misleading publishers about its intentions.

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As regular readers have probably noticed, I’ve been bothered for some time about the general lack of zing in publishing get-togethers, and the massive disparity between the hunger, excitement and inspiration generated at events like FOWA and SXSW and the drab reality of book fairs and similar events.

Moreover, I believe this situation is bad for publishing, bad for books, and bad for literature in general. As I’ve argued many times, if we don’t talk to each other, and talk about the future, the massive changes that are coming are going to damage us, and prevent us from doing what we love and believe in: finding great work, and getting it into the hands of readers.

Also, I quite like beer. And pizza.

So, I’m launching Slow Fire, a networking group for publishers, booksellers, agents, reviewers - anyone professionally involved with books, who’d like to meet new people, talk about what they’re up to, and perhaps learn a little. You probably need to live in London, or nearby, to take part. A major model for this is the regular barcamp and minicamp informal meetings held by tech professionals: open, friendly, unstructured and inspirational.

Check it out. Tell me what you think. Join the mailing list. Come along.

• BuzzMachine » The obsolete interview - Jeff Jarvis on a techworld spat, and its consequences for journalism.
• The Pirate Publishers from The Missouri Review - Speer Morgan on the past and future of literary publishing.

• RSS in Plain English - The video everyone’s talking about. S’alright…
• RSS Has No Value Without A Filter - Scott Karp comments on the ‘RSS in Plain English’ video…
• Amazon set to launch online music store - More on Amazon’s DRM-free music store from The Times
• Amazon set to launch DRM-free music store? - Which would give them a pretty fine infrastructure to do the same with ebooks, no?

• Gamer Theory 2.0 - McKenzie Wark’s moderated book, version 1.1, is now out. if:book have released v2.0…
• Amazon, Web 2.0, and Missing The Point of Community - Booksquare gets analysing…

Here’s something that passed me by, but that makes fascinating reading: yesterday was International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day (via Boingboing).

On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if it hasn’t, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.

The root of IP-ST Day lies in a (coherent and self-described) rant written by Howard V. Hendrix, well-published author and current Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (the SFWA).

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• Pretty shiny things: the FLEPia - Fujitsu announces colour-screen ‘console reader’ - an ereader by any other name - and it’s gorgeous… the price can not be correct…
• O’Reilly TOC Conference - June 18-20, 2007 - San Jose, California - Yes, I am planning on linking to this every day until somebody buys me a ticket.
• Colour e-ink paper is on the way - Teleread leads as usual, with a round-up of some other developments in e-ink too…
• Amazon Reader hardware demoed at London Book Fair - The ‘Kindle’ will be pricey and proprietary - but since when has that stopped technology?
• Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog: The Death of the Book, Again - Grauniad reports on the LBF seminar that I blogged, rather more haphazardly, at booktwo.tumblr.com
• Kotob Arabia - Arabic-language publisher producing ebooks. One of the finalists in this year’s International Young Publisher awards.
• VidLit - Another video-based book promotion site - a bit hard on the eye, but big in the States apparently.
• Microsoft has its own Book Search - which I tried out at the LBF. But who actually uses Live Search? Still, at least Google has competition
• Second Life Book Fair - Snowbooks is exhibiting, along with a host of others.
• The ABC’s of GBS: Part 1 - The OUP Blog talks about a more positive attitude to Google Book Search - helping people find what they want, and selling more books.

So, as a little experiment, I’m going to be logging the London Book Fair as it happens at www.booktwo.org/lbf2007/. For realtime updates, see the Twitter stream, and you can also grab an RSS feed. If people - particularly people attending - want to get involved, and make this more of a community backchannel - then please get in touch, and we’ll try to extend it. If not, no worries.

See you there…

Thanks for all the thoughts that people offered in advance of my talk today at the British Council. I’ve posted the slides and a bunch of links, which you can read here, and I’ll post some more about it later.

In short, I think it went well - in that I explained a few things reasonably clearly, and I didn’t clam up, which was my main worry. Interestingly, about a third of the room had never really used the internet, another third didn’t believe that anything would ever stop people reading paper books, and the rest were mildly interested - which, despite these guys being from all over the world, some without any internet access at all, and most from places where access is limited at best - is basically the same reaction as I get from UK publishers.

I’ve just agreed to give a fifteen-minute presentation on ‘publishing in the digital age’ at the British Council on Friday, as part of their International Young Publisher programme (which, incidentally, I wrote about last year).

Frankly, help me. The other speakers are from the Oxford Brookes Institute of Publishing and the London College of Communications so I will be in excellent company. Topics that spring immediately to mind are:

• Production: print on demand, phasing gently into ebooks
• Content: microformats, microchunking, ephemerality of literature
• Distribution: ebook readers, mobile phones, ipod for books
• Creation: collaboration, wikis, networked books, web apps, user generation
• Inspiration: $100 laptop, bookmobiles
• Politics: copyright, DRM, APPGP
• Web-to-print: blogs, blooks, moo.com/POD

I’ll stop there. I made that list by skimming through the last six months of posts and seeing what my interests actually are. I’d be really interested to hear what other people would suggest. If you had the best and the brightest of the next generation of publishers in a room with you, what would you say to them?