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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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

…

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A quick note. As I mentioned vaguely before, I’ll be attending all three days of the London Book Fair next week. I’ll be working, but if there’s anyone who’d like to meet up for a drink at the end of the day, please get in touch.

I’ll obviously be reporting on any booktwo-related events, on the general techness of this year’s Fair, and of the state of the industry as a whole, so stay tuned.

With little fanfare, if:book released a very early version of Sophie, their rich content creation tool, last Wednesday. You can download it here. Sophie has been described variously as the next step in ebooks, a publishing tool for the rest of us, the first base of the networked book, so I was eager to see what it actually was.

After a short time playing around with it, I pretty much gave up. I’d show you the result, but I can’t figure out how to show it off as there’s no documentation and everything I did manage to do…

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Hello. Sorry. I’m very busy at the moment and booktwo isn’t getting the attention it deserves, although I hope you’re enjoying the regular Stop Press – it’s all stuff I’d like to write more about if I had more time – also about this, and particularly this, hopefully soon.

In the mean time, a heads-up for Londoners about this (ta, Max):

Margaret Atwood, Andrew O’Hagan, Stephen Page & Erica Wagner
Digitise or Die: What is the Future of the Book?

Tuesday 17 April 2007, 7:30 P.M, Queen Elizabeth Hall.

What

…

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