booktwo.org

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is the website and nom de guerre of artists Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, based in Seoul, South Korea. Their art takes the form of text, usually parodying the manifesto or thesis form and accompanied by jazz soundtracks, delivered either as film, or, on the web, flash movies. You can watch the films on their website (the above is from Cunnilingus in North Korea, their most recent work is Morning of the Mongoloids, for Lisboa20).

The artists’ state their intentions with these web-based movies thus: “We try to break as many rules as possible. We try to express the essence of the Internet: information. Strip away the interactivity, the graphics, the design, the photos, the illustrations, the banners, the colours, the fonts and the rest, and what’s left? The text.”

A recent literary event provided a chance for an extended chat with various people about the possibilities for new types of readings. I’ve always thought they’re a bad way to appreciate lit, but they’re valuable in promoting new work, and bringing together like-minded people. What can we do about this?

Read the rest of this entry »

• Kansas City bookstore burns surplus books in protest at “society’s diminishing support for the printed word.” - Not sure if this is entirely serious; there are certainly more helpful ways to make this point. (Also Leathem/Latham - coincidence?) (Via Maud Newton)
• PersonaNonData: HP’s E-Reader Concept “BOOK” - A pretty one this. Who wants to start getting me demo models of this stuff?
• My new start-up: BookTour.com - Chris Anderson (of Wired and Long Tail fame) teases us. Not sure what this is going to be…
• PC World - Sony, Philips Unveil Flexible OLED Displays - Not ebook-suitable (being backlit, not reflective), but impressive nontheless.
• YouTube - Sony’s flexible, full-color OLED - Video of the above in action.
• Burst Culture - Warren Ellis on flash fiction, SF, and why the web is another medium, not a replacement medium.
• You can’t stop a tidal wave with a fork - Salon article on outsourcing and the death of a publishing sector - largely, but not entirely, due to technology. (Via Times Emit)

3:AM Magazine, of which I am a co-editor as well as designer and site developer, today launched a new, Portuguese-language edition dedicated to writing, music and culture from Brazil: 3:AM Brasil.

I meant to write about 3:AM when we launched the redesigned site back in January, but didn’t get round to it. It’s a great example of a new kind of literary magazine, fully distributed (editors are based in the UK, France, the Czech Republic, the US, Canada and elsewhere), constantly updated and updatable, a Myspace sensation (with 3:AM Brasil hot on its heels), publishing new and established writers with equal commitment and holding offline events in a host of cities worldwide.

I’m really excited about this new venture, not just because of all the hot lit coming out of Brazil right now, which now has a central place to show itself off to a wider community, but because it shows how technology can be leveraged to readdress the shocking state of literature in translation in the English-speaking world (much back-and-forth between 3:AM’s sister sites is planned), and we can bring yet more new, exciting writing into the light. 3:AM Deputy Editor A. Stevens and new 3:AM Brasil Editor Elisangela Fracaroli deserve much praise for making this happen.

Unsurprisingly, 3:AM France and Japan are now in advanced states of planning - watch this space…

If things have been less busy around here for the last couple of weeks, there’s a reason: I’m moving on from my day job with the lovely Snowbooks, and pursuing other opportunities, with the consequent upheavals. Booktwo isn’t going anywhere though, and neither is Slow Fire - thanks to all who have signed up, and expect to see something in the next few weeks (I’m off to MiniCamp tonight, to see how they do things).

Apologies for the self-promotion, but one of the things I’ll be doing is this: STML Studio,  a design and marketing consultancy helping out publishers and others with, well, whatever they need help with. If that’s you, why not drop me a line.

Publishing is a tough business at the moment, but I continue to believe that we can harness technology to make sure publishers and literature in toto can compete, survive and thrive. I for one am going to see what I can do about that. Don’t go away.

• Amazon.com Acquires Brilliance Audio - They’re not planning on taking over the world. Not at all. Noooo.
• DailyLit: Read books by email and RSS. - This I like. I’m going to try Moby Dick (Might as well aim high) and report back on how it goes…
• A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright? - New York Times - But hopefully, a stupid idea dies quickly.
• Against perpetual copyright - Larry Lessig (of Creative Commons)’s open response (and open wiki) to that stupid idea.
• Tell Us About The Future Of Publishing - More Booksquare: we’re all invited to pitch in. Spread the word.
• What If A Billion Kids Were Reading And Nobody Noticed? - Booksquare appeals for us to give the kids something to do. A commendable request.
• Notes from the Google UnBound Conference (NYC, January 18, 2007) - Some good stuff in there (Via PersonaNonData)
• Publisher and Authors Parse a Term: Out of Print - The NYT on Simon & Schuster’s rewriting of the rules, thanks to POD. Expect to see more of this…
• The Ultimate eBook Experiment: Reading in the Bathtub - Genius. Take that, Margaret. (Yeah, it’s silly, but remember that yellow waterproof Sony walkman? They could make a Reader like that, no problem).
• twitterfic - Twitter Fiction - More Twittish lit
• “We must act together! We must act quickly!” - Booksellers Association’s Digital Task Force - A must-read if you’re in the UK. According to this in depth Bookseller article, the conference’s response was (predictably) huffish.

• LG.Philips announce flexible colour A4 eink paper
• U.K. Music Label Creates a Vinyl-MP3 Hybrid - Will we see books come packaged with an ongoing ebook license?
• ZombieAttack! - A tale told by Twitter
• Andrew Marr on curling up with a good ebook - “Refine the page-turning just a little more, offer a battered blue cloth-bound wallet and, above all, make it smell… But it’s clear enough that after all the waiting and the over-hyping, the ebook is arriving.”
• “The ‘killer device’ - an iPod for books - isn’t with us yet, but…” - Macmillan’s Digital Publisher Sara Lloyd gets a frisson from Andrew Marr
• Richard Charkin’s Macmillan figures and thoughts - Rounding up the ebook story on the Chark Blog.
• MPS Technologies | BookStore - Macmillan’s not-terribly-new tech, as mentioned by Richard Charkin. I’ve tried it, it’s not very exciting.
• rBooks.co.uk - Random House UK’s new online push - Claims to ‘take you inside the books we sell’ - reality appears to be a bookshop, a few interviews, and an RSS-less news feed.
• Zoe Margolis: Curl up with a good blog - The ‘Girl With A One Track Mind’ author argues - unsurprisingly - for the quality of writing on the web.

[Booktwo.org is on holiday this week. We'll be back on the 23rd of May.]

With new technology comes the need to rethink certain conventions. The above is clipped from a Macmillan ebook (link), and while I don’t wish to do anyone in particular down, and the technology is young, I think it speaks to a disparity in the understanding of ebooks: they are not simply paper books, scanned page by page and uploaded - or at least, they have the potential to be so much more.

Read the rest of this entry »

• Fiction Markup Language (FicML) - A novelist/nutter creating an XML schema for fiction. Kind of wonderful.
• Bill Gates: The only obstacle preventing online reading is the clumsiness of devices. - He’s talking about newspapers, but as the currency of online reading increases, and drives new technology, can books be far behind?
• Laughing Squid builds Amazon aStore, meets resistance - Interesting and informed debate on online bookselling (via <a href=”http://www.sizemore.co.uk/visiblemonsters/”>Visible Monsters</a>)

Book piracy is no laughing matter, particularly in India, where it is estimated that US$36.5 million a year are lost by publishers (Source). With the advent of YouTube-like services such as Scribd, the problem is only going to grow.

However, I fear that these ads from an Indian bookseller are unlikely to have much effect, even with their very Indian appeal to respect the authors involved.

Ta, Mike.