booktwo.org

• The Big List of Bookish Social Networks [Deeplinking] - Handy.
• Rez HD Review [Eurogamer] - “Xbox Live Arcade is, then, our modern printing press: digital distribution transforming the expensive and exclusive into the affordable and inclusive.” Via Infovore. Very interested in games distribution and community right now.
• Opening a dream bookshop [Guardian] - Lee Rourke reports on two guys attempting to buck the trend.
• Open a Bookshop, what could possibly go wrong? - The Big Green Bookshop has a blog.

• eBook pricing: what’s fair / what will fly? [thedigitalist.net] - Pan Mac’s recently revamped site has some good thoughts. [Via Eoin]
• Online shoppers prefer books [Guardian] - “Booming demand in emerging markets from Vietnam to India has made books the most popular item to buy online, according to research out today.”
• Booksthatmakeyoudumb - “Yes, I’m aware correlation [does no equal] causation. The results are awesome regardless of direction of causality.” (Via Blackbeltjones)
• All this online sharing has to stop [guardian.co.uk] - Great article from Charles Arthur about the nature of the internet, the wrong attitudes to it, and the right one: change or die.
• Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books [TorrentFreak] - Yup, even Paulo Coelho’s doing it now. (Via Strange Attractor)
• BooksInMyPhone - As discovered by Alex - a good mix of public domain and modern, CC-licensed works. I’m going to give it a try.

Things Magazine just pointed to the growing cult of book covers online - Flickr groups for good looking books, old paperbacks, graphics and more, and similar projects like their own, wonderful Pelican Project. There are also plenty of blogs dedicated to the subject, and Penguin have spent the last couple of year deliberately turning them into a fetish item.

But why? Only today we learn that books are the number one internet product, and the weighting of book covers on ecommerce sites has long mystified me. We’re still selling books by the cover, even though their original purpose was only ever to attract the eye in the physical bookshop; online, they become pixelated blurs, lacking any of the distinctions of colour and typography that obsess designers. The covers are no longer representative.

Even actual ebooks are still represented by “covers”. It’s not unique - this continued reliance on a visual signifier for a virtual product is paralleled in Apple’s iTunes store and, particularly, Coverflow, and you see it too in the ‘boxing’ of downloadable software.

We say, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but we always do. The web, and particularly the rise of the ebook, should allow us to make better, more informed judgements about what we buy and read - or at least, that judgement should be based on the skill of the writer, and not the illustrator. You don’t buy shoes for the box, do you?

Is there a better way of communicating content?

• RCRD LBL | Free MP3 Downloads - Another innovation in the music sector - a free, ad-supported record label, from the founder of Engadget.
• Steve Jobs: “People Don’t Read Anymore” [Gizmodo] - Apple not planning on making an iBook then? What was that you said in 2006, Steve? Apple will never make a phone?
• Laser-cut art book by Olafur Eliasson - Another book hack: laser-cutting the pages to produce a 3D interior. From the man who brought you Sun in the Tate.

• Amazon Goes (Stealth) Social [Mashable] - Amazon have started piling on the post-Kindle social features, going up against LibraryThing and others in the online catalogue game. They aren’t going to stop, you know.
• Video Killed the Radio Star [The Penguin Blog] - Penguin are launching a mini-series - eight episodes accompanying a new novel - on their kids’ sitre, Spinebreakers. A nice step up from book promos, and well targeted.

• The Library of Congress Hits the Jackpot on Flickr [Book Patrol] - Michael Lieberman gives a good account: “This is a watershed event. It is a solid web 2.0 victory.”
• LibraryThing | Catalog your books online : Cuecat - The cuecat is a very cheap USB barcode scanner. One of my NY resolutions is to use LT properly, and until ebooks and an LT widget (like Last.fm) this is the only way I’m going to be bothered.
• Guerrilla Advertising on the streets of Tokyo [CR Blog] - The shape of the book is not immutable. Another one for the ‘book hacks’ category.
• A Venerable Magazine Energizes Its Web Site [NYT] - The Atlantic is abolishing its paywall, expecting that going ‘free’ will actually bring them profit.
• Kinbote’s Bespoke Art Commentary Service - “Explaining why a young, immature artist — a child, if you will — chooses to be influenced by Renoir rather than Richter is an almost impossibly complex maneuver, one for which you need an expert. I am that expert.” Genius.

• Escape Old London’s Most Feared Prison - Guided by GPS [Wired] - Write-up of one of the mscaper’s projects (Ta, George)
• Noises off: Characters in search of a blog [Guardian] - David Mamet has been blogging in character ahead of his new play opening on Broadway.

Brief outline of ideas for locative storytelling (more thoughts originating from here and here).

Goal: To produce a locative storytelling experience, where strands of the story are triggered by the reader/listener’s location.

Tech requirements: GPS-enabled mobile phone, or Google Maps’ new locator function, headphones, application running on Symbian or Windows Mobile (or preferably both…).

Personnel: Writer or team of writers, developer, interface designer, voice actor.

Issues: Low GPS penetration - few handsets currently but set to change rapidly - GMaps not yet accurate enough, at least outside large towns.

Proposal: Create a downloadable application which runs on a mobile device. Each standalone app contains a story, specially created for the medium and a particular location (although it would be possible to edit stories with strong localities for this, the former offers more possibilities).

Running the app spawns a navigation map - either a GMaps overlay or a specially created one (perfectly possible for small areas), showing the user’s location (X, above, wide and zoomed) and the accessible storypoints - location-specific ’shards’ of the story.

As the user moves across the map, they come into contact with the storypoints - close enough, and they trigger the shards associated with that point: scrollable texts, an audio recording, even images or video.

This format offers a number of interesting possibilities for the narrative form, beyond a simple (and still wholly possible) linear structure, such as:

• Multiple entry and exit points
• Threaded/associative storytelling (storypoints only revealed after certain others have been visited)
• … tending to “Choose your own adventure” style
• Surprise shards (hidden storypoints)
• Story as treasure hunt.

To achieve the full potential, it would require a writer prepared to engage with (at least partially) non-linear storytelling.

So, that’s a start. Thoughts? Would be pretty sweet to set one of these up in time for London Lit Plus in the summer…

Further reading:

• The Missing Voice
• And While London Burns
• Navball
• Mscapers

• My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell - One of the early seminal texts on online culture and virtual worlds, now available as a free download. Thanks, Julian
• James Bond And The Decline Of Western Civilization [Creative Review] - Ian Fleming’s book jackets as metaphor for creeping crass commercialism.

• iriver prepping handwriting-friendly e-book / tablet? [Engadget] - Pretty, but probably vapour.
• Amazon Kindle Has Secrets: Faux-GPS Google Maps, Minesweeper, and More [Gizmodo] - Implying there’s rather more to the little beast, and a next gen can’t be far off.
• Flashman and the Grim Reaper - Someone has kindly transcribed Private Eye’s rather lovely tribute to GMF, subtitled ‘The bits you actually will miss’. Enjoy.
• Camerassassins [TIGS] - Faris on the new generation of mobile games
• Worst Medium Ever [Gawker] - ‘The Simpsons’ announces the death of print