booktwo.org

• Handicapping the Tournament of Books [Coudal partners] - Books + Gambling = Literacy. Brilliant. [Via Infovore]
• tales from the long tail: graph paper time [russell davies] - Russell’s been tracking his Amazon rank with potentially interesting results.
• The Blog on the Bookshelf - “The home of interesting bookshelves, bookcases and things that look like them.” Niche blogging taken to the limit.

Kate Pullinger’s column in today’s Guardian - Writers deserve a better deal from digital publishing - is very good on why authors should get a better, not worse, deal from digital publishing, and on the role of publishers in the new digital world.

But it’s particularly priceless for this anecdote:

At the moment the entire infrastructure of the publishing industry is geared toward shifting retail units; the head of digital publishing at a large publishing house told me that because their accounting system is entirely warehouse-based, for a time they had to find a way to represent the units shifted through digital downloads. Their solution was to have empty pallets in the warehouse, with invisible digital content, thus enabling the system to count the units that had sold.

I think this stands as an exemplar of the industry’s problems adapting. Although it was a temporary solution, publishers need to recognise that the game has fundamentally changed - in supply, distribution, and in rights and royalties - and the old ways are just not applicable any more.

• unfiction.com -
• Quotations from Aldous Huxley’s Island - Stumbled on a page of quotations from one of my favourite books. Thought I’d share.
• Electric Alphabet - “Writing and publishing in the digital near-future” - a new blog for you to watch.

• What has a grin and six tales? - Boys and Girls: Attention.
• The Penguin Blog: Nonlinearity - Jeremy “waffles with intent”. Excellent.

• Brits! Write to your MP to stop sneaky copyright term extension NOW! [Boing Boing] - If only because it gives you an opportunity to use a lovely MySociety site. And for all the other reasons too…
• Psst! Want to read a Nobel winner for free? Or a Pulitzer or Newbery book? Here?s how [TeleRead] - “Notice? This isn?t just a list of books, but also, unwittingly, a policy statement?documenting the damage that copyright term extension has done to the study and enjoyment of literature in the United States.”
• borders self-publishing and the idea of vanity [if:book] - ‘You can even pay to have your own book tour and readings in actual Borders stores, bringing vanity publishing to a whole new level of fantasy role-playing. Writing and publishing, as the Borders site proclaims in its top banner, is now a “lifestyle.”‘
• Digital Life - Digital Life? Borders Lifestyles? Personal Publishing? All very confusing, but basically it’s a Borders-themed skin for Lulu.
• Data Feeds at BookMooch - More bookish APIs (Ta, Tom) - any more, much appreciated.
• Product Placement in Books [New York Times] - The book industry needs to look at ways to make money from content other than sales, but let’s hope this is not the route it takes.

• isbndb.com - free ISBN database - Hello API.
• Wikitravel Press - POD printing of the relevant bits of Wikitravel, just for you. Web2Print done right.
• On the OLPC Movement… [plasticbag.org] - Tom Coates’ review of the XO and some surrounding thoughts. A pretty cogent introduction to the machine, and unpacking of the beliefs that created it.

I’m currently reading a book in three formats at once. I’ve got a nice paperback copy for bed and sofa reading. I’ve got an ebook formatted for my mobile phone for tubes and buses. And I’ve got a free audiobook—an MP3 also on my mobile phone—for when I’m cycling along the canal to work in the mornings. (I could also read by email and RSS, if desired).

None of this is perfect. The pbook is an old photostat copy - it was cheap, but it’s poorly set, there are a lot of (uncorrectable) typos and there’s little metacontent (e.g. a good, contextual introduction - a real value-add in pbooks). The ebook is fine but very limited, and I keep pressing the wrong button and skipping to the wrong place (despite now being quoted on their homepage, I’m not an unqualified fan of booksinmyphone). And the audiobook is too quiet and read in a fairly toneless Californian voice, which just doesn’t suit the text. Nevertheless.

What does this tell us? Well, firstly, that the old idea of the ‘book’ as distinct, inviolable, physical entity is well and truly gone - we’ve had ‘audiobooks’ for decades, for starters. Many audiobooks typically outsell the hardback editions of their print counterparts, and while this market has yet to really break through into mp3s, Amazon’s acquisition of Audible and increased iTunes support will change this eventually. The main issue at the moment, as with ebooks, is pricing.

The other thing I think we need to pay more attention to is interoperability (? right word) between formats, because these aren’t going to stop multiplying. I don’t just mean making ebooks platform-independent, I mean building structures that make skipping between formats easy. Yesterday’s proposal contains the germ of this, but really a universally agreed mark-up language for texts to allow direct-linking at a line-by-line level is necessary.

Which isn’t going to happen, of course—imagine creating a mark-up language for all the different versions of Shakespeare’s texts alone—but it’s fun to think about. And possibly create things now that will help.

• Free eBooks - Featured on BuzzFeed - When Buzzfeed gets involved, you know something is up. But telling that everyone is quietly approving.
• Alain Robbe-Grillet est mort [Bibliobs] - Will we finally see some reprints and recognition? Let’s hope so.

I’ve been thinking about how to create RSS feeds and achievements for pBooks, almost an API. Here’s a quick, on-the-way-to-work scheme. Think Foamee. Bkkeeper monitors your twitter feed for @bkkeeper notes - just text an ISBN and ’start’, ‘end’ or a page number to your Twitter stream. On ’start’, bkkeeper adds that ISBN to your LibraryThing account and fills in the ’started on’ date. It continues to follow your progress as you read the book, then when it gets an ‘end’ message it fills in the ‘finished on’ date. Further enhancements could include blogging dog-eared pages - although limited to Twitter’s 140-char limit, less a 13-digit ISBN.

Should really finish another bkish project before trying this one, although the two would mesh quite nicely together, eh, Tom?

OK. Back to work.

• What Have You Done For Me Lately? [Booksquare] - “Because I have seen the future and her name is Alison Norringtonâ�¦ your competition is not who you think it is.” On the future of publishers. God I love Booksquare.
• How to roast a duck [The Digitalist] - Sara Lloyd at Macmillan sums up a few interesting points from the Tools of Change conference, e.g. “40% of Internet users are tagging content on a daily basis”.
• James-Frey.com - A little booksite we just signed off at work. My favourite feature is bringing the comments up to the same level as the content. We shall see if we live to regret this (a post on trolls is coming soon).
• Secrets of Cambridge ‘porn’ library revealed [Telegraph] - Not as exciting as first hoped. May I recommend the Harry Price bequest at Senate House for anyone in search of more esoteric fun.
• Spectra (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - “Bynner and Ficke were old-school poets who had grown weary of the isms and free-form experiments that had displaced more traditional varieties of poetic practice… they had let their mental guard down, and produced some of their most interesting work.”
• Sokal Affair - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - “The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University).”
• Top authors to go digital with ebooks [Times Online] - “Every other major publisher is drawing up plans to follow suit, pitching the books at just below the price of a hardback.” Oh dear. The journalist doesn’t understand much more either.