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After the recent, ongoing hullabaloo over Amazon’s attempts to monopolise the print-on-demand market, I thought I’d point to some interesting uses of POD that might change some peoples’ perceptions of the technology, and show it’s not all vanity presses and Lulu photobooks.

First up is PublicDomainReprints.org, a project by book geek and hacker Yakov Shafranovich, which takes texts from The Internet Archive and Google Books (over 2 million works) and automatically formats them and sends them to print. It’s a non-commercial project based on his own commercial POD company, and while (confessedly) ropy, it’s…

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I wanted to post this quickly, before it gets lost in the weekend. Authors and publishers who use Print-On-Demand printers in the US have recently been hearing that Amazon will only continue to carry their works if they switch to Amazon’s own POD property, BookSurge. WritersWeekly has the full story.

This is a pretty big deal. Amazon has around 15%-20% of the total book market (in the UK), but the vast majority of the online book market, which is growing all the time. Meanwhile, POD has been turning from a vanity publisher’s niche into a mainstream printing…

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Continuing booktwo’s mission to push lit into every available media space, online and off, we’re pleased to present a muxtape featuring some of our favourite pieces of poetry and spoken word. I’ve always been rubbish at arranging mixtapes, so apologies if the order jars a little.

1. William Burroughs – Thanksgiving Prayer
2. Stephen Spender – The Truly Great
3. Thom Gunn – Moly
4. Richard Hell – “The Rev. Hell Gets Confused”
5. Rainer Maria Rilke – Too Alone
6. Louis MacNeice – Prayer Before Birth
7. Ivor Cutler – Shop Lifters
8. Don Paterson – The Lover
9. Hilaire Belloc – Tarantella
10. T.S. Eliot

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In 1928, a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called /Plane Crazy/. In November, in New York City’s Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, /Steamboat Willie/ brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse. Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie /The Jazz Singer/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would

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The Great Escape cover above, designed by Abram Games for Penguin in 1951, is one of my all-time favourites. And when, Moleskined-out, I needed a new notebook, it sprung to mind.

So here’s what I did. I scanned in the cover, and created a dummy edition, complete with 200 blank, numbered pages, which I had printed by Lulu – a replica edition for my own use. It cost £5, which I thought was pretty reasonable.

If you’d like to do the same, here’s the blank, numbered interior pdf for a 200pp paperback notebook (what Lulu calls…

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I was recently asked for links on the subject of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and, hunting around, came across http://fweet.org/, the utterly bonkers Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury, a collection of over 78,000 notes on the Wake, gathered from numerous written sources. Very easy to get lost in.

It reminded me of another great resource for comprehension: HyperArts’ excellent Thomas Pynchon site, which has grown dedicated wikis since I last visited, in addition to the most useful concordance to Gravity’s Rainbow:

White Visitation
34; former mental hospital located in the fictional town of Ick Regis on the coast

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