booktwo.org

• Hay Festival 21 | Mssv - Adrian’s great article on Hay: “a glimpse of the future, a future run by old people.”
• Science Museum API documentation - Not much yet, but oh, the possibilities…

• PODULARITY ? Authors and books. In a pod. - An interesting-sounding author interview podcast.
• Microsoft hands Google the future of digital books | The Register - Microsoft is shutting down Live Book Search, and, more worryingly, ending its funding of the Open Content Alliance.

• BIGGEST DRAWING IN THE WORLD - GPS + DHL.

• Lookybook | Home - Picture books online. A lot better than Browse Inside.

• The dire state of book typography | Typophile - For this comment: “Maybe someone should start a blog comparing the crap type in printed books with the crap type in ebooks, so that the publishers realize how little consumers will really be losing when they make the switch.”

Back in February, I sketched out this idea on the back of an envelope. I’m pleased to say it is now a reality.

Bkkeepr allows you to track your reading and make bookmarks via text message and the web. It uses Twitter as it’s source, generating a timeline of everyone’s reading, as well as pages for people, and pages for books. Once added, users can add their books to the LibraryThing account, check library availability, and much more. There are also all the RSS feeds and widgets you’d expect.

I particularly like the bookmarking feature which allows me to remember not only my favourite thoughts and phrases from books, but to see what everyone else thought too. A step towards real social bookmarking, and a help to blogging all dog-eared pages.

Bkkeepr came about initially because I was always forgetting to add my books to LibraryThing, mostly because I wasn’t in front of my computer when I was reading. I can now text bkkeepr when I start and finish a book, and add to LT at my leisure. But the idea behind bkkeepr is something more than this: it is an attempt to provide an API for the physical book, to enable the creation of services around the enjoyment of literature; a Last.fm for books.

Like Last.fm, it is meant to be as simple and unobtrusive as possible, and as open as possible. I intend Bkkeepr to be as much a platform as a website, to enable interesting things with books on the web. As Last.fm has resulted in a range of mashups and services, so I’d like to see Bkkeepr generate charts and graphs of literary opinion and activity, to create a window on the lit zeitgeist. Despite the proliferation of book-related material on the web, the act of reading itself, because of its inherent disconnectedness, has remained almost invisible on the web, leading to a perception of its decline. I hope bkkeepr does something to change this.

For the geeks, there’s a lot more about bkkeepr on this development blog (which I’ll continue to update). I learned PHP to build it, it’s entirely built with open-source components, including the CodeIgniter framework, and uses freely-exchanged data from Amazon Web Services, LibraryThing, WorldCat and others. I’ve learned more about ISBNs than I ever wanted to know, and I hope it holds up.

Bkkeepr is currently ’sponsored’ by Little, Brown, who I owe a debt of gratitude for taking a gamble on the site. I’m not much of a fan of advertising, but the ongoing hosting and bandwidth of the site need support, a publisher is the right partner, and I hope to continue to find sponsors who are sympathetic to its aims.

Finally, I built bkkeepr because it was a good idea (I think) that needed doing. It didn’t take long, it wasn’t the hardest thing ever, and it didn’t cost anything. I frequently detail on this site the troubles that publishers and the book industry in general are having figuring out what they should be doing on the web. I think that this sort of thing is one area where their energies could be focussed: not trying to compete with Amazon et al on sales or metadata, but providing meaningful services and experiences for book-lovers in the same way they’ve been doing through their content for years.

• Giddy & Malevolent - The New York Review of Books - The NYRB republishes Patrick Hamilton, and this great essay on his work. Good things do happen.

• Story vs. Book: The Future of Publishing | Booksquare - I love Booksquare. Spot on as always.
• Publishers fighting off Amazon - for now - Finally, a UK angle on the Amazon-bully story. The Big A has been demanding ever-higher discounts, and allegedly stopped sale of Bloomsbury’s titles for a period of time.
• Class action suit filed against Amazon over POD bullying?with BookLocker as the primary plaintiff - Was wondering what was happening on this.
• Steven Poole: Talking like a pirate - Good review of MAtt Mason’s ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’, with an added codicil for the publishing industry.
• YouTube - book launch 2.0 - This is the world we live in.

I’ve been spending the day listen to friends twitter from NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference at the South Bank, and an Arts Council England summit on the future of literature just round the corner. NESTA was established by the government in 1998 with an endowment of £250 million. Just last week, ACE announced £16.5 million of Lottery funding for the Southbank Centre, the same week I discovered that my full-price membership of that institution no longer lets me take in a friend for free.

Meanwhile, the slash and burn of the literature sector continues (others too: film, theatre, visual arts, but lit’s what I know). Since launching London Lit Plus 2008 last week I’ve been hearing the same story from all over: we don’t have any money. They cut us off. It’s depressing, and frustrating. I’ve long been an exponent of using the internet and related technologies to bypass the need for huge investment, but real-world activities still need real-world money.

A tale of two literary magazines illustrates the point: The London Magazine, one of the longest-established literary journals in the world, has seen its budget drastically reduced, but they say “we are determined to continue, and to reach out to a wider audience.” Pen Pusher is a fantastic little magazine, only two years old, “publishing the best and most inspirational new fiction, poetry and features”. In that time they’ve proved that there is an audience for what they do, yet they were refused ACE funding on the basis of ‘insufficient priority’ (you can help by responding to their Sponsor-a-Page campaign).

I believe these audiences are better served by helping small organisations reach people directly rather than funding big-org beanfeasts so Gordon Brown can tell some of the countries wealthiest people that “innovation is the most important thing for Britain’s future”, not least because small companies use what they’re given better - they have to. I hope this year’s LL+ will be a show of defiance in the face of the bureaucrats who trade on our culture while contributing nothing to its economy.

• Hide & Seek Festival - Hide and Seek is a festival of social games and playful experiences, running in London from the 27th to the 29th of June 2008.