booktwo.org

I’ve been playing with glanceables and synecdoches for a while now, until I came up with something that had to be got out of my head, and into the world.

So here it is: Romance has lived too long upon this river; a single-serving web page that tells you how high the tide is at London Bridge: explicitly close up, but also, roughly, at a glance.

(It works very well on the iPad (although better if it were wrapped in an app), OK on the iPhone, and it works particularly well on big screens, particularly…

Read the rest of this post →

BBC7 is currently doing Gibson’s Pattern Recognition as this week’s Sci-Fi serial. If you’re in the UK you can listen via iPlayer.

It’s being read by Lorelei King, “one of the most successful and accomplished American actresses working in the UK today.” She’s good at voices but (and, Lorelei, this is no criticism if you’re idly googling yourself) her standard one has a strange, disembodied quality, which makes it sound like Text-to-Speech.

As David pointed out, it feels like there should be a choice for voices for a text like this, and there’s some assemblage…

Read the rest of this post →

There it is, just sitting on a shelf, in a little electronics store in the corner of Khan Market, in New Delhi. Like it’s a totally normal thing. An ebook reader. In a shop. In India.

It’s only a little over four years since I wrote Birth pangs of a new literature. Publishing then didn’t believe in eBooks (or a number of other things mentioned therein, like Amazon becoming a publisher, but there you go.)

Four years. And there’s an ereader in a shop in a market in New Delhi.

…

Which is not to make any…

Read the rest of this post →

Back from India. It was amazing, as ever. Couple of things to talk about. First:

If we’ve ever talked about India and books, you’ll know I’m slightly obsessed with One Night @ The Call Center by Chetan Bhagat. I first read it and wrote about it when I was in India last year, and it’s stayed in my head ever since.

One Night @ The Call Center is about a bunch of young, over-educated kids working in a call center in Gurgaon (which is, trying desperately not to deviate, the new Chiba). Over the course of a…

Read the rest of this post →