Archive
London Lit Plus, the literary festival I set up last year, kicks off for the second time tomorrow. I’d love to see you there. After a slow start, we’ve gathered up a bunch of really fantastic events. There’s a great string of events for classic London authors like Derek Raymond and Chris Petit, walks across […]
FTW (“For The Win”): An enthusiastic emphasis to the end of a comment, message, or post. Sometimes genuine, but often sarcastic. Originated from the game show Hollywood Squares where the result of the player’s response is expected to win the game. [Urban Dictionary] The term ‘Win’ and its antonym ‘Fail’ have outgrown their origin in […]
Attempting to bypass a creative block today, I started photographing objects around the house. I noticed the texts that cover most consumer goods, the sheer wealth of them, and how they are so often hidden, turned away. I started making them visible. I’d just been reading an extract from Felicity Lawrence’s Eat Your Heart Out […]
Last night I attended the launch of Semina, a new series of experimental novels from Book Works, at Housmans. The novels are the result of an open call for submissions, and are being selected by series Commissioning Editor Stewart Home. The first two titles in the series, Bridget Penney’s Index, and Maki Kim’s One Break, […]
I have mixed feelings about creative writing courses, but Hanif Kureishi doesn’t: “One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.” I recently gave a talk to some Creative Writing […]
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 […]
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 […]
HarperCollins have just launched their online slushpile site, authonomy.com, in private beta. Authonomy allows budding authors to upload chapters of their work for the rest of the community to read and comment on. There’s been a lot of speculation about how this would be implemented, and at first sight it looks pretty good – HC […]
I’m very pleased to say that my open-source literary festival, London Lit Plus, is happening again this year. Full details at londonlitplus.com, with plenty more to come. Head over, check it out, start spreading the word – and think about holding an event!
George Perec’s W, and the tyranny of the Olympic Ideal, by James Bridle. The Frenchman Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, believed that the Olympic games could be a force for peace in the world, creating a new religion “adhering to an ideal of a higher life, to strive for perfection”, […]
Flickr, everyone’s favourite photo site, just added video, and not everyone is happy about it. But Flickr has been very clever – their video offering is not designed to rival YouTube or the rest as a repository for short films, comedy clips and old adverts. Instead, they’ve limited the videos to 90 seconds to create […]
If you’ve not been keeping up, Amazon is making a massive and highly controversial land-grab for POD and the long tail of publishing. More info here. As this is a very big issue indeed, and no worthy body on this side of the pond seems to be making a fuss, I’m only too happy to […]
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, […]
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 […]
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. William Burroughs – Thanksgiving Prayer Stephen Spender – The […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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Booktwo.org is the blog of James Bridle, a book and technology specialist with specific expertise in planning and producing web and new media projects for clients in publishing and the arts. If you'd like to hire me, have a look at my CV and portfolio, and feel free to get in touch.
I am also a member of the Really Interesting Group.
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I am available for conferences and other events. For examples, see my talks at Interesting, Playful, South by Southwest, dConstruct and Tools of Change Frankfurt.
A complete list of talks, with links, is available.