Archive
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 […]
I got my Cuecat a couple of weeks ago and spent a happy couple of hours scanning in this whole bookshelf, which consists of approximately 90% of my library. The above is a detail from the resulting author cloud. I like the cuecat as a nice little interface tool, necessary now like a CD reader […]
So, I just finished reading a novel on my phone. Stepping up to the plate, I downloaded Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which is a blast, by the way) from booksinmyphone.com and gave it a go. And you know what? It was great. It was easy to read. It didn’t strain […]
Things Magazine just pointed to the growing cult of book covers online – Flickr groups for good looking books, old paperbacks, graphics and more, and similar projects like their own, wonderful Pelican Project. There are also plenty of blogs dedicated to the subject, and Penguin have spent the last couple of year deliberately turning them […]
Brief outline of ideas for locative storytelling (more thoughts originating from here and here). Goal: To produce a locative storytelling experience, where strands of the story are triggered by the reader/listener’s location. Tech requirements: GPS-enabled mobile phone, or Google Maps’ new locator function, headphones, application running on Symbian or Windows Mobile (or preferably both…). Personnel: […]
Vanquished in the field of arms, Armenia seeks salvation in the scriptoria. It is a retreat, but in this withdrawal there is dignity and a will to live. What is a scriptorium? It can be a cell, sometimes a room in a clay cottage, even a cave in the rocks. In such a scriptorium is […]
And so the end of the year. So much to say, so little time. I’m off until mid-January, and I wish all Booktwo readers the very merriest of Christmases. No final comments (and I have so much to say!), no best-of lists (although I have to say, this was definitely my book of the year). […]
I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It’s an art form for very few […]
So, I’ve been meaning to write about Swotter for a while. A couple of weeks ago, it finished reading the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses to Twitter. I think there’s something kind of amazing about that, but I’m not sure what. Final stats: Followers: 198 (meh) Updates: 23,467 (phew!) Props to the hardcore who followed […]
So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it. There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to […]
Tony White, author of one of my favourite books, Foxy-T, and literary editor of The Idler, has just published a series of extracts from Balkanising Bloomsbury, a work in progress, in the Diffusion eBooks format. He writes: The ebooks are the result of a residency with Proboscis that I’ve been undertaking in recent months, working […]
Jeremy Ettinghausen just announced Penguin’s new Facebook page over at the Penguin blog with a particularly apposite and self-effacing quote: “Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies … But […]
Tom pointed to this hilarious/depressing news story about the National Lottery’s ‘Cool Cash’ scratchcard: To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing. But the concept of […]
Things I Love (a short and selective list): Blogging, WordPress, Books, Penguin paperbacks, Typography. I am, therefore, quite over the moon to announce the release of Marber, a theme for the WordPress blogging platform based on good typographic practices and Romek Marber’s classic 1961 grid for Penguin Books. Marber is a real labour of love, […]
I’ve noticed a trend in longtime bloggers, which I’m certainly a part of. Blogging less, linking more, generally winding down the straight blog in favour of a more distributed presence via Twitter, Delicious, videoblog apps like Seesmic. Some of these may be fed through the blog, like Booktwo’s RSS links, but it’s all getting a […]
So, I signed up for Blog Action Day, and then promptly forgot about it. It was yesterday. Here’s what I’d planned to talk about, with a lot less research than the original idea. Sorry about that: I’m pretty angry about the environmental state of publishing. We are not, by any extent of the imagination, a […]
So, Peter noticed something quite interesting. His attempts to download Radiohead’s In Rainbows failed – he logged in, paid, requested a download key, it never arrived – so he dropped them an email. After a quick and entirely automated exchange, they gave him an email address to write to for a new authentication key: downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com. […]
So. I wrote a book. It’s out today. Yeah, I know. You’ve been reading this site for ages, waiting for booktech revelations, when you realise it’s just been a plog all along. Yes, I wrote a book, and if you want to buy it, that would be sweet. It is pretty awesome. But that’s not […]
However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he […]
Adobe have just launched a fascinating project called Knowhow which allows user-generation of help data in CS3. Items in knowhow’s del.icio.us network with contextual CS3 terms appear as tooltips in CS3 itself (image and link via swissmiss). Flickr and many other services uses simple tagging to provide metadata around their content, but this system offers […]
For Hire
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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Speaking Engagements:
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.