Archive
For reasons that will become clear in a bit, I am currently wrangling various bits of SXSW-related data into different media. I couldn’t find the schedule in a useful form anywhere, although it is probably out there somewhere, so for anyone who might also find it useful, here is the complete Interactive schedule in XML: […]
On Friday I went to The Story, a conference organised by Matt Locke of Channel 4. It was very good, and also confusing. In a good way. And because it was confusing this won’t be a straight trip report: it will be some hastily scrawled notes and some linked reflections. Attempt no summaries here. [For […]
UPDATE 4/3/10: Newspaper Club won! Ten days ago, Newspaper Club asked me to make something to go in the Design Museum, where they’ve been nominated in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year awards. They wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design […]
For those who expressed an interest, Immanent In The Manifold City, my newspaper concerning Walking Stewart, ubiquity and time travel in the Nineteenth Century, is now available for purchase, in an edition of 100 signed & numbered copies.
Tomorrow is T-day. Or iDay. Or whatever. It’ll be fun. Nobody knows *anything* yet. Well, apart from the folks at McGraw-Hill and Hachette, probably Kobo, and a whole host of others. But for the purposes of this discussion: nobody *knows* *anything*. About the Tablet, that is. Because, actually, we know quite a lot. We know […]
In March, I’m going to South By Southwest, the Austin, Texas-based megafestival encompassing film, music, and all things digital. I’m talking on a panel put together by Chris Heathcote about post-digital design, and why the future isn’t just on screens, alongside Aaron Straup Cope and Michal Migurski of Stamen, and Ben Terrett and Russell Davies […]
I’ve just started Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future (indeed, I read a bit of the opening of the first of the seven short stories therein on today’s Mattins). The second story—an excellent and extraordinary fantasy of the Eiffel Tower run amok—begins with a meditation on reading and bookmarking. You know when you’re reading an […]
For a long time now, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London. And so, this year, I’m doing something about it. I’m studying it: watching it again and again, mining it for references and meaning, analysing and locating shots and scenes. London lends itself to this process, more than any other film […]
I’ve been wanting to play with Layar, the augmented reality browser for iPhone 3GS and Android for a while. So I did. As a test case, I’ve created a layar for Noticings, the utterly awesome photography game created by my friends Tom and Tom. It lets you see and find Noticings near you (if there […]
As some of you may have noticed, booktwo.org has over this year become increasingly personal. This trend is likely to continue in 2010, and while I’ll continue to write about books, technology, and their intersections, I’ll be writing about other things. The main reason for this is that in August I went freelance, and now […]
Update: This newspaper is now for sale. I have been somewhat obsessed with the eccentric figure of Walking Stewart for a number of years, since first encountering him in some dusty library, at the unpopular end of De Quincey’s “Collected Works”. A strange, liminal figure, Stewart seems to stalk the margins of the Nineteenth Century, […]
Quote above from Alex Petridis’ review of the decade in music from Monday’s Guardian. And it strikes me that this is increasingly true of the publishing business too, and perhaps it is something we should be concerned about. My own approach has always been: literature first, technology second. What are the needs of writers and […]
I’ve long been a fan of Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials magazine, an occasional, elegant, high quality and free literary journal – except that I have a huge problem with its attitude. Five Dials is only available as a PDF, intended, say HH, to be “downloaded, printed out and enjoyed (we hope) away from the computer”. […]
A couple of weeks ago, Russell Davies noted that most podcasts of the kind we (meaning, I think, Russell, me and some like-minded folk) listen to while wandering around are quite long for most of our wanderings – typically 30 minutes or more, like the radio programmes we post at Speechification. There’s room in the […]
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a panel at the Frontline Club on the future of publishing. It was an interesting evening, and I spoke alongside Tom Tivnan of the Bookseller and Chris Finnamore, test editor at WIRED. The whole thing’s now online if you’re so inclined: During the talk, one particularly […]
Inspired by the Japanese iPhone/Book mashup that appeared in the Stop Press links recently, I made this rough concept of an in-book mobile app, riffing on ideas of the “enhanced edition“. Imagine if when you got a book, you also got a mobile app that contained the footnotes and index, supporting material and the searchable […]
I’m pleased to announce that Artists’ eBooks, a project first mooted in this post a couple of months ago, is now live at www.artistsebooks.org. eBooks, as we’ve been saying for some time, have massive potential to revolutionise not only how we read, but what we read. The incorporation of audio and video, the possibilities for […]
Back in March, I launched a little site called Quietube, which is basically a little bookmarklet allowing you to watch YouTube videos without all the comments, ads and so on (original booktwo post is here). Well, it turned out to be very popular, currently edging towards two million views, with a daily average of 10 […]
Just a quick note to say that the good people at Playful asked me to speak at their one-day event all about games and play on Friday 30th October, at Conway Hall, London. I don’t know much about games, so I’ll be talking about books. Surprise! But they will be playful games, or playful literatures, […]
I’m working on a couple of eBook projects, and thinking about distribution. Sales figures are important: in the music world, we’ve already seen the move to recording downloads in addition to physical sales for compiling charts. (Chris Heathcote has some thoughts on the latter, and notes we’re not yet at the per-play stage – c.f. […]
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.
You can follow me on Twitter.
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.