booktwo.org

For a while now, I’ve been slowly reading my way through the works of Gabriel Josipovici, one of our more interesting contemporary authors, but one little known outside lit crit circles. If you haven’t had the pleasure, go pick up Moo Pak or Goldberg: Variations for a taste. His most recent book, Everything Passes (Carcanet, […]

Amazon have just announced AmazonEncore: “a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.” They’re now a publisher. It’s been a while coming, but some of us have been predicting this move for some time: […]

Shared bookmarks are one of the primary drivers of conversation and socialisation on the web. Simple pointers to information are the basic currency of networked communication, and one of the most desirable functions of the future book. But, in the book, they’re pretty hard to achieve. I’ve hit this problem already on bkkeepr, and that’s […]

Re: today’s announcement about Google and Sony. It doesn’t appear to be a deal as such, but what’s clear is that half a million scanned books from Google Book Search will be made available as epub files, with millions more to come. Epubs. Ebooks. Now, cast your mind back, if you will, to the London […]

A presentation you need to read, and not just for the explanation above of DRM: Date Repulsion Mode, the scale of cool, or why no one with a Kindle gets asked for their phone number in Starbucks. Loads of excellent stuff on book data accessibility, XML, catalogues and innovation. And make sure you read the […]

Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book. (For those of you who don’t get Twitter, and those who are just bored by it’s sudden, seeming ubiquity: move along. Nothing to see here.) → The full photoset is here. […]

I’ve been thinking about “Free” again, in the context of, well, art. Specifically books of course, but lets look again at some other spheres of free. With all the discussion of what Free means, we haven’t been talking a lot about perfectly viable models of Free that are happening right now. Newspapers and music occur […]

A quick heads-up on a little Apt project I haven’t talked about properly before. We got bored with all the comments and crud on YouTube, so we built Quietube – think of it as Readability for your favourite videos. A little bookmarklet lets you easily and quickly generate a nice, clean page – and a […]

The above is a graph of my reading for the last year from bkkeepr, as generated by the first application powered by the bkkeepr API: The Velocity of Reading. TVR calculates statistics and draws graphs based on your reading habits, counting pages read and hence your average reading speed. All you need is a bkkeepr […]

As regular readers know, I’m currently in India as part of the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneurs scheme. We’ve spent the last few days at the utterly wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, and while I’ve got some time online I thought I’d write up one of the many talks I attended, and its associated lessons. […]