booktwo.org

I’m very pleased to announce that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a collaboration between my employer Apt and The Institute for the Future of the Book, is now live. Several months ago we heard that the Institute was setting up in the UK, and we approached Chris Meade with a view to working with if:book […]

Over at Times Emit, I’ve just posted my notes from last night’s talk by Vicky Barnsley at LSE, where she talked about the changing publishing landscape, and some of the things HarperCollins is doing to expand the role of the publihser in the 21st Centure. It was a good talk, with a number of interesting […]

I’m pleased to tell you that bkkeepr, my project to create a Last.fm-alike for reading (and more besides) now has an API. An Application Programming Interface (API) is essentially a machine-readable version of an application, and more specifically, the data in contains. bkkeepr is first and foremost an application that does stuff with data, and […]

Two years ago, I co-founded London Lit Plus, an open literary festival for London. We’ve had two excellent years, but with all kinds of commitments, it would in no way be right to attempt to keep running it in my somewhat useless and slapdash fashion, to the inevitable detriment of the events. But it’s a […]

I recently bought one of the Tikitag starter kits, and have been playing with it. To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed, but here’s a nice application with a bunch of Ifs attached. IF everyone had RFID readers (like tikitags’) and IF the tags were dirt cheap (mass-produced, they wuld be, but no idea of […]

Books Published: The size of each territory shows the number of new book titles published each year.* “Each new book published is counted only once on this map, regardless of how many copies it sells… A book is defined as having at least 50 pages; a pamphlet has 5 to 49 pages. Publications with fewer […]

“How do you make a small fortune in publishing?” “Start with a large fortune.” First of all, I must apologise for over a month’s silence here at booktwo.org. I have, as I promised, been working on something, and it’s finally available for inspection. I hope you won’t mind me discussing it here: certain aspects of […]

I’ve wanted for some time to create a simple infographic of where a book’s cover price goes, and the Observer published a nice one in their Book of Books a few months ago. The figures made sense, so I’ve created a similar one here, in colour. The Observer’s figures were based on a notional £20 […]

Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of day, or time in years. Centuries might pass […]

O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog has a nice series of posts on books as ebooks as applications: Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking Treating Ebooks Like Software A Big Boost to Books as Apps? I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some […]