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 […]
May 20th 2008
May 7th 2008
Authonomy: First Look
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 […]
May 3rd 2008
London Lit Plus
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!
Apr 28th 2008
Faster, Higher, Stronger
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”, […]
Apr 10th 2008
The long moment
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 […]
Apr 7th 2008
We suspect this manoeuvre
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 […]
Mar 31st 2008
POD: Why it’s a good thing
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, […]
Mar 28th 2008
Amazon’s POD monopoly
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 […]
Mar 26th 2008
Spoken Word Muxtape
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 […]
Mar 18th 2008
It was terrible, but it was wonderful!
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. […]