booktwo.org

The Great Escape cover above, designed by Abram Games for Penguin in 1951, is one of my all-time favourites. And when, Moleskined-out, I needed a new notebook, it sprung to mind. So here’s what I did. I scanned in the cover, and created a dummy edition, complete with 200 blank, numbered pages, which I had […]

I was recently asked for links on the subject of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and, hunting around, came across http://fweet.org/, the utterly bonkers Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury, a collection of over 78,000 notes on the Wake, gathered from numerous written sources. Very easy to get lost in. It reminded me of another great resource for […]

Kate Pullinger’s column in today’s Guardian – Writers deserve a better deal from digital publishing – is very good on why authors should get a better, not worse, deal from digital publishing, and on the role of publishers in the new digital world. But it’s particularly priceless for this anecdote: At the moment the entire […]

I’m currently reading a book in three formats at once. I’ve got a nice paperback copy for bed and sofa reading. I’ve got an ebook formatted for my mobile phone for tubes and buses. And I’ve got a free audiobook—an MP3 also on my mobile phone—for when I’m cycling along the canal to work in […]

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 […]