booktwo.org

And so the end of the year. So much to say, so little time. I’m off until mid-January, and I wish all Booktwo readers the very merriest of Christmases. No final comments (and I have so much to say!), no best-of lists (although I have to say, this was definitely my book of the year). […]

I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It’s an art form for very few […]

So, I’ve been meaning to write about Swotter for a while. A couple of weeks ago, it finished reading the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses to Twitter. I think there’s something kind of amazing about that, but I’m not sure what. Final stats: Followers: 198 (meh) Updates: 23,467 (phew!) Props to the hardcore who followed […]

So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it. There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to […]

Tony White, author of one of my favourite books, Foxy-T, and literary editor of The Idler, has just published a series of extracts from Balkanising Bloomsbury, a work in progress, in the Diffusion eBooks format. He writes: The ebooks are the result of a residency with Proboscis that I’ve been undertaking in recent months, working […]

Jeremy Ettinghausen just announced Penguin’s new Facebook page over at the Penguin blog with a particularly apposite and self-effacing quote: “Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies … But […]

Tom pointed to this hilarious/depressing news story about the National Lottery’s ‘Cool Cash’ scratchcard: To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing. But the concept of […]

Things I Love (a short and selective list): Blogging, WordPress, Books, Penguin paperbacks, Typography. I am, therefore, quite over the moon to announce the release of Marber, a theme for the WordPress blogging platform based on good typographic practices and Romek Marber’s classic 1961 grid for Penguin Books. Marber is a real labour of love, […]

I’ve noticed a trend in longtime bloggers, which I’m certainly a part of. Blogging less, linking more, generally winding down the straight blog in favour of a more distributed presence via Twitter, Delicious, videoblog apps like Seesmic. Some of these may be fed through the blog, like Booktwo’s RSS links, but it’s all getting a […]

So, I signed up for Blog Action Day, and then promptly forgot about it. It was yesterday. Here’s what I’d planned to talk about, with a lot less research than the original idea. Sorry about that: I’m pretty angry about the environmental state of publishing. We are not, by any extent of the imagination, a […]