booktwo.org

So, Peter noticed something quite interesting. His attempts to download Radiohead’s In Rainbows failed – he logged in, paid, requested a download key, it never arrived – so he dropped them an email. After a quick and entirely automated exchange, they gave him an email address to write to for a new authentication key: downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com. […]

So. I wrote a book. It’s out today. Yeah, I know. You’ve been reading this site for ages, waiting for booktech revelations, when you realise it’s just been a plog all along. Yes, I wrote a book, and if you want to buy it, that would be sweet. It is pretty awesome. But that’s not […]

However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he […]

Adobe have just launched a fascinating project called Knowhow which allows user-generation of help data in CS3. Items in knowhow’s del.icio.us network with contextual CS3 terms appear as tooltips in CS3 itself (image and link via swissmiss). Flickr and many other services uses simple tagging to provide metadata around their content, but this system offers […]

A short story for you, in a different form. I’m not entirely sold on QR codes, but I like the interaction that they create, a physical bartering with the environment to obtain the message – providing people are willing to do so. There’s also the element of surprise inherent in uncovering the message. I’d like […]

An update on some of the locative stuff I’ve been talking about… I did get that GPS unit, and thanks to quite a lot of Googling I’ve managed to hack it to my laptop to update my location on Google Maps (screenshot above) – which involved teaching myself rudimentary Python and exploiting my new, poor […]

Some people are going to hate me for this, but I think it’s great: The 250GB Book. I did agonise over cutting up the book. I did reject several others in the charity shop because they were too nice to do it too, even if they were just going to rot on the shelf anyway. […]

Quite possibly the best thing ever. Do not watch if offended by language, or without headphones in a busy place. Do watch if interested in increasing literacy rates. And booty. The video is a product of BET, the ‘black interest’ US cable channel, who deserve utter praise for such a forthright and downright hilarious approach. […]

I was quite interested when I heard about StoryCode.co.uk (via Zero Influence – there’s a .com version too). At first sight, I thought it might be a newer, better version of WhichBook.net: a way of classifying books to create a more accurate “If you liked this, you’ll love…” recommendations system. The advantage it has on […]

Too long and too important for a Stop Press post: Google is throwing away information that is fundamentally characteristic of books—metadata that describe and even determine what books are, as simple and trivial as volume numbers, or artifacts of type design, editing, and artistic production. Books are not, in other words, mere bags of words, […]