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In what should be the last of the round-ups of the Google Unbound conference, but probably won’t be, some more commentators: Why don’t people care enough about literature to steal it? by Stephen Leavitt at the Freakonomics blog Quit Marketing By the Book – a comprehensive write-up by Rebecca Lieb at Clickz.com How to be […]

Today’s Guardian has a short piece with more Google follow-upping: The iPod has done it with music, Flickr has done it with photos, MySpace has done it with bands and Saatchi is doing it with paintings. The question is: can Google do the same thing with books by creating an international online market place for […]

Lots of recent activity in the British press concerning future books: last weekend’s Sunday Times contained not one but two pieces on the subject. The first piece, Google plots e-books coup, reports on the Google Unbound conference we mentioned last week. Unfortunately, it’s all fairly techless, reporting that “the internet search giant is working on […]

Kim White over at the Institute for the Future of the Book has a great post about the sea change coming to books. Alongside screen technology (e-ink, &c.) and the breakdown of the traditional author/reader divide (the networked book, &c.), White identifies another key factor in the evolution of the book: 3D visualisation. As we’ve […]

Best bookish news from this years CES show in Las Vegas: iriver, best known for their pretty iPod competitors, have announced a rather pretty ebook. A direct competitor to the Sony Reader, iriver’s ebook takes the looking-like-a-pbook game to the next level: two facing e-ink ‘pages’, both touch-sensitive for easy page turning. It takes AAA […]

Via MobileRead, an extraordinary visualisation of the possibilities of e-ink by a London-based designer. Instead of book pages however, vast expanses of the London Underground are papered over: For a higher-res version, see Alex Griffin’s website (under Design > E*Ink).

This looks like it should be very interesting: Six centuries ago, a German metalworker tinkered with a wine press, metal alloys and oil based ink, perfecting one of history’s great inventions: the printing press. With the rise of mass publishing, more people than ever were able to access information. Books proliferated. Today, digital technology offers […]

The Poetry Archive is a fantastic example of what the connected, high-speed web can do for literature. Inspired by a meeting in 1999 between the UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and the recording producer Richard Carrington, it provides recordings of English-language poets reading their own works. It’s a wonderful idea, exactly the sort of thing […]

From the Guardian: “Touchstone, an imprint of the publishers Simon & Schuster, yesterday launched First Chapters, a competition designed to find writing talent through the internet. It is inviting unpublished authors to submit the first three chapters of a manuscript to the scrutiny of the voting public. The winner’s book will be published and distributed […]

A very Happy New Year to all Book Two readers. I hope you had a good one and are all ready to look to the future once again. Christmas was not a good time for the UK book trade and I’ll be talking some more about this later, but in the meantime I’m flagging up […]