booktwo.org

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 a new niche: the long moment.

The idea has been around for a while - see the ‘long pose’ meme on YouTube for an example - but Flickr’s smarts are in seeing the gradual amalgamation of digital video and still photography in the same devices, and making a useful connection between the two media produced.

Literature is usually, and paradoxically, perceived as both static - fixed and unchanging on the page - and temporal; spooling along a timeline, occupying an extended period from start to finish. If literature has a photo moment, a pinpointable spot, it is the phoneme, or perhaps the word. Joyce’s great ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng‘, my favorite sound in all literature, or Keat’s ‘Forlorn!’, tolling like a bell in Ode to a Nightingale.

Is there such a thing as a long textual moment? If there is, I would suggest that it can perhaps be found - again paradoxically - in silence, whether in the Beckett’s brooding pauses, or the crystalline, breathless moment at the end of a poem, when the last words hang in the air and, soundlessly, resound.

Above, my ‘long photo’ of African Wild Dogs pacing their enclosure at London Zoo, taken this bright, shiny morning on the canal.

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 with and exploring the potential of their new Diffusion ebook generator.

These stories have been created by cutting up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a variety of sources to create completely new works. This process mines a particular seam of Balkanist fantasy in English language literature and media; ranging from E.M.Forster to contemporary free-sheet the London Paper. Alongside each story is full bibliographical information relating to the research process. In addition, these resources are also collected in a separate bibliography which will be refreshed and added-to each time a new work is uploaded.

Diffusion is a project to create an online ebook generator which people can use to produce small editions of their work. The term ebook is somewhat misleading as the final product is in fact a paper book, albeit one that can be quickly and reasonably easily assembled from an electronic file: the ebook engine generates a 4-up pdf that is printed and assembled into a chapbook:

The project is a direct response to the increasing difficulties of getting short and niche works into the bookshops, and the generator will shortly be made publicly available to all. All the titles are free to download.

It’s a good idea and a pretty good implementation, although it took me a couple of tries to get to grips with the assembly, largely because my printer chopped off the page numbers (suggestion: put these at the top of the minipages, not the bottom corner), and the instructions are not very clear (there are better ones on the site, but I only found these later). Anyway, it’s the new sharing age, so (largely inspired by Common Craft) I made my own instruction/demo:

P.S. Ooh, there’s some Stewart Home too!

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 the point. I did get all booktwo on it as well.

Check out this site I made for the book. I’m sticking to all my principles; I retained full electronic rights to the work, and the whole text is available online, for free, under a Creative Commons license.

It’s all valid, it’s built with open-source, mostly free software and there’s even a mobile edition.

And on top of that, I’ve marked it up in a prototype hRecipe microformat, and you can download the whole book as a tagged XML file to use for other experiments with this type of data.

What do you reckon?

I’ve also been making some little cooking videos to illustrate the site (the kind of thing, incidentally, which would be simple in a true ebook, but only possible now through this kind of split-personality marketing). Here’s one; check the book and follow the blog for more.

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. It has, quite predictably, caused a bit of a furore across the pond due to it’s supposed negative stereotyping of black youth. It’s satire. It has a message. People will get the message. Acting on it is up to them. (Via Print Is Dead).

We’re currently experiencing technical difficulties. This is very boring, as we have things to say, but in the mean time, watch this video: [Problems fixed! Video still good…]

There’s a lot of really interesting and varied information in there, and you’ll be glad you did.

Designed by Xplane for Shifthappens. Via Iain Tait.

[Wordpress ninjas? Help required.]