Top articles:
- 12/11 The New Aesthetic: Waving at the Machines
Firing a laser through a cloud of ideas. - 10/11 The New Value of Text
There is an increasingly pervasive notion that other forms of media are additive to literature, that they somehow improve it. Because, you know, books are just telling stories, right? - 3/11 Seven posts about the future
Nostalgia, fiction, sharing and stories. - 17/2/11 Publishing Experiences
Why publishers should reconsider what they do. - 25/10/10 Network Realism
William Gibson and new forms of Fiction. - 5/10/10 Walter Benjamin's Aura: Open Bookmarks and the form of the eBook
The future of social reading. - 6/9/10 On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography
Visualising archives and historical process.
Recent posts from the blog:
- 17/9/09 On eBook distribution, and Artistry
I’m working on a couple of eBook projects, and thinking about distribution. Sales figures are important: in the music world, we’ve already seen the move to recording downloads in addition to physical sales for compiling charts. (Chris Heathcote has some thoughts on the latter, and notes we’re not yet at the per-play stage – c.f. bkkeepr.) My question is: how do you track, monitor and analyse downloads? Particularly of free ebooks? Imagine this scenario: there’s a free ebook. It’s hosted in one place, and there’s a single addressable URL to access it. This will probably be a... Read the rest of this post → - 7/9/09 Enhanced Editions: Bunny Munro and eBooks for the iPhone
At the weekend, the fruits of several months of work at Apt finally hit the App Store in the form of Enhanced Editions‘ first title: The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave. Enhanced Editions ebooks are a different breed to most, as our mission is to work closely with publishers to obtain the best material, and take advantage of every possible benefit of the ereading experience. This means taking every feature you’ve come to expect from good ereaders – including bookmarking, full-text search, adjustable fonts and type sizes, night mode, tilt scrolling (on the iPhone)... Read the rest of this post → - 11/8/09 Amazon API Changes, Bookdata, PHP (Sorry)
Warning: deeply dull post ahead. But, we’ve had a lot of discussion about bookdata, APIs, and Amazon on this blog, so it would be remiss of me not to post this. From August 15th, Amazon requires all API requests to be signed, which to the layman means that you need to add a timestamp, and a ‘signature’, which is a hash of the entire request, and your private Amazon key. There are a bunch of PHP examples for doing this on the web, but because I had to tweak them all slightly to get them to work, I... Read the rest of this post → - 10/8/09 Going Solo; in which there is an announcement, a few observations, and an offer.
A couple of months ago, I drew this on the back of an envelope: That’s pretty much the best representation I could come up with of what I do. I encompasses all my major projects of the last few years: this site; Bookkake, my print-on-demand, experimental small publisher; bkkeepr, the web app for tracking your reading and bookmarking on the go; London Lit Plus, the open-source literature festival which ran in 2007 and 2008; Cooking With Booze; many smaller projects, and of course my work... Read the rest of this post → - 9/8/09 Book Club Boutique & Newspaper Club
Recently, I did some work with Newspaper Club, the new startup from from the fine folks at the Really Interesting Group, building on their rather wonderful Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet project. Looking to test the systems they’re working on and start building a portfolio of possibilities, they offered me the chance to create a newspaper from scratch. I jumped at the chance. The Book Club Boutique is a weekly literary night in Soho bringing together new writers, performance poets and musicians in a suitably decadent atmosphere. Founded by Selena Godden... Read the rest of this post → - 7/7/09 Flickr + OpenLibrary = Bookdata goodness
As we noted some months ago, George Oates, former designer and more at Flickr, probably the best designed site on the web, moved to the OpenLibrary. And now this exciting move has borne some fascinating fruit: OpenLibrary Machine Tags on Flickr. Stick with us. Machine tags are machine-readable versions of the ubiquitous tag system that Flickr and now many, many sites use to describe and organise content. So far, they’ve mostly been used to link last.fm music gigs or upcoming events with photos, but they’re expanding slowly. Machine tags are an incredibly important link... Read the rest of this post → - 15/6/09 All Hail The Book Seer
In case you don’t read Times Emit (which you obviously should), Apt just released a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data): It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from Amazon and LibraryThing – at the moment. I’d like to pull stuff from more places, but it’s not easy. … Book data is hard, but it shouldn’t be. It’s also valuable, and that’s why Amazon ranks higher than most publishers for... Read the rest of this post → - 3/6/09 Josipovici, Rabelais and the Little Room
For a while now, I’ve been slowly reading my way through the works of Gabriel Josipovici, one of our more interesting contemporary authors, but one little known outside lit crit circles. If you haven’t had the pleasure, go pick up Moo Pak or Goldberg: Variations for a taste. His most recent book, Everything Passes (Carcanet, 2006) is perhaps his most beautiful and mysterious work to date, a short novel which affected me profoundly. Written in Josipovici’s signature spare and compressed style, it deals with life, death, and art – particularly the intentions and what the publisher calls the “ambiguous... Read the rest of this post → - 14/5/09 Amazon turns publisher, finally. Encore!
Amazon have just announced AmazonEncore: “a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.” They’re now a publisher. It’s been a while coming, but some of us have been predicting this move for some time: Amazon have finally made it to the penultimate step on the publishing chain. I say penultimate, because although they are now, by any definition, a publisher, they still appear to be cherry-picking from existing books rather than seeking out their own authors. Their... Read the rest of this post → - 8/4/09 Inter-operative bookmarking; Gracenote for books.
Shared bookmarks are one of the primary drivers of conversation and socialisation on the web. Simple pointers to information are the basic currency of networked communication, and one of the most desirable functions of the future book. But, in the book, they’re pretty hard to achieve. I’ve hit this problem already on bkkeepr, and that’s just with physical books. If two people are reading the same book in two different editions (hardback or paperback, modern or ancient, even in different translations) then the same text doesn’t occur on the same page. (This is one of the main reasons... Read the rest of this post →
For Hire
Booktwo.org is the blog of James Bridle, a book and technology specialist with specific expertise in planning and producing web and new media projects for clients in publishing and the arts. If you'd like to hire me, have a look at my CV and portfolio, and feel free to get in touch.
I am also a member of the Really Interesting Group.
You can follow me on Twitter.
Speaking Engagements:
I am available for conferences and other events. For examples, see my talks at Interesting, Playful, South by Southwest, dConstruct and Tools of Change Frankfurt.
A complete list of talks, with links, is available.
