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Recent Blog Posts:

• 18/4/11 Dear Publishing
  ... Read the rest of this post →
• 12/4/11 The Silence Before, The Context Now
  On online communication, its past and its weight.
• 7/4/11 London Book Fair 2011
  A debate and a panel, on Monday 11th.
• 27/3/11 The Author of Everything
  A story about digitisation.
• 26/3/11 #wikileakspaper
  On printing things out.
• 24/3/11 The House of Wisdom
  On the transmission of the classics, then and now.
• 24/3/11 An Elixir of Reminding
  Borges and Sharing; Instagram and Death.
• 23/3/11 Stop Lying About What You Do
  Pretending will not save us.
• 21/3/11 Starpunk
  Hollowing out spaces of possibility.
• 20/3/11 Hauntological Futures
  On the attempts to rehabilitate nostalgia.
• 14/3/11 HG Wells on Newspapers
  Writing about technologies.
• 17/2/11 Publishing Experiences
  Excerpted from my talk from Tools Of Change, on why publishers should reconsider what they do.
• 7/2/11 Profanity in Art Criticism
  Waxing lyrical about Caravaggio in Milan.
• 25/1/11 Really Interesting
  On joining the Really Interesting Group.
• 19/1/11 Oblique Reading: a Tutorial
  Strategies for exploring books.
• 19/1/11 Interview at The Age of Glass
  On Italy, ebooks and Open Bookmarks
• 4/1/11 Electronic idiocy: VAT and ebooks (and art and libraries)
• 31/12/10 2010: The Booktwo/STML Yearnotes
• 9/12/10 The City and the Sea
  Art, design and inspiration.
• 7/12/10 The beauty of engineers: Google Books.app
• 3/12/10 Selfish vs Social: Open Bookmarks and Casual Strategies
• 3/12/10 Samuel Pepys and the POD Diary
  Phil Gyford, who amongst many other things curates the excellent and veritable http://www.pepysdiary.com/, is rightfully annoyed at HarperCollins for pulling a bait-and-switch with their print-on-demand reissues: The new volume, again on the right, is much whiter. It’s only when you compare standard books with really white paper that you realise they’re usually a bit yellow, slightly textured. You might think that having whiter, smoother paper is an improvement. It’s cleaner, brighter, more contrasty, but… it feels cheap. The paper is smooth and crisp, like the kind of paper you buy in reams to feed through your temperamental inkjet printer. ... Read the rest of this post →
• 30/11/10 Romance has lived too long upon this river: A London Companion
  I’ve been playing with glanceables and synecdoches for a while now, until I came up with something that had to be got out of my head, and into the world. So here it is: Romance has lived too long upon this river; a single-serving web page that tells you how high the tide is at London Bridge: explicitly close up, but also, roughly, at a glance. (It works very well on the iPad (although better if it were wrapped in an app), OK on the iPhone, and it works particularly well on big screens, particularly if you use a ... Read the rest of this post →
• 25/11/10 Two Things (Gibson TTS and Fictional Memory Palaces)
  BBC7 is currently doing Gibson’s Pattern Recognition as this week’s Sci-Fi serial. If you’re in the UK you can listen via iPlayer. It’s being read by Lorelei King, “one of the most successful and accomplished American actresses working in the UK today.” She’s good at voices but (and, Lorelei, this is no criticism if you’re idly googling yourself) her standard one has a strange, disembodied quality, which makes it sound like Text-to-Speech. As David pointed out, it feels like there should be a choice for voices for a text like this, and there’s some assemblage possible via ... Read the rest of this post →
• 19/11/10 The Kindle as Tiny Pony: eBooks in India
  There it is, just sitting on a shelf, in a little electronics store in the corner of Khan Market, in New Delhi. Like it’s a totally normal thing. An ebook reader. In a shop. In India. It’s only a little over four years since I wrote Birth pangs of a new literature. Publishing then didn’t believe in eBooks (or a number of other things mentioned therein, like Amazon becoming a publisher, but there you go.) Four years. And there’s an ereader in a shop in a market in New Delhi. … Which is not to make any sort ... Read the rest of this post →
• 15/11/10 Other possible futures: India and its young people
  Back from India. It was amazing, as ever. Couple of things to talk about. First: If we’ve ever talked about India and books, you’ll know I’m slightly obsessed with One Night @ The Call Center by Chetan Bhagat. I first read it and wrote about it when I was in India last year, and it’s stayed in my head ever since. One Night @ The Call Center is about a bunch of young, over-educated kids working in a call center in Gurgaon (which is, trying desperately not to deviate, the new Chiba). Over the course of a single night, they ... Read the rest of this post →
• 28/10/10 Open Bookmarks: The Beginning
  I’ve just launched a blog and a wiki over at Open Bookmarks – if you missed the original post about the project, it’s here. The blog’s for keeping up to date with the project: subscribe to the RSS to keep up-to-date. The wiki is where the discussion will happen. At the moment, it’s read-only, but it will be opened up to registered users at the end of November. In the mean time, it contains some short pieces of introduction: Project aims Project terminology Basic use cases First challenges Partners Please have a read if you’re interested in contributing to ... Read the rest of this post →
• 27/10/10 Mappings
  I’ve noticed some really nice Google Earth / maps things recently. Starting with today’s Big Picture, on Florida developments and the Human-made landscape: There’s these satellite prints by Jenny Odell, such as: Approximately 1,326 Grain Silos, Water Towers, and Other Cylindrical-Industrial Buildings and Empty Carparks: You’ve probably seen Globe Genie, it’s been around for a bit, but it’s lovely (we haven’t seen even the beginning of what’s possible with Street View. Although that Arcade Fire video was a nice idea): Meanwhile, Google Earth just released a whole bunch of new historical layers, including the bombed-out ... Read the rest of this post →
• 25/10/10 Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction
  I recently spoke at Web Directions South in Sydney, which was a lot of fun. I was invited to talk about the future of the book, and I did… sort of. In this post, I want to expand on some of the thoughts in that talk, which tied together a common thread from several previous discussions, and see if I can do some old-fashioned lit crit too. It’s going to be a bit hand-wavey, but I wanted to put something out there. Here goes. Link to original talk at the end. I recently read William Gibson’s new novel Zero History... Read the rest of this post →
• 22/10/10 Fiction Uncovered
  Today sees the launch of Fiction Uncovered, a new UK literary promotion for writers who deserve recognition but have yet to receive a major literary prize or media attention, or be picked for retailer promotions. The brainchild of Sophie Rochester, who is also behind the excellent Literary Platform site, Fiction Uncovered places itself squarely where it can be of most help to writers and readers: at the intersection of publishers and retailers, encouraging the former to promote their lesser-known authors and titles, and giving the latter a strong incentive to support and promote them. I was pleased to ... Read the rest of this post →
• 11/10/10 PaperCamp 2: The Briefs
  Saturday was the second Papercamp. There are some write-ups appearing online already, such as these from Ben and Roo, as well as photos on Flickr. I couldn’t make it unfortunately, but Matt suggested I create some briefs to get people going, and so I did. Apparently, there weren’t many formal responses to them (with this glorious exception), which is all to the good, but I hope they added something to character of the day, and might inspire some more responses… 5 Briefs for Papercamp ONE: FOLDING Create a new fold or codex type. A new way ... Read the rest of this post →
• 5/10/10 Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook
  I spoke earlier today at Tools of Change in Frankfurt. The short version is that many of the things we think about ebooks are wrong: but they are very interesting. The future of the book lies in its aura not in its copies, and that’s why I’m launching Open Bookmarks. For the longer version, read on… (As ever, far more was said on stage than these notes, but there you go). 4 things: introductions and what I do; the form of the ebook; bookmarks etc.; and an announcement. Regular readers will know my history. CompSci / AI degree, into ... Read the rest of this post →
• 1/10/10 To Frankfurt, and Australia
  A quick reminder that I’m speaking at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you there. Worth noting that the talk description cited on the website is bobbins. I’ll be talking about the challenges, limits, and possibilities of ebooks, particularly when it comes to bookmarks and annotations, and making an announcement. Do come. The week after, by some miracle, I’ll be in Sydney, talking at Web Directions South, on not dissimilar but less industry-focussed topics. Looking forward to that.... Read the rest of this post →
• 27/9/10 On Book Guilt
  We need to talk about something. It’s quite serious. It affects a lot of people. And I genuinely believe it costs the book industry millions of dollarpounds every year, in addition to incalculable personal misery. We need to talk about book guilt. When I created bkkeepr, it had (still does) three commands: start, finish and bookmark. I assumed a happy, linear model of reading. You start a book; you finish a book. Simple, right? But almost immediately I started getting feature requests: with one, overwhelmingly popular one: abandon. The problem was that when you started a book, ... Read the rest of this post →
• 20/9/10 iBooks and Kindle: Bookkake and Artist’s eBooks
  I’m very pleased to announce that all five Bookkake titles are now available direct from Apple’s iBookstore, and several are available on the Kindle. In addition, all Artists’ eBooks titles are also available free in the iBookstore. This has not been the simplest process, but I think it’s really important to make ebooks available in as wide a number of ways as possible, and in particular in ways that make it easy for people to find them—an issue I recently addressed in the discussion of Tony Blair’s multiformat memoir. Initially, I made ebook editions of all Bookkake ... Read the rest of this post →
• 15/9/10 Maps for Birds: London at 300 feet
  Ever since I took the above photo from a boardroom high above the Euston Road, I’ve had this image in my head of what London looks like at 300 feet (~ 100 metres). So, as usual, I got it out of my head by making something, while also using it as an excuse to have a play with Polymaps. So, this is what Docklands looks like at 300 feet: And this is the City: You can explore the map at shorttermmemoryloss.com/maps/300ft/. Usual disclaimers apply. (Ben, does this count?)... Read the rest of this post →
• 13/9/10 Bus-Tops: London, screens and the Olympics
  Back in January, I was approached by Art Public and asked to build an application and website as part of their Bus-Tops project. This has just gone live over at http://bus-tops.com/shelters/, so it seems like a good time to talk about the project. Bus-Tops is part of the Cultural Olympiad, and benefited from a grant from Artists Taking The Lead, a nationwide series of arts projects sponsored by the Arts Council and London 2012. In short, we’re putting screens on the top of bus stops across London, and we’re going to let people play with them. One part ... Read the rest of this post →
• 6/9/10 On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography
  On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft, and everyone who came, for a really great time. I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily. This, despite efforts like the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (which, incidentally, is kept in a shipping container). William Gibson spoke recently at BEA. He said this: “If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you ... Read the rest of this post →
• 1/9/10 A journey through formats: Blair, Hardbacks and Ebooks
  I won’t get into the politics here, because this isn’t the venue, but since the lying, warmongering scum former Prime Minister Tony Blair is all over the news today, I thought I’d look around to see where and how his book is available. A Journey is officially released in hardback today, with the RRP of £25 in the UK. you can order it direct from the publisher Random House’s ecommerce site rbooks.co.uk for £22.50. You don’t want to though, because Amazon’s doing it for £12.50, as is Waterstone’s online, while WH Smith’s are offering on the high street ... Read the rest of this post →
• 24/8/10 Five Things
  This Five Things thing. Various people have been doing it. So here goes. Five things I’m thinking about: The future of the book That may seem a little obvious. And vague: let’s talk about novels. The novel is a historical accident, it’s different to everything else, and it’s not dead yet. It’s only been around for a very short while: its roots lie in medieval and early modern epics and romances, but it only really gained its present form in the 18th Century. It has, crucially, always been enabled by technological and social development. And with that in mind the ... Read the rest of this post →
• 16/8/10 One Year
  A year ago this week, I went freelance. So this seems like a good time for a recap. In the last year I’ve been extremely lucky to work with clients including Hachette UK, Bonnier, Art Public, Six To Start, Airlock, Newspaper Club, Proboscis, Dennis Publishing, and a number of others. I’m continuing to work with clients large and small on a range of projects within publishing and in the wider spheres of art and technology, which I’ll talk about here when I can. I’ve also spoken at Playful, SXSWi, Port ... Read the rest of this post →
• 15/8/10 Blog all Dog-Eared Pages: Benjamin & Montaigne
  I’m just returned from Scotland, where I swam in lochs and rivers and partook of nature. This was good. I also read: novels aside, I was immersed in Walter Benjamin and Montaigne’s Essays. Of the former, this was my first experience of reading on the iPad, and a very good one indeed. The highlight function in iBooks is addictive; the lack of an export function criminal, but there you go. Copying out, as we shall see, has its own rewards. Both writers are prodigious, generous and, in their own way, quite funny, which makes them ideal holiday companions. I ... Read the rest of this post →
• 30/7/10 On covers
  I’ve been thinking about covers for a while now. One of the many great debates around the ephemeralisation of music has been the lamentations for the loss of cover art: now, we are reaching the same point with books. I say ephemeralisation rather than digitisation because it’s not just a physical transformation we’re going through, it’s a cognitive one. I’ve been repeating Walter Pater’s famous quote in my head a lot: “all art aspires to the condition of music”. Pater argued that “For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, ... Read the rest of this post →
• 21/7/10 At Port Eliot
  A quick note to say that I’ll be at the Port Eliot festival this weekend, and MENACE and I will be appearing in the Round Room at 2pm on Saturday, alongside Keith Albarn and David McCandless (of Information is Beautiful) as part of the World of Wonders. Say hello if you’re about, and any tips for other things to see gratefully received.... Read the rest of this post →
• 18/7/10 On waves
  “The French Revolution aroused and then disappointed Wordsworth, causing him to seek consolation in universal nature; it made Byron a rebel, and Southey a laureate; but it gave birth to Shelley. And the chief effect of the revolution on English life and thought is to be sought in literature rather than in politics. The great wave that broke over Europe in the roar of the Napoleonic wars spent its strength in vain on the political structure of these islands, but the air was long salt with its spray. And the poems of Shelley, if it be not too fanciful to ... Read the rest of this post →
• 6/7/10 dConstruct 2010
  In September, I’ll be speaking at dConstruct, in Brighton. The theme of the day is design, which I don’t know very much about, and I wouldn’t put much stock by my talk description. Nevertheless, I will be talking about books, I expect, and attempting to close the circle on recent explorations of the book as designed object in time and space, and recent obsessions with loss and destruction in the works of Borges, Sebald, Bevan, Baez and others. And Geocities. You should buy a ticket. Some of the other folk look really good. ... Read the rest of this post →
• 6/7/10 Of gays and griots: sexuality, technology and story-telling
  This post is going to talk about sex quite a lot. I’m going to assume you’re all OK with that. For me, technology, literature and sex are all bound up together, and this entanglement can be traced back to a single book: JC Herz’s Surfing on the Internet (Little, Brown; 1994). An exploration of the early net, a travelogue, an explicator of MUDs and MOOs, of chatrooms and founding memes; what was still, then, the Information Superhighway. I read the book in, I think, 1995. Within a month, I had a 28.8 modem and a Compuserve account. It’s probably impossible ... Read the rest of this post →
• 28/6/10 The Museum of Obsessions
  The Museum of Obsessions accepts donations on loan from collectors, enthusiasts and the sentimental. The things that enthral us, but which we cannot give a home to; our treasured possessions from which we cannot bear to be parted, yet cannot keep: these are the contents of the Museum. If you have no more room in your house, if you lack the means to store the essential things of your life, then the Museum was established to help you. The contents of the Museum, even cumulatively, are worth little on the open market. The value of each item lies explicitly and ... Read the rest of this post →
• 18/6/10 Metronome and Semina: Publishing as artistic practice
  I’ve written about Metronome Press before, in a series of articles at the old STML Litblog in 2005 – 2006. If you recall, the Metronome series commissioned contemporary artists to write novels, presented as much as art pieces or artefacts as well as traditionally published books. At least one of the authors, Tom McCarthy, has gone on to considerable success in the mainstream. What I most liked about Metronome back then was twofold: the unashamed presentation of such work as “art”, and the appropriation of the mundane apparatus of the art world for the funding, distribution and publicity of ... Read the rest of this post →
• 14/6/10 On Bookmarking, Dog Ears and Marginalia
  I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people recently about how they bookmark stuff. It seems to be on a lot of peoples’ minds as more and more of our reading moves onto screens. So I thought I’d share a few things, and ask for some feedback. Firstly, here’s what I do: I dog-ear a lot. I dog-ear every page that has something interesting on it (which is not always obvious when I return to it), and I dog-ear my last position in the book. Top corner. Sometimes I try to make the dog-ear point to the exact place ... Read the rest of this post →
• 2/6/10 99 Delights: London
  A few weeks ago, while filming Battersea Power Station from the roof of a pub, I got chatting to Katie Bonham, a ceramics artist whose recent work includes pieces fired from the mud of the Thames itself. As a result of this encounter, I’ll be showing a short film at a pop-up exhibition this weekend, documenting the progress of my London 2010 project, which, if you haven’t been following, is an attempt to reconstruct Patrick Keiller’s 1992 film, London. The venue is 99 Delights, one of London’s loveliest secret restaurants, so from midday til 6 on ... Read the rest of this post →
• 1/6/10 Cassava Republic
  This morning, on as wet and dismal a Tuesday as London has to offer, I had the pleasure of meeting Bibi Bakare-Yusuf and Jeremy Weate from Cassava Republic. Cassava Republic was founded four years ago in Abuja, Nigeria, with the intention of introducing African readers to local writers too often celebrated only in Europe and America, and to encourage home-grown writing, “rooted in African experience in all its diversity, whether set in filthy-yet-sexy megacities such as Lagos, in little-known rural communities, in the recent past or indeed the near future.” Cassava faces all the usual pressures of a small ... Read the rest of this post →
• 17/5/10 Words In Progress
  Yesterday I spoke at Words In Progress, an event convened by Hannah Gregory, of Vertigo of the Modern, and Monster Emporium Press. There was much goodness there, from such fine folk as Ambit, CB Editions, antepress, Strange Attractor and Zero Books—the latter represented by Nina Power of Infinite Thought, whose book One Dimensional Woman is worth your time. My favourite work, however, was by David Rule from or-bits, whose obsessional diarising over six months produced a five volume, barely edited memoir, and who turns his and his friends’ half-remembered stories ... Read the rest of this post →
• 14/5/10 Blog All Dog-Eared Pages: A Universal History of the Destruction of Books
  Fernando Báez is the director of Venezuela’s National Library and the author of, among other things, a history of the lost library of Alexandria. In 2003 he was sent to Baghdad as part of a cultural commission to evaluate the damage down to Iraq’s—and the world’s—cultural heritage, having previously performed a similar, and similarly devastating, task in the former Yugoslavia. The result of 13 years labour, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books (trans. Alfred MacAdam, Atlas & Co., 2008) is a compendium of bibliocausts, a necessary reckoning of not only what we have lost, but of the myriad ... Read the rest of this post →
• 13/5/10 Long Snake City
  It was the second Gamecamp on Saturday, and by all accounts it was a huge success. I couldn’t attend, but I was asked to contribute something to the one-off newspaper produced for the day. The result is above, with the text below. During the proceedings of the Fourth Situationist International Conference in London in December 1960 Tomas Coteblanc found a playing card in the gutter outside a bar in King’s Cross. As a result, he proposed the game of Long Poker. Players were to collect cards as they went about their daily lives, but all cards were to be ... Read the rest of this post →
• 25/4/10 Four Corners Books
  On Friday I met Elinor Jansz & Richard Embray from Four Corners Books. With backgrounds in publishing and the art world they came together to create one of the most beautiful small presses around. Four Corners publish art books, with their first serious success being Come Alive!, the examining the work of Sister Corita, Catholic nun and Pop artist. Their one stated intention was “not to produce catalogues” and so the book is the primary object, with the work selected first for book and not gallery display. However, the Come Alive! launch was naturally followed by a ... Read the rest of this post →
• 22/4/10 Grounded: volcano fictions and collective experiences
  So it’s started again: the planes rumble overhead. The first I’ve heard is right above me now—for a few moments it drowns out the birdsong and childrens’ voices rising from the gardens below my window. I grew up beneath the flight path of Heathrow. From my bedroom window I could read the flight numbers of the planes. There was a railway line too, the main line from Waterloo, and rail strikes or maintenance on the line frequently resulted in garden parties. No such respite from the air—until this week. For most of us, the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull has been characterised ... Read the rest of this post →
• 15/4/10 Bookcubes: Souvenirs of Digital Reading
  I was recently asked by the good people at Proboscis to undertake a virtual residency, exploring their Bookleteer suite of tools. Bookleteer is described as “a platform for public authoring and cultures of listening—creating and sharing knowledge, stories, ideas and information”, and also as a form of samizdat for the twentieth century. I’ll be further exploring the Bookleteer API in a future post. The code for the experiments can be found on the Bookleteer blog. One of the subjects that came up in my thinking for SXSW, and which I mentioned briefly, was the question of souvenirs. ... Read the rest of this post →
• 14/4/10 CoverSpyLondon: In ur tubes, reading ur books
  I should have mentioned this earlier, but I am joining the shadowy forces behind CoverSpyLondon for one week only. If you have any tube book sightings, please follow @coverspylondon and send us a direct message. I thank you.... Read the rest of this post →
• 6/4/10 Artists Ebooks’ and (what is wrong with) ePubs
  I’m very pleased to announce two new Artists’ eBooks: Niven Govinden’s L’histoire de Bexhill Baudelaire and Kenji Siratori’s Guerilla Sex Generation. L’histoire de Bexhill Baudelaire includes links to YouTube videos which comprise the book’s soundtrack. I’ve been a fan of Niven’s work for some time, and he approached me to see if there was something we could do with one of his stories. While the limitations of the ebook format – discussed below – didn’t allow the full expression of the ideas we had, I’m pleased to get a soundtrack in there. Guerilla Sex Generation includes an introduction ... Read the rest of this post →

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