booktwo.org

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…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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On Friday I went to The Story, a conference organised by Matt Locke of Channel 4. It was very good, and also confusing. In a good way. And because it was confusing this won’t be a straight trip report: it will be some hastily scrawled notes and some linked reflections. Attempt no summaries here.

[For some reason I still have Rabelais and Kharitonov and the Little Room in my head. I'm not sure why. Perhaps writing this will tell me.]

I say a conference in disguise because what happened and what nobody seemed to be expecting…

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For those who expressed an interest, Immanent In The Manifold City, my newspaper concerning Walking Stewart, ubiquity and time travel in the Nineteenth Century, is now available for purchase, in an edition of 100 signed & numbered copies.

For a long time now, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London. And so, this year, I’m doing something about it. I’m studying it: watching it again and again, mining it for references and meaning, analysing and locating shots and scenes.

London lends itself to this process, more than any other film I know. Composed entirely of short, fixed-camera shots, together with a single-narrator voiceover, it takes place over a fixed length of time (January-December 1992, a single year), and within a fixed sphere: the city I live in.

So as well as cataloguing…

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As some of you may have noticed, booktwo.org has over this year become increasingly personal. This trend is likely to continue in 2010, and while I’ll continue to write about books, technology, and their intersections, I’ll be writing about other things.

The main reason for this is that in August I went freelance, and now work on a greater range of projects than I did previously. Many of these come from outside the publishing world, and booktwo provides a space to write about those things too.

And so. There’s been a bit of a flurry of weeknotes recently….

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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…

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A couple of months ago I was doing some research into various sources of book data, and one of the things I was interested in was seeing if it was possible to hook into local library data. For example, if I was building a site that contained lots of book info, it’s easy to point to a place to buy that book online, and there are increasing ways to find things if they’re in your local bookshop (e.g. localbookshops.co.uk and LT Local). But what about seeing if it’s in your local library?

If I want to check…

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