booktwo.org

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 was that most of the speakers did not give talks, they told stories. This was most pronounced at the start of the day, at the height of the audience’s confusion: Cory Doctorow read his short story on the future of bookselling. Dr Aleks Krotoski outlined a personal history of making the BBC’s Virtual Revolution series [sidenote: if you haven't seen Aleks' 1984 project, go here and hit the slideshow button now]. John Spooner went for a walk around the idea of the neutrino. Tim Etchells prefaced his contribution with the words “its status as a story is debatable. But it’s definitely obscene.”

The effect was as if the audience had been tricked into attending a spoken word event, masquerading as a conference. The overarching themes of the day, as it unfolded, were lying and discomfort. Nobody said that aloud. I’m not sure if anyone else thought that.

Sydney Padua, of the marvellous Babbage and Lovelace comics, presented a metaslide on graphic storytelling: a graph of a presentation. A metapresentation for a metaconference.

[photo CC gill wildman]

Tony White, booktwo collaborator on Artists’ Ebooks, talked about his practice, and read Include Me Out over a pecha kucha-style slideshow, a layered context of story and backstory and format and source: all presented together, at once, overwhelming and slightly disturbing. It broke, quite deliberately, your attempts to understand everything. Possibly the most interesting effect of the day.

I wish I’d seen/participated in (what is the word for this?) A Small Town Anywhere, Coney’s piece of participative theatre. Find out more. Coney’s Annette Mees said “a format is a weird place to start when you want to tell a story.” This is devastatingly true.

Tassos Stevens said something like: “Meaning is found in complexity, the point at which things break and fall apart, where you have to make hard, difficult choices.” Yes.

In the theatre, play-testing is called “scratching”. (Speaking of play-testing, it’s Sandpit tonight. You should go.) What Coney does feels less like writing a story, and more like writing a framework, with associated tests and walkthroughs. A script that is run rather than followed.

[At lunch, I had a really, really good talk with Eliot about wikihistory, wikiality, the way in which truth and history and opinion are related and constructed, and the stories this tells and the stories that can be told with it. I need to write more—a lot more—about this, soon.]

I’m not much of a gamer, and I haven’t played Failbetter’s Echo Bazaar, but I’ve been watching a lot of other people play it, and marvelling at the richness of the story. (James Wallis has said: it is more story than game.) (From something Alexis Kennedy said, I remembered I am that most casual of gamers: “playing for shits & giggles” as he put it. Shooting friendly NPCs. Going for stars in GTA.)

To make the Echo Bazaar, it was necessary to remake narrative, by “making up cool names for stuff”. Magick is all about naming and control. So is journalism, and software engineering—related disciplines.

Someone dreaming about your story, in your world, is probably the highest form of praise. Fires in the desert: the points where you see what’s going on, how far you’ve come and where you can go next. Also the points that linger longest in the mind.

Half-way through Tim Wright’s story I wrote in my notebook: “Tim’s pulling a bait and switch.” He was—a quite devastating one, that left the audience stunned into silence. Lying and discomfort: only rivalled by Tim Etchells’ repetitive lists of celebrities dead and/or covered in semen. (cf Ulrich Haarbürste.)

The last note I have says: “Just a work of fiction.” I’m not sure what this refers to. Someone said it, and I thought: nothing is just a work of fiction.

A lot of people seemed to be struggling to justify their day at the conference—to themselves, and to their boss, real or imagined. Unsure why they were there, what they were getting out of it. An edge conference. I’ve made it sound darker and more confusing than it was: perhaps that’s my mood. Other reports are available.

Lying and discomfort. Sorry. I’ll stop saying that now.

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 and visiting the locations, I am filming them too. I don’t know exactly where this project will go – where it will take me – but it starts on London Bridge, eighteen years ago and last Saturday. I filmed the above, badly, in the driving wind and rain. It replicates Keiller’s opening shots from 1992. I will probably have to reshoot, and would love to do so with a cruise ship, as in the original, but I will take what the Thames throws up.

Why now? This, like 1992, is the year of a general election, a subject which the original film revolves around – and not only that, but one that is quite likely to result in a Tory victory, as in 1992. This is the one event depicted in the film that doesn’t happen – if it happens more than once – every year. But also because it feels right. Because Keiller’s vision is coming around again, bracketing the boom years.

I’m covering the project on its own blog, where you can see some of the ruminations so far, and follow the ongoing progress. Right now, I still need help locating some of the shots. They’re all in this Flickr set, and if you recognise any of them, please do leave a comment.

“London”, says Robinson, “was the first metropolis to disappear.” But the narrator disagrees: in his words, and in Keiller’s shots – the preponderance of swirling waters, and trees in the wind, set against the weathered streetscape – the film emphasises the city’s mutability, but also its persistence. It is this change, and this permanence, that I shall be exploring for the next year.

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. Individuals, teams and companies writing up their work, their experiences, their hopes and fears. This seems good, so I thought I’d do an annual review. The week is probably not going to happen. And I’m going to talk in a fairly light-hearted way, about work, and about other things. It’s almost New Year.

January seems like a long time ago. The booktwo year started with Bookcamp (photo CC Matt Biddulph). This was good. I should have known that hooking up with Jeremy Ettinghausen and Russell Davies would produce interesting things, but I was still amazed at the range of people that came. I still tell people how it’s the only place I’ve ever seen an author, an agent, a publisher and a retailer all sitting around a table, having a proper chat. Bookcamps have since happened abroad. We should probably do another one. I met a lot of people who went on to shape the year. If you want to know more, Billy and Hugh have longer write-ups.

And then I went to India.

(Photo by Peter. Mine are here.)

I haven’t written much about India, which is a real shame. I went as one of the shortlisted UK Young Publishers of the Year, courtesy of the British Council. It was incredible – not least because of a great bunch of people: Pablo Rossello, of the BC, Jessica Purdue from Orion, Nii Parkes of Flipped Eye, my Apt colleague Peter Collingridge, agent Lucy Luck and Davy Nougarede of Heavy Entertainment. We met all kinds of publishers, from little independents to the major corporations, as well as retailers and everyone in between. It reignited my love for India, which I first visited ten years ago, and got me excited about the possibilities.

When working in one small corner of the industry, and frequently alone, and sometimes in opposition to most of the industry, it’s good to be reminded that the industry is nevertheless very broad, and filled with people who are passionate about what they do, and we’re all in this together. When you couple that with the extraordinary changes taking place in India, you see the vast scope of what literature means at all these different levels. I hope I get to go back soon, and I still want to develop some of the connections made when I was there. It’s important not to let these die.

If I had to pick one thing that made an abiding impression on me, from a business perspective, it’s probably the stories by, and the story of, Chetan Bhagat – one of the few things I did write up. Bhagat’s story shows that even in the vastness of India, it’s still possible to make a big impact through innovation, fearlessness and conviction.

On a personal level, the people that I met – like the folk at Seagull, Zubaan and Katha – were a huge inspiration. As were the guys at Pegs N Pints – who got their wish four months later and I wish I’d been there to celebrate.

The first half of the year at Apt yielded a range of fascinating projects. The Bookseer, which started out as an in-house experiment, went viral, garnering great interest across the web, and from some commercial entities. It may yet evolve further. The real meat, however, was Enhanced Editions, our advanced ebook reader for the iPhone.

We worked on Enhanced Editions for over a year, the product of an ongoing conversation about ebooks and the role of publishers. I learned a lot: about project management, about the iPhone platform, about development. It was good working in a bigger team that included different roles, all working towards the same objective. The reaction was brilliant: our Nick Cave app received awesome feedback, and I look forward to seeing how the books do in future.

Throughout the year I’ve also been working on smaller, side projects. I built a website for Detained Lives, a really important charitable campaign, that I’m pleased to see making progress highlighting the horror of indefinite detention. I built a site for my friend Rafa, a great photographer. These projects are good for stretching the muscles, trying out design and development ideas. They make a pleasant change.

There have been a range of print-based projects too. The Tweetbook, of course, which generated a quite absurd amount of coverage. And the newspapers – for Book Club Boutique in the summer, and for myself at the end of the year: Immanent in the Manifold City – which, due to popular demand, will be going into a second printing in January. Probably.

The newspapers were a real joy to work on, combining my own ongoing love of print and print technologies with the privilege of working with some very, very smart folk – the Really Interesting Group. I’ve seen (and helped a tiny bit) the Newspaper Club offering develop, and am as excited as anyone to see it released in the New Year.

I first met Russell of RIG in 2008, when he asked me to speak at the second Interesting, and he was kind enough to ask me back to MC – badly – at Interesting 09. But the Interesting connections have been fundamental to the sort of work I’ve been doing – and the gigs I’ve been getting – throughout 2009. People are good, and I’m really excited that I’ll be working at a desk in the RIG (and BERG) offices from January, surrounded by clever, clever people.

One of the highlights of the year, which resulted from my appearance at Interesting, was Playful, for which I had to throw something together in a week after realising my intended talk had been done the previous year. The result – A New THEORY of AWESOMENESS and MIRACLES, concerning CHARLES BABBAGE, HEATH ROBINSON, MENACE and MAGE – went down rather well on the day, and was picked up by Boing Boing, Gizmodo and others, which was hugely gratifying.

Playful Photo CC Roo Reynolds

Meanwhile, other projects rumbled on. Bookkake, which I set up in 2008, has yet to produce any new books since the first tranche – although there are plans – but it has provided a venue to continue ruminating on literature, censorship, poetry and, of course, filth in the form of the Bookkake Blog. I hadn’t done much writing on literature since the closure of the original STML blog some years ago, so it was extremely satisfying, and creatively useful, to do so again, whether it was ruminating on the lost gothic classics of English lit, cataloging dirty poetry, silly cooking, or designing subversive flat-pack furniture. These explorations of the edges of literature – the literature I love, and want to learn more about, are, I think, an essential part of any new business, and I hope I’m able to continue them.

Writing itself is something I want to do a lot more of in the New Year, whether its pitching articles on my specialities, or writing fiction – like I did for Bad Idea magazine’s Future Human night back in September – a hugely satisfying experience.

Actual real projects have also been going on under the radar. bkkeepr continues to chug along nicely, if quietly, and there are some exciting plans for its future which I can’t wait to get started on. There are a couple of other things too, which I apparently need codenames for.

So AwesomeSecretProject#1 just got turned down for funding, but I’m confident it will make it through in the Spring – it’s a real business, with a plan and everything, and it fills a niche in the publishing industry that I’ve been eyeing up for some time. It would have real benefits to publishers and readers, as well as – I can dream – actually pay me a salary, which would be A Good Thing. If I can learn to talk Business, and explain it a bit better, it might get interesting.

AwesomeSecretProject#2 has taken a bit of a beating this year, and I don’t think it’s going to happen in any way that I envisaged it. But I’ve learned a lot trying to make it happen, about the publishing business and what it means to be a publisher – the responsibilities and the risks thereof, when to take things personally, and when to let them go – and I’m going to take those experiences, and do something else with them in the New Year.

(There’s a story to the table)

Going freelance has been another opportunity to figure out exactly what it is that I do. I still don’t have the answer. I thought I’d be working on more projects that cross the boundaries between publishing and technology – but, with the exception of the newspapers, most jobs have fallen into one or the other camp. It seems to be getting increasingly hard to get cross-media projects off the ground, as a third party, as publishers get more savvy and take more of this stuff in-house. This is undoubtedly A Good Thing but it’s meant I’ve been working more on the tech side – I recently did all the frontend HTML/CSS for the new ITV Player, for example, as well as other things I can’t talk about.

In turn, this has left me more energy to devote to more esoteric projects, like Mattins and Artists’ eBooks, which have been great but decidedly non-revenue-generating – while I don’t doubt they will lead to, and inspire, things that are. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m in this to enjoy myself, after all.

So, 2009 was Good – and I’ve probably missed loads of stuff – and here’s to 2010. I have some really interesting projects lined up for the New Year, which you’ll probably hear about at some point. My general mood swings wildly between total elation and utter terror – but the emphasis is on the former, and that’s the freelance life, I guess.

I’d love to hear about what you’ve been up to, and what you’re doing in the future. If you’re interested in working with me, please get in touch: I’m always looking for new projects. You can check out my (almost) full portfolio, and I’m very easy to find and get hold of.

As a bonus, here’s (almost) everything I cooked in 2009.

Happy New Year. May it be full of joy.

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 with Snowbooks and Apt.

I’ve just left my full-time position at Apt, although I will continue to work with Peter Collingridge and many of our collaborators on a range of projects, not least the much-loved Bookseer and the forthcoming and hugely exciting Enhanced Editions, which we hope, Apple willing, will invigorate and expand the provision of quality ebooks on the iPhone and other platforms (there’s more in this weekend’s Observer).

The last couple of years at Apt have been a very enjoyable and fruitful time, working on a number of hugely rewarding projects from across the publishing world. These have included the launch of Granta.com and websites for Portobello Books and Pictures; the multi-award winning This Is Where We Live film for HarperCollins; Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook online reading group; Coversourcing, the open design competition for Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing; and much more besides.

It’s been an absolute privilege to work with Peter, our clients, and our collaborators; I’m incredibly grateful to all of them and it won’t be the last you see from us, but it’s time to move on, and I’m going it alone with a number of interesting proposals and projects in the pipeline, of which more will be revealed in the coming months.

It is, as the old curse goes, interesting times. When booktwo.org launched in October 2006, it did so because of a perceived lack of action and initiative in the publishing industry in relation to ebooks and the possibilities of online and electronic reading. As the scope of the site has widened, so has the outlook of the publishing industry, and you can now find CEOs talking openly about ebooks at book fairs and business meetings, and ereaders in high street stores. This is exciting, and also a sign that it’s time to find a new schtick: when the big boys gear up, most of the interesting battles have already been fought. There’s a lot still to be done, but the wheels are definitely and irreversibly in motion.

So, as I kick-start my own wheels, I’m interested in what other people are doing as well. I’m available for some freelance work, and if you’re still not sure what it is I do, you can check out my CV and my portfolio. If what you’re doing is book-related, technology-led (or not), online or off, and you’d be interested in collaborating, please get in touch.

Here’s to books, and the future.

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 my local library, I can use their website, but it’s not a great service, and I have to find my local library on a host of different local government sites, which use different protocols. Surely there’s a central database of this stuff? So I called up the library, and was passed around a bit, and was finally told about OCLC, the organisation that holds all catalogue records for UK libraries. I’d come across the OCLC before in the form of WorldCat – a huge database of library holdings that, yes, does allow you to search for titles in your local library. However, its terms are quite restrictive, there’s no open API, and I didn’t use it much, preferring more free and more open services.

What I didn’t know is that the OCLC is the supplier of library data for all UK libraries, which have to pay to upload their data – and then pay to get it back out again. I spoke to someone at OCLC (briefly – they’re not that interested in individuals) and was informed that while it is possible to interact with their data at a programmable level, the fees for doing so are immense: in the thousands and thousands of pounds.

To me, this was a scandal. Why are our publicly funded libraries locked into a monopolistic relationship with a clearly greedy data supplier? Why are they paying thousands of pounds to access their own data? Why are the public, whose money is paying for this, locked out of the system?

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only one to notice. The Open Library project was set up to provide a direct alternative to the OCLC, and yesterday Aaron Swartz, one of the people behind Open Library, posted Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab, a summary of OCLC’s monopolistic practices and their latest, most damning initative:

Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.

It’s not just Open Library that’s at risk here — LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened. Basically anything that uses information about books is going to be a victim of this unprecedented powergrab. It’s a scary thought.

Fortunately, the new rules haven’t gone into effect yet and it’s not too late to stop them. But we need your help. Please, spread the word about this disaster and share this blog post. Sign our petition demanding that they stop. And, if you’re a librarian or at a library, there’s a lot more you can do. First, you can share your library catalog now, before the new policy takes effect. Second, you put your own license on the records you contribute to OCLC, insisting that the entire catalog they appear in must be available under open terms. And third, you can use your OCLC membership status to pressure the organization to listen to libraries instead of dictating to them. Together, we can stop this thing.

I’m going to be following this up in a number of ways. I’ve started by filing a freedom of information request with my local council, to see how much they’re paying the OCLC and what, if any, efforts they’ve made to find other suppliers. Why don’t you do likewise?

It’s Remembrance Day today, 90 years since the end of the First World War, 63 since the Second, and all the others too, and it’s always been resonant in my family. On my mother’s side, there were lots of boys in the family: uncles, brothers and sons, who didn’t come back, and on my father’s side a smaller family but no less a part played.

Last year, my father gave me my Grandpa’s archive, comprising his photograph collection, some ephemera, and his memoirs, which he dictated to my Grandma, who dutifully typed them up, in the late 1980s. He had a pretty interesting life, running away from home in the East End of London aged 17 and lying about his age to join the Royal Engineers in 1924, seeing service in Egypt and the Sudan before returning home to join the Fire Service, which had always been his primary interest. He was the youngest Fire Force Commander in the Second World War, based in the West Midlands, and during and after the war he was repeatedly at the head of reform in the Fire Service, putting in place organisational practices still in use today. Among many other events, his memoirs contain a vivid recollection of the firebombing of Coventry in November 1940. Here’s his obituary in the Independent (which contains only a couple of glaring errors).

I’ve been trying to think what to do with this material, because I think something should be done. My Grandpa was no prose stylist, and it’s unlikely that his memoirs will be of interest, except in small doses, to anyone without a professional interest in the history of the period, the prewar Army or of the postwar Fire Service – and blogs like this. But it definitely has value to them, so I think I need to get some copies made and make sure they’re placed in the right archives. And while I’m doing that, I might as well get them digitised, made searchable and so on.

The photographs are quite wonderful, so I think scanning and Flickr’ing is in order for them. They haven’t been particularly well-looked after, and they’re degrading fast. There are so many stories, and so many people in here, and I’m such a geek about this stuff, it seems wrong to keep them locked up in these albums.

So, I’m looking for suggestions of what to do with this material, beyond what I’ve suggested. Are there accepted formats and channels for this sort of thing? Are there good precedents of how to do it that you can think of? And how should I go about getting the typeset digitised? I have some ideas, but I’d like to hear yours.

Over at Times Emit, I’ve just posted my notes from last night’s talk by Vicky Barnsley at LSE, where she talked about the changing publishing landscape, and some of the things HarperCollins is doing to expand the role of the publihser in the 21st Centure. It was a good talk, with a number of interesting points made and a couple of announcements. Go read it.

I recently bought one of the Tikitag starter kits, and have been playing with it. To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed, but here’s a nice application with a bunch of Ifs attached.

IF everyone had RFID readers (like tikitags’) and IF the tags were dirt cheap (mass-produced, they wuld be, but no idea of actual figures), inserting them in books would mean you could do nice things like the above. Excuse the self-promotion (or get used to it, I’m afraid), but as well as the paperback of Bookkake’s edition of Venus In Furs, there are also free ebook editions available. So you can stick a linked RFID tag in the back of the book, and tapping it on the reader takes you to a page of free ebook editions of the same book.

Yup, I know it’s not very thrilling. The same could have been achieved with a QR code, a cuecat, or, yes, just by typing in the URL. But it’s something to play with. The idea of the tikitags is to use RFID to create an “internet of things”, linking physical objects to data and communication, as suggested by Bruce Sterling’s “spime” concept, in which objects with pervasive RFID and GPS tracking can record their history of use and interact with the world. There’s definitely something here, but haven’t thought of the best application yet. Something neat for bkkeepr? Stay tuned.

Books Published: The size of each territory shows the number of new book titles published each year.*

“Each new book published is counted only once on this map, regardless of how many copies it sells… A book is defined as having at least 50 pages; a pamphlet has 5 to 49 pages. Publications with fewer than 5 pages are not shown on this map. Worldwide, about a million new book titles were published in 1999, with the largest numbers published in the United Kingdom, China and Germany. Overall, the map is dominated by Western Europe, which is home to a number of well established publishing houses. [ * Books titles published, number per million people, 1999.]”

The data is over a decade old, but I’d wager the proportions are still reasonably accurate, despite the massive growth of publishing in India and other developing nations. Europe, and particularly Britain still publishes too many books.

From The Atlas of the Real World, via Creative Review.