Archive
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, and... Read the rest of this post →
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 →
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 →
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... Read the rest of this post →
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... Read the rest of this post →
Ten days ago, at South by South-West Interactive in Austin, Texas, I took part in a panel discussion entitled Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design (#mbsp). It was good. One peculiarity of SXSW is that the panels are picked months in advance, long before the participants have come together to actually discuss what they’ll talk about, so there’s bound to be a little bending of the theme. Moreover, the panel is created out of those people coming together for the event: much of what I thought about and discussed came out of meeting and spending time with those people.... Read the rest of this post →
So, I’m off to the SXSW Interactive festival in a couple of days, where I’ll be going to lots of talks, meeting people, and appearing on a panel. You should come to that if you’re around on Tuesday. It should be fun. The panel’s about post-digital design, or what we could and should be thinking about when we can blend physical and digital formats in new and interesting ways. As part of my own preparations and thinking, I (surprise!) made a book. The idea is, it’s a book to last you the week, through SXSW. A one-time... Read the rest of this post →
Tomorrow is T-day. Or iDay. Or whatever. It’ll be fun. Nobody knows *anything* yet. Well, apart from the folks at McGraw-Hill and Hachette, probably Kobo, and a whole host of others. But for the purposes of this discussion: nobody *knows* *anything*. About the Tablet, that is. Because, actually, we know quite a lot. We know about authors and writing, and editing and publishing, and bookselling and reading. We know and understand the long-form narrative and its place between people, and in society. And I’m more comfortable with Apple getting in on the act than I am about... Read the rest of this post →
Quote above from Alex Petridis’ review of the decade in music from Monday’s Guardian. And it strikes me that this is increasingly true of the publishing business too, and perhaps it is something we should be concerned about. My own approach has always been: literature first, technology second. What are the needs of writers and readers, and how can publishers use technology to address these needs? Increasingly, we seem to be flailing about in a sea of formats, models, and philosophical digressions into the meaning of publishing when what we should be saying is: we have writers, we... Read the rest of this post →
I’ve long been a fan of Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials magazine, an occasional, elegant, high quality and free literary journal – except that I have a huge problem with its attitude. Five Dials is only available as a PDF, intended, say HH, to be “downloaded, printed out and enjoyed (we hope) away from the computer”. Well, bah. Not only do I think it disingenuous to use the internet for your distribution while so pompously thumbing your nose at it, PDFs are horrible on screen, and I don’t have a printer capable of rendering them any better, nor the... Read the rest of this post →
Inspired by the Japanese iPhone/Book mashup that appeared in the Stop Press links recently, I made this rough concept of an in-book mobile app, riffing on ideas of the “enhanced edition“. Imagine if when you got a book, you also got a mobile app that contained the footnotes and index, supporting material and the searchable text. The app sits inside the book itself. Search the app for “Leonardo da Vinci” and it points you to the relevant pages in the book. Supplementary material is accessed by typing in the page you’re on in the book. It... Read the rest of this post →
Back in March, I launched a little site called Quietube, which is basically a little bookmarklet allowing you to watch YouTube videos without all the comments, ads and so on (original booktwo post is here). Well, it turned out to be very popular, currently edging towards two million views, with a daily average of 10 to 20 thousand visits. These are not small numbers. However, looking at the logs, it became clear that these visits were coming from unexpected sources. The vast majority of visits are from the Gulf region. A few weeks ago (a fairly typical... Read the rest of this post →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
As regular readers know, I’m currently in India as part of the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneurs scheme. We’ve spent the last few days at the utterly wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, and while I’ve got some time online I thought I’d write up one of the many talks I attended, and its associated lessons. Much more of this kind of thing to come. The very first session I attended on Friday morning was with bestselling author Chetan Bhagat (left). His first novel, Five Point Someone and it’s successor, One Night at the Call Center are... Read the rest of this post →
It’s rare that I out-and-out praise a service, particularly here, but if you’re running any kind of customer-facing service on the web I can’t recommend Get Satisfaction highly enough. In fact, if you’re not using it, you’re doing it wrong: it’s up there in a select set of absolutely essential tools like Google Analytics, Feedburner and Campaign Monitor (or equivalents, but they’re my picks) that should be set up and running for your project / website / shop before they launch. Get Satisfaction is “people-powered customer service” that provides a trackable single point of contact,... Read the rest of this post →
As a little end-of-year project, I’ve just launched jocelynbrooke.com, a site dedicated to the life and work of English writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908—1966). I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Brooke in the last few months, and have begun a small campaign to revive his reputation. Brooke’s writing, which clusters in the decades around the Second World War, is unique in English letters. I’ve managed to amass an almost complete set of his books with a particular penchant for the Kafkaesque Image of a Drawn Sword and the angst-ridden The Scapegoat, and extending to his delightful botanical treatise The Flower... Read the rest of this post →
FTW (“For The Win”): An enthusiastic emphasis to the end of a comment, message, or post. Sometimes genuine, but often sarcastic. Originated from the game show Hollywood Squares where the result of the player’s response is expected to win the game. [Urban Dictionary] The term ‘Win’ and its antonym ‘Fail’ have outgrown their origin in FTW. In (extremely) current slang, they are used to denote all aspects of success and failure, and have been both adjectivised (“Incredibly win”) and quantified (“Full of fail”): the ultimate accolades of the emergent argot. I’m not going to apologise for... 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.
