Archive
Last night I attended the launch of Semina, a new series of experimental novels from Book Works, at Housmans. The novels are the result of an open call for submissions, and are being selected by series Commissioning Editor Stewart Home. The first two titles in the series, Bridget Penney’s Index, and Maki Kim’s One Break, A Thousand Blows!, are available now. Further titles in the series include Bubble Entendre (2009) by Mark Waugh and Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010) by Stewart himself, with another five titles still to be announced. Both the... Read the rest of this post →
I’ve been spending the day listen to friends twitter from NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference at the South Bank, and an Arts Council England summit on the future of literature just round the corner. NESTA was established by the government in 1998 with an endowment of £250 million. Just last week, ACE announced £16.5 million of Lottery funding for the Southbank Centre, the same week I discovered that my full-price membership of that institution no longer lets me take in a friend for free. Meanwhile, the slash and burn of the literature sector continues (others too:... Read the rest of this post →
Flickr, everyone’s favourite photo site, just added video, and not everyone is happy about it. But Flickr has been very clever – their video offering is not designed to rival YouTube or the rest as a repository for short films, comedy clips and old adverts. Instead, they’ve limited the videos to 90 seconds to create a new niche: the long moment. The idea has been around for a while – see the ‘long pose’ meme on YouTube for an example – but Flickr’s smarts are in seeing the gradual amalgamation of digital video and still photography... Read the rest of this post →
If you’ve not been keeping up, Amazon is making a massive and highly controversial land-grab for POD and the long tail of publishing. More info here. As this is a very big issue indeed, and no worthy body on this side of the pond seems to be making a fuss, I’m only too happy to reprint this statement and appeal from the US Authors’ Guild. Don’t think it won’t happen here. Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house... Read the rest of this post →
I wanted to post this quickly, before it gets lost in the weekend. Authors and publishers who use Print-On-Demand printers in the US have recently been hearing that Amazon will only continue to carry their works if they switch to Amazon’s own POD property, BookSurge. WritersWeekly has the full story. This is a pretty big deal. Amazon has around 15%-20% of the total book market (in the UK), but the vast majority of the online book market, which is growing all the time. Meanwhile, POD has been turning from a vanity publisher’s niche into a mainstream printing... Read the rest of this post →
I was recently asked for links on the subject of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and, hunting around, came across http://fweet.org/, the utterly bonkers Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury, a collection of over 78,000 notes on the Wake, gathered from numerous written sources. Very easy to get lost in. It reminded me of another great resource for comprehension: HyperArts’ excellent Thomas Pynchon site, which has grown dedicated wikis since I last visited, in addition to the most useful concordance to Gravity’s Rainbow: White Visitation 34; former mental hospital located in the fictional town of Ick Regis on the coast... Read the rest of this post →
I’m currently reading a book in three formats at once. I’ve got a nice paperback copy for bed and sofa reading. I’ve got an ebook formatted for my mobile phone for tubes and buses. And I’ve got a free audiobook—an MP3 also on my mobile phone—for when I’m cycling along the canal to work in the mornings. (I could also read by email and RSS, if desired). None of this is perfect. The pbook is an old photostat copy – it was cheap, but it’s poorly set, there are a lot... Read the rest of this post →
Things Magazine just pointed to the growing cult of book covers online – Flickr groups for good looking books, old paperbacks, graphics and more, and similar projects like their own, wonderful Pelican Project. There are also plenty of blogs dedicated to the subject, and Penguin have spent the last couple of year deliberately turning them into a fetish item. But why? Only today we learn that books are the number one internet product, and the weighting of book covers on ecommerce sites has long mystified me. We’re still selling books by... Read the rest of this post →
I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It’s an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I’ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.] To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and... Read the rest of this post →
Jeremy Ettinghausen just announced Penguin’s new Facebook page over at the Penguin blog with a particularly apposite and self-effacing quote: “Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies … But they became extinct.” “Extinct?” “We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no... Read the rest of this post →
However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work.... Read the rest of this post →
Adobe have just launched a fascinating project called Knowhow which allows user-generation of help data in CS3. Items in knowhow’s del.icio.us network with contextual CS3 terms appear as tooltips in CS3 itself (image and link via swissmiss). Flickr and many other services uses simple tagging to provide metadata around their content, but this system offers much more: additional content, outside the original system, curated by users, adding information back into the system. I’d love to see a system like this for books. I search google and wikipedia all the time for additional information on things I... Read the rest of this post →
An update on some of the locative stuff I’ve been talking about… I did get that GPS unit, and thanks to quite a lot of Googling I’ve managed to hack it to my laptop to update my location on Google Maps (screenshot above) – which involved teaching myself rudimentary Python and exploiting my new, poor PHP skills. What I did learn was how fun technology on your own terms is; just as we’re moving past the stage of being passive consumers of TV and other media, so we’re taking control of technology at it’s most base level... Read the rest of this post →
I was quite interested when I heard about StoryCode.co.uk (via Zero Influence – there’s a .com version too). At first sight, I thought it might be a newer, better version of WhichBook.net: a way of classifying books to create a more accurate “If you liked this, you’ll love…” recommendations system. The advantage it has on WhichBook is to encourage visitors to “code” books they’ve read, which are then added to the system along with the data – a great advance on using professionals behind the scenes to classify books, which has only managed a couple... Read the rest of this post →
Too long and too important for a Stop Press post: Google is throwing away information that is fundamentally characteristic of books—metadata that describe and even determine what books are, as simple and trivial as volume numbers, or artifacts of type design, editing, and artistic production. Books are not, in other words, mere bags of words, but vehicles in which ride a wide sundry of other passengers—metadata, artistic expression, whimsy, and error. Books are born and produced in a rich organizational and information-rich social and economic context, and the willing discard of that context carries with it a loss whose... Read the rest of this post →
Matt Webb, of Schulze and Webb, gives this explanation, which pretty much nails it: A book is designed and manufactured… We discover a book, somehow. We wish for it. We select it, maybe out of a possible half dozen alternatives. We purchase it, then show it off. We discuss it, reviewing it if it’s great or if it’s terrible. We might sell it on. A bookstore on the street, a traditional bookstore, now seems quite inadequate. Or at least, inadequate before they started doing evening book talks, supporting book clubs and having employee recommendations. But inadequate—it’s really only... Read the rest of this post →
In the great future lit debate, there’s one thing we keep coming back to, that we hear over and over again: “I can’t read from a screen.” Never mind that most of us spend far more time reading from a screen (as you’re doing right now) than we do reading from paper (especially if you count text messages, display boards, TV titles and subtitles and many other instances). Is fiction different? Is the novel or other long work uniquely suited to paper? Novelists like Margaret Atwood certainly believe so, in her vociferous opposition to all things electronic, and who... Read the rest of this post →
I haven’t talked about Creative Commons in a while. Last night I went to the London CC Salon, which turned out to be a sort of pep rally for free culture – not a bad thing. One of the films shown is embedded below (or watch it on YouTube) and makes for a pretty funky introduction to the concepts behind CC. The video is one of the many pieces of CC-licensed work included on Free Me, a DVD created to show off and promulgate the CC ethos. Eventually, it is intended to be sent to... Read the rest of this post →
Saturday was definitely Interesting. A 300-person conference which noone really knew the content of beforehand, but which lived up to its name. And there were even some booktwo-related thoughts in there.
A recent literary event provided a chance for an extended chat with various people about the possibilities for new types of readings. I’ve always thought they’re a bad way to appreciate lit, but they’re valuable in promoting new work, and bringing together like-minded people. What can we do about this?
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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.
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