Archive
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 →
So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it. There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to be near a computer. Online back-up of your books is very smart – one customer losing their whole library after dropping one of these in the bath would pretty much kill it. The big page-turner paddles on the side will be good for... Read the rest of this post →
Tony White, author of one of my favourite books, Foxy-T, and literary editor of The Idler, has just published a series of extracts from Balkanising Bloomsbury, a work in progress, in the Diffusion eBooks format. He writes: The ebooks are the result of a residency with Proboscis that I’ve been undertaking in recent months, working with and exploring the potential of their new Diffusion ebook generator. These stories have been created by cutting up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a variety of sources to create completely new works. This process mines a particular... Read the rest of this post →
Citing the crucial need to access records on nuclear waste storage, or census returns, in five, 10 or even 100 years’ time, [Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the National Archives] said: “This is a critical issue for us, and for UK society as a whole. We assume our personal records are secure, we expect our pensions to be paid, but anyone with a floppy disc even three or four years old is already having a hard time finding a computer that will open it.” [Source] This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and pertinent articles I’ve seen... Read the rest of this post →
With new technology comes the need to rethink certain conventions. The above is clipped from a Macmillan ebook (link), and while I don’t wish to do anyone in particular down, and the technology is young, I think it speaks to a disparity in the understanding of ebooks: they are not simply paper books, scanned page by page and uploaded – or at least, they have the potential to be so much more.
I’ve written about Google Book Search before, but it’s time to do so again – particularly after their PR barrage at the London Book Fair, some aspects of which I wrote up at the time. For a while now, I’ve been broadly in favour of GBS, at least in as much as it’s forcing publishers to look seriously at digitisation strategies and becoming the driving force for change within the industry. Google’s PR drive has also stepped up a notch, with their flacks becoming increasingly informed about the book trade, a number of high-profile panels at book... Read the rest of this post →
With little fanfare, if:book released a very early version of Sophie, their rich content creation tool, last Wednesday. You can download it here. Sophie has been described variously as the next step in ebooks, a publishing tool for the rest of us, the first base of the networked book, so I was eager to see what it actually was. After a short time playing around with it, I pretty much gave up. I’d show you the result, but I can’t figure out how to show it off as there’s no documentation and everything I did manage to do... Read the rest of this post →
Today’s Guardian has a short piece with more Google follow-upping: The iPod has done it with music, Flickr has done it with photos, MySpace has done it with bands and Saatchi is doing it with paintings. The question is: can Google do the same thing with books by creating an international online market place for them enabling readers to download volumes in their entirety – at a price of course – to their iPods, Blackberrys or smartphones? Luckily, the Guardian’s Vic Keegan is more clued-up than Bryan Appleyard – for example, he’s been trying out
Best bookish news from this years CES show in Las Vegas: iriver, best known for their pretty iPod competitors, have announced a rather pretty ebook. A direct competitor to the Sony Reader, iriver’s ebook takes the looking-like-a-pbook game to the next level: two facing e-ink ‘pages’, both touch-sensitive for easy page turning. It takes AAA batteries for what iriver claims will be up to six months use, and to top it all off it comes handsomely bound in leather. The prototype E-BOOk (which is apparently the annoyingly capitalised name) runs Adobe Reader LE – a mobile version of... Read the rest of this post →
Yesterday I was given a fascinating demonstration of ICUE, an application which allows ebooks purchased from the ICUE store to be read on a mobile phone. There are three reading modes: a simple down-scrolling page, a sideways-scrolling ticker, and ‘flicker’, which flashes a single word at a time, at a speed of your choosing. The latter is surprisingly comprehensible, and apparently allows much faster reading than a person’s norm. According to Managing Director Jane Tappuni, ICUE is popular with lots of people who wouldn’t normally be big readers; kids especially. She made the good point that while for... Read the rest of this post →
Currently all over the blogs: think tank calls for ‘private right to copy’. If you didn’t know already, every time you rip a CD to your computer, and then copy that MP3 to your portable player, you’re breaking several copyright laws. Clearly these laws are out of date and ineffectual, but that doesn’t stop the various industry bodies involved from pushing to tighten them up rather than rewrite them. The news now, of course, is all about music, but the same arguments apply to books. Soon, ebooks will allow you to ‘rip’ your books to other portable devices,... Read the rest of this post →
Via Macmillan chairman Richard Charkin’s blog, an interesting half-way house on the ebook: a USB memory stick that comes pre-loaded with an ebook. The book in question is The Study Skills Handbook by Stella Cottrell, a “best-selling guide to academic success” providing “practical, no-nonsense advice on all aspects of study skills such as writing, revision and exams, critical and analytical thinking, time management and memory skills” and the package also includes a free twelve-month subscription to The Study Space which contains “additional study resources and expert advice” – which sounds exciting, but is in fact a site... Read the rest of this post →
My recent post on Adobe’s Acrobat-disguised-as-an-eReader Digital Editions software drew a response from m’learned friends over at Mobileread. Alexander Turcic pointed out that DE doesn’t only support PDFs, but also the forthcoming Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS), a new standard for content creators and consumers – about which the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) has just published a press release. The new standard also includes a container standard for packaging ebooks (the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format, or OCF), and is intended to make it easier and cheaper for all concerned. The IDPF and the OEBPS have... Read the rest of this post →
Adobe have just dropped the first fruit of their takeover of Macromedia – and it’s book-related. New eReader technology Adobe Digital Editions is a Flash-based Rich Internet Application – that is, it takes all of the online benefits of connectivity and streams them through a pleasant, pervasive interface that lets you interact with things rather than just look at them. Supposedly. The most impressive thing about it is undoubtedly how easy it is to install and play with. Go have a try over at Adobe Labs. There are plenty of free sample books available there too. Once launched, it... Read the rest of this post →
Following our extended coverage of the Sony eReader, I thought we should point towards a few other ways to read eBooks – chosen, it must be said, pretty much at random, but no less illustrative for that. Engadget on Panasonic’s Word Gear. This looks nice, and is competitively priced against the Sony. Unlike the Sony, it’s a fully-featured, colour screen, which means vastly reduced battery life, but the chance to view movies, photos, and, in the example given, scantily-clad Japanese girls. Symbian explain all about eBooks, and how to read them on their OS Phone. As Apple... Read the rest of this post →
Following widespread hoots of derision from the publishing industry, guess what? From the Bookseller: “Overwhelming demand” for the new e-reader from Sony means that the device has sold out online. Priced at US$349.99, the ebook reader was launched on 27th September and sold out shortly afterwards. Sony states on its website that “due to overwhelming demand, new orders may ship as late as November 30th”. Sony would not disclose manufacturing quantities or sales volumes for the product. While much of this is undoubtedly down to early adopters who want to try out the device, not people with a... Read the rest of this post →
Welcome to booktwo.org. This site was inspired by the following piece of writing first posted at shorttermmemoryloss.com. This should give you some idea of where booktwo came from, and where it’s supposed to be going. There’s been a bit of a creative block in these parts for a while. Half-formed thoughts. Unfinished articles. Sweaty, 5am thinking jags. Please ignore the elephant in the corner. He’s not really there. La la la la la. The book is going to die. It’s over. Five, ten years. No more books. And we really, really need to start talking... 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.
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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.
