Archive
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 →
Really quite appalled by this, from Saturday’s Grauniad. Sony should sue. There’s a case that it’s about R&J, not the Reader, but I’m not buying it. Lazy, stupid, annoying.
Here’s a thing someone floated at me. What if Amazon released a Kindle-reading app for the iPhone? It’s a thought, isn’t it? After initial doubts – why would Amazon deliberately waste all that investment in the Kindle hardware? – I did come to the conclusion that the Kindle and iPhone demographics, while they certainly overlap, are by no means mutually inclusive. I don’t have figures on this, but my presumption is that the iPhone’s younger and/or early-adopter audience is not quite the same as the Kindle’s slightly older, less techy, but more hardcore booky audience (heavy genre readers, in romance... Read the rest of this post →
O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog has a nice series of posts on books as ebooks as applications: Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking Treating Ebooks Like Software A Big Boost to Books as Apps? I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some current projects, may come back to bite me): Books are not applications, or software. They are words. I think there’s a danger inherent in regarding books as something to be run rather than something to be read. This argument is a bit hazy... Read the rest of this post →
“The blogosphere has been buzzing since the App Store launched over last weekend with comments about ‘dozy publishers’ who have missed a great opportunity to make their books available on the iPhone. But apart from a few digital PR points scored against competing publishers, there doesn’t seem to me to be any huge value in first mover advantage here for publishers, unless we want to make the decision to become software developers.” Sara Lloyd has responded over at The Digitalist to the many comments (including ours) on this issue. She strikes a note of caution, and suggests that... Read the rest of this post →
So the iPhone 2.0 is here, and with it a slew of reading apps. There are two approaches here: create a standalone ereader that can be used to read ebook files, or create standalone apps for each book. The former is definitely better, and the reader of choice so far appears to be Lexcycle’s Stanza, an open epub reader that’s loosely tied to FeedBooks, enabling you to pull down a bunch of free ebooks directly, or search for a whole lot more. Getting ebooks (or any other files) onto your iPhone/iPod Touch is not easy however, which is... 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 →
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 →
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 wrote about Adobe’s Digital Editions, its Adobe Reader-lite for ebook fans, a while back, but until today I hadn’t tried out Microsoft Reader – and what a pig it is. Admittedly, it’s designed primarily for PDAs (hence the Cleartype technology), but for the flagship eReader product from the largest software company on the planet, you have to be disappointed – and understand why so many people’s first experience of ebooks is such a turn-off that it colours their whole appreciation of the technology. From the blocky icon to the blurred logotype to the bland interface,... Read the rest of this post →
Whenever I try to tell people how the traditional book is on the way out and we’ll all be reading very differently a lot sooner than people think, the standard response is that people like traditional books, they like the look and feel, and nothing will ever substitute for that. Well, sorry, but it will. I believe that a majority of people will switch to reading ebooks very quickly once the technology closes the look and feel gap between trad books and eReaders. And one of the key advances in this is electronic paper: a neutrally coloured, flicker- and glow-free... 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.
