Archive
  • At Port Eliot
    A quick note to say that I’ll be at the Port Eliot festival this weekend, and MENACE and I will be appearing in the Round Room at 2pm on Saturday, alongside Keith Albarn and David McCandless (of Information is Beautiful) as part of the World of Wonders. Say hello if you’re about, and any tips […]
  • dConstruct 2010
    In September, I’ll be speaking at dConstruct, in Brighton. The theme of the day is design, which I don’t know very much about, and I wouldn’t put much stock by my talk description. Nevertheless, I will be talking about books, I expect, and attempting to close the circle on recent explorations of the book as […]
  • Words In Progress
    Yesterday I spoke at Words In Progress, an event convened by Hannah Gregory, of Vertigo of the Modern, and Monster Emporium Press. There was much goodness there, from such fine folk as Ambit, CB Editions, antepress, Strange Attractor and Zero Books—the latter represented by Nina Power of Infinite Thought, whose book One Dimensional Woman is […]
  • Playfully Speaking
    Just a quick note to say that the good people at Playful asked me to speak at their one-day event all about games and play on Friday 30th October, at Conway Hall, London. I don’t know much about games, so I’ll be talking about books. Surprise! But they will be playful games, or playful literatures, […]
  • The Jaipur Literary Festival, Part 1 of X: Chetan Bhagat
    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. […]
  • Bookcamp 09
    Penguin Books, Russell Davies and, er, me, are hosting a day of bookish, techy mucking about in London on January 17th. It’s for publishing folk, and for geeks, and there’s more info on the Penguin blog. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while (remember Slow Fire? Yeah, sorry about that), and it […]
  • London Lit Plus: The Future
    Two years ago, I co-founded London Lit Plus, an open literary festival for London. We’ve had two excellent years, but with all kinds of commitments, it would in no way be right to attempt to keep running it in my somewhat useless and slapdash fashion, to the inevitable detriment of the events. But it’s a […]
  • London Lit Plus 2008
    London Lit Plus, the literary festival I set up last year, kicks off for the second time tomorrow. I’d love to see you there. After a slow start, we’ve gathered up a bunch of really fantastic events. There’s a great string of events for classic London authors like Derek Raymond and Chris Petit, walks across […]
  • Funding gap, knowledge gap
    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 […]
  • London Lit Plus
    I’m very pleased to say that my open-source literary festival, London Lit Plus, is happening again this year. Full details at londonlitplus.com, with plenty more to come. Head over, check it out, start spreading the word – and think about holding an event!
  • Lit+ : Open-Sourcing the Literary Festival
    Sorry it’s been quiet around here. With London Lit Plus in full swing for the last couple of weeks, and a new job, it’s been a little hectic. However, we do have one important announcement. Lit+ (litplus.com) is a new booktwo.org project: taking the London Lit Plus ethos – an open-access, distributed literary festival – […]
  • Tools of Change
    Despite my repeated entreaties, no one bought me a ticket for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference, on this week. It looks like a lot of interesting people, talking about important stuff. Pleased to see that Manolis Kelaidis’ bluebook project, which I wrote about last year, has made an impactful appearance, and I suspect there’s a […]
  • Post- (but not un-) Interesting
    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.
  • Hack Day & Interesting
    Of interest to very few, I imagine, but I’m attending the BBC/Yahoo Hack Day at Alexandra Palace this weekend. Probably only the Sunday, as I’m also attending Interesting 2007 on the Saturday. Busy, busy, busy. Very interested in hooking up with booktwo-interested parties at either. Drop me a line if you’re coming… (Also available via […]
  • London Lit Plus
    I love it when a plan comes together. A Sunday evening chat on Brick Lane about ways of opening up/gatecrashing/subverting the upcoming London Literature Festival has led very quickly to the creation of London Lit Plus, an open-access festival to showcase the best of London’s literary scenes: London Lit Plus (LL+) is an open festival, […]
  • New kinds of readings
    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?
  • Slow Fire
    As regular readers have probably noticed, I’ve been bothered for some time about the general lack of zing in publishing get-togethers, and the massive disparity between the hunger, excitement and inspiration generated at events like FOWA and SXSW and the drab reality of book fairs and similar events. Moreover, I believe this situation is bad […]
  • British Council Talk
    Thanks for all the thoughts that people offered in advance of my talk today at the British Council. I’ve posted the slides and a bunch of links, which you can read here, and I’ll post some more about it later. In short, I think it went well – in that I explained a few things […]
  • Time to put my money where my mouth is…
    I’ve just agreed to give a fifteen-minute presentation on ‘publishing in the digital age’ at the British Council on Friday, as part of their International Young Publisher programme (which, incidentally, I wrote about last year). Frankly, help me. The other speakers are from the Oxford Brookes Institute of Publishing and the London College of Communications […]
  • London Book Fair
    A quick note. As I mentioned vaguely before, I’ll be attending all three days of the London Book Fair next week. I’ll be working, but if there’s anyone who’d like to meet up for a drink at the end of the day, please get in touch. I’ll obviously be reporting on any booktwo-related events, on […]
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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.

    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.