Archive
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 for other things to see gratefully received.
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 designed object in time and space, and recent obsessions with loss and destruction in the works of Borges, Sebald, Bevan, Baez and others. And Geocities. You should buy a ticket. Some of the other folk look really good.
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 worth your time. My favourite work, however, was by David Rule from or-bits, whose obsessional diarising over six months produced a five volume, barely edited memoir, and who turns his and... Read the rest of this post →
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, or playful ways of constructing literatures… or something. Get a ticket! UPDATE: due to a previous speaker on the same subject, I didn’t talk about books, but about AWESOMENESS, MAGIC, and a computer made out of matchboxes. You can read the full... 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 →
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 should be a lot of fun. Hopefully, we’ll be taking the book apart and thinking about what we should be doing with it in the future. There’s been a lot of pontificating and a lot of “new initiatives” in the industry, but... Read the rest of this post →
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 wonderful thing, and I still believe in the concept of the open festival, and I’d love to see it continue. So I’m appealing for someone or someones to take it on, with full blessing and support. If you’re interested, read this for... Read the rest of this post →
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 the territories of Patrick Hamilton and W.B. Yeats, live readings and poetry from Liar’s League, Spoonful of Poison, Legend Press (at Speaker’s Corner!) and the Stuckists, a great kids and comics event from the DFC,... 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 Ł250 million. Just last week, ACE announced Ł16.5 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 →
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!
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 – and turning it into a template that anyone can use to set up their own festival. We’ll be using the same kind of tools – the power of the internet and free software – to create a resource for all.... Read the rest of this post →
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 lot of similarly cool stuff being discussed. Places to find out more: there’s the Conference blog, Andrea Laue’s jusTaText seems to be on the ball, as does Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead, and there’s always Jeremy’s excited... 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.
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 the backnetwork as STML). Would love to hack something, but not much of a hacker. Additional tags: interesting2007, hackdaylondon.
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, which means anyone can participate, and anyone can hold an event. All you have to do to be included is to submit your event, and we’ll add it to the list on this website. We want to showcase all the wonderful... Read the rest of this post →
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?
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 for publishing, bad for books, and bad for literature in general. As I’ve argued many times, if we don’t talk to each other, and talk about the future, the massive changes that are coming are going to damage us, and prevent us... Read the rest of this post →
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 reasonably clearly, and I didn’t clam up, which was my main worry. Interestingly, about a third of the room had never really used the internet, another third didn’t believe that anything would ever stop people reading paper books, and the rest were mildly interested... Read the rest of this post →
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 so I will be in excellent company. Topics that spring immediately to mind are: Production: print on demand, phasing gently into ebooks Content: microformats, microchunking, ephemerality of literature Distribution: ebook readers, mobile phones, ipod for books Creation: collaboration, wikis, networked... Read the rest of this post →
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 the general techness of this year’s Fair, and of the state of the industry as a whole, so stay tuned.
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.
