booktwo.org

UPDATE 4/3/10: Newspaper Club won!

Ten days ago, Newspaper Club asked me to make something to go in the Design Museum, where they’ve been nominated in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year awards. They wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design Museum and going… somewhere…

Accordingly, I took myself to Bermondsey the following weekend, and did what I always do when I have a nose for something but little notion of the quarry. Accompanied by Rimbaud – borrowed from the London 2010 project – I went for a walk.

A quiet, cold but clear Sunday took me along the river, from Tower Bridge over St Saviour’s Dock, past Cherry Gardens and St Marychurch, the Mayflower monument and Brunel’s tunnel, into the reformatted docklands of the Rotherhithe peninsular. It’s a strange landscape, under-populated and defined by water: the filled-in docks that lie just beneath your feet and the constant cry of seabirds. I found the narrative I needed, and a destination: Stave Hill, a strange and marvellous earthwork that rises impossibly from the spoil.

Somewhere along the way I had the realisation that Bermondsey and Rotherhithe form not a riverbank, but a coastline: a starting point for voyages and expeditions, a strand of possibilities. All the world embarked from this point: Conrad’s famous opening lines to Heart of Darkness – “What greatness had not floated on that ebb into the mystery of an unknown earth!” – look out from here; as do the mad expeditions of Brunel and Captain (Saint?) Christopher Jones. And so: we have a walk, a story, a history.

There were many sites, too, that it wasn’t possible to include – Cuckold’s Point, on the far side of Rotherhithe, fell just outside the realm of inquiry, but I’ll be sure to return in the Summer for the Horn Fair Procession. I thought the journey had ended at Stave Hill, but I was given one more sign as I returned to the underworld – as if a sign was needed: the great bulk of the Harmsworth Quays print works, “home of quality newspapers” that rises up at Canada Water. A final treat for those who follow the map.

You can pick up a copy of A Wide Arm Of Sea from the Design Museum from now until the 6th of June. As ever, huge thanks to Newspaper Club for indulging my ramblings (and I have some beta invites if you’re looking to make something yourself) – and there’s more about the paper and the awards on their blog.

More photos of the walk and the newspaper at Flickr.

… And there are still limited copies of Immanent In The Manifold City available for sale.

Tomorrow is T-day. Or iDay. Or whatever. It’ll be fun. Nobody knows *anything* yet. Well, apart from the folks at McGraw-Hill and Hachette, probably Kobo, and a whole host of others. But for the purposes of this discussion: nobody *knows* *anything*.

About the Tablet, that is. Because, actually, we know quite a lot. We know about authors and writing, and editing and publishing, and bookselling and reading. We know and understand the long-form narrative and its place between people, and in society. And I’m more comfortable with Apple getting in on the act than I am about Amazon, because Apple aren’t in the content game, and Amazon definitely are. And if Apple swoop in and solve ebook distribution like they solved (legal, paid-for, mainstream) music distribution with iTunes, then great. Amazon are having a pretty good crack at that with Kindle too, but I’d like to see more involvement from someone without such an aggressive history of pressuring publishers until their bones show (although I’m under no illusions), and Apple have a history of producing devices and interfaces that make people go “Oh, OK. I get it now. Neat.” Amazon are also showing signs of a more open, mulitplatform approach (iPhone app, epub, etc) but that’s another conversation.

Publishers have been confused about their roles for some time. And I’m trying very hard not to be inconsistent on this, because I’ve spent several years urging publishers to get on board with new technologies and try new things, but equally I hope there’s space for a lot of publishers to get back to concentrating on what they do best: acquiring, editing, producing and publishing books. I’d like to have seen more happen in the last few years, but if it hasn’t, we should probably stop scrambling to get on the latest bandwagon (vanilla Books-as-Apps, I’m looking at you), and concentrate on the basics: ebook production, metadata, integrated marketing, quality and consideration. There is a lot to be done, but this or that device will never be the be-all-and-end-all of the future of publishing.

In March, I’m going to South By Southwest, the Austin, Texas-based megafestival encompassing film, music, and all things digital. I’m talking on a panel put together by Chris Heathcote about post-digital design, and why the future isn’t just on screens, alongside Aaron Straup Cope and Michal Migurski of Stamen, and Ben Terrett and Russell Davies of RIG. It should be fun.

I’ve never been to SxSW before, and it has an interesting history of book-related stuff. After last year’s debacle, there are panels analysing what went wrong – and plenty more on every aspect of the new book industry, and pretty much everything else under the sun.

The thing is, I can barely afford to go. And I’m not sure how I’ll be spending the five days I’m there for. And so, I’m offering a good-size chunk of my time to any individuals or businesses who can’t attend themselves, but would like a detailed report on the buzz, on specific panels or themes, from any part of the Interactive festival. Rates are negotiable, as is the mission, but if you can’t attend, and would like some inside information from someone who understands the book business as well as the interactive one, and who will be having plenty of chats with interesting folk over those five days, get in touch.

Photo CC Martin LaBar

As some of you may have noticed, booktwo.org has over this year become increasingly personal. This trend is likely to continue in 2010, and while I’ll continue to write about books, technology, and their intersections, I’ll be writing about other things.

The main reason for this is that in August I went freelance, and now work on a greater range of projects than I did previously. Many of these come from outside the publishing world, and booktwo provides a space to write about those things too.

And so. There’s been a bit of a flurry of weeknotes recently. Individuals, teams and companies writing up their work, their experiences, their hopes and fears. This seems good, so I thought I’d do an annual review. The week is probably not going to happen. And I’m going to talk in a fairly light-hearted way, about work, and about other things. It’s almost New Year.

January seems like a long time ago. The booktwo year started with Bookcamp (photo CC Matt Biddulph). This was good. I should have known that hooking up with Jeremy Ettinghausen and Russell Davies would produce interesting things, but I was still amazed at the range of people that came. I still tell people how it’s the only place I’ve ever seen an author, an agent, a publisher and a retailer all sitting around a table, having a proper chat. Bookcamps have since happened abroad. We should probably do another one. I met a lot of people who went on to shape the year. If you want to know more, Billy and Hugh have longer write-ups.

And then I went to India.

(Photo by Peter. Mine are here.)

I haven’t written much about India, which is a real shame. I went as one of the shortlisted UK Young Publishers of the Year, courtesy of the British Council. It was incredible – not least because of a great bunch of people: Pablo Rossello, of the BC, Jessica Purdue from Orion, Nii Parkes of Flipped Eye, my Apt colleague Peter Collingridge, agent Lucy Luck and Davy Nougarede of Heavy Entertainment. We met all kinds of publishers, from little independents to the major corporations, as well as retailers and everyone in between. It reignited my love for India, which I first visited ten years ago, and got me excited about the possibilities.

When working in one small corner of the industry, and frequently alone, and sometimes in opposition to most of the industry, it’s good to be reminded that the industry is nevertheless very broad, and filled with people who are passionate about what they do, and we’re all in this together. When you couple that with the extraordinary changes taking place in India, you see the vast scope of what literature means at all these different levels. I hope I get to go back soon, and I still want to develop some of the connections made when I was there. It’s important not to let these die.

If I had to pick one thing that made an abiding impression on me, from a business perspective, it’s probably the stories by, and the story of, Chetan Bhagat – one of the few things I did write up. Bhagat’s story shows that even in the vastness of India, it’s still possible to make a big impact through innovation, fearlessness and conviction.

On a personal level, the people that I met – like the folk at Seagull, Zubaan and Katha – were a huge inspiration. As were the guys at Pegs N Pints – who got their wish four months later and I wish I’d been there to celebrate.

The first half of the year at Apt yielded a range of fascinating projects. The Bookseer, which started out as an in-house experiment, went viral, garnering great interest across the web, and from some commercial entities. It may yet evolve further. The real meat, however, was Enhanced Editions, our advanced ebook reader for the iPhone.

We worked on Enhanced Editions for over a year, the product of an ongoing conversation about ebooks and the role of publishers. I learned a lot: about project management, about the iPhone platform, about development. It was good working in a bigger team that included different roles, all working towards the same objective. The reaction was brilliant: our Nick Cave app received awesome feedback, and I look forward to seeing how the books do in future.

Throughout the year I’ve also been working on smaller, side projects. I built a website for Detained Lives, a really important charitable campaign, that I’m pleased to see making progress highlighting the horror of indefinite detention. I built a site for my friend Rafa, a great photographer. These projects are good for stretching the muscles, trying out design and development ideas. They make a pleasant change.

There have been a range of print-based projects too. The Tweetbook, of course, which generated a quite absurd amount of coverage. And the newspapers – for Book Club Boutique in the summer, and for myself at the end of the year: Immanent in the Manifold City – which, due to popular demand, will be going into a second printing in January. Probably.

The newspapers were a real joy to work on, combining my own ongoing love of print and print technologies with the privilege of working with some very, very smart folk – the Really Interesting Group. I’ve seen (and helped a tiny bit) the Newspaper Club offering develop, and am as excited as anyone to see it released in the New Year.

I first met Russell of RIG in 2008, when he asked me to speak at the second Interesting, and he was kind enough to ask me back to MC – badly – at Interesting 09. But the Interesting connections have been fundamental to the sort of work I’ve been doing – and the gigs I’ve been getting – throughout 2009. People are good, and I’m really excited that I’ll be working at a desk in the RIG (and BERG) offices from January, surrounded by clever, clever people.

One of the highlights of the year, which resulted from my appearance at Interesting, was Playful, for which I had to throw something together in a week after realising my intended talk had been done the previous year. The result – A New THEORY of AWESOMENESS and MIRACLES, concerning CHARLES BABBAGE, HEATH ROBINSON, MENACE and MAGE – went down rather well on the day, and was picked up by Boing Boing, Gizmodo and others, which was hugely gratifying.

Playful Photo CC Roo Reynolds

Meanwhile, other projects rumbled on. Bookkake, which I set up in 2008, has yet to produce any new books since the first tranche – although there are plans – but it has provided a venue to continue ruminating on literature, censorship, poetry and, of course, filth in the form of the Bookkake Blog. I hadn’t done much writing on literature since the closure of the original STML blog some years ago, so it was extremely satisfying, and creatively useful, to do so again, whether it was ruminating on the lost gothic classics of English lit, cataloging dirty poetry, silly cooking, or designing subversive flat-pack furniture. These explorations of the edges of literature – the literature I love, and want to learn more about, are, I think, an essential part of any new business, and I hope I’m able to continue them.

Writing itself is something I want to do a lot more of in the New Year, whether its pitching articles on my specialities, or writing fiction – like I did for Bad Idea magazine’s Future Human night back in September – a hugely satisfying experience.

Actual real projects have also been going on under the radar. bkkeepr continues to chug along nicely, if quietly, and there are some exciting plans for its future which I can’t wait to get started on. There are a couple of other things too, which I apparently need codenames for.

So AwesomeSecretProject#1 just got turned down for funding, but I’m confident it will make it through in the Spring – it’s a real business, with a plan and everything, and it fills a niche in the publishing industry that I’ve been eyeing up for some time. It would have real benefits to publishers and readers, as well as – I can dream – actually pay me a salary, which would be A Good Thing. If I can learn to talk Business, and explain it a bit better, it might get interesting.

AwesomeSecretProject#2 has taken a bit of a beating this year, and I don’t think it’s going to happen in any way that I envisaged it. But I’ve learned a lot trying to make it happen, about the publishing business and what it means to be a publisher – the responsibilities and the risks thereof, when to take things personally, and when to let them go – and I’m going to take those experiences, and do something else with them in the New Year.

(There’s a story to the table)

Going freelance has been another opportunity to figure out exactly what it is that I do. I still don’t have the answer. I thought I’d be working on more projects that cross the boundaries between publishing and technology – but, with the exception of the newspapers, most jobs have fallen into one or the other camp. It seems to be getting increasingly hard to get cross-media projects off the ground, as a third party, as publishers get more savvy and take more of this stuff in-house. This is undoubtedly A Good Thing but it’s meant I’ve been working more on the tech side – I recently did all the frontend HTML/CSS for the new ITV Player, for example, as well as other things I can’t talk about.

In turn, this has left me more energy to devote to more esoteric projects, like Mattins and Artists’ eBooks, which have been great but decidedly non-revenue-generating – while I don’t doubt they will lead to, and inspire, things that are. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m in this to enjoy myself, after all.

So, 2009 was Good – and I’ve probably missed loads of stuff – and here’s to 2010. I have some really interesting projects lined up for the New Year, which you’ll probably hear about at some point. My general mood swings wildly between total elation and utter terror – but the emphasis is on the former, and that’s the freelance life, I guess.

I’d love to hear about what you’ve been up to, and what you’re doing in the future. If you’re interested in working with me, please get in touch: I’m always looking for new projects. You can check out my (almost) full portfolio, and I’m very easy to find and get hold of.

As a bonus, here’s (almost) everything I cooked in 2009.

Happy New Year. May it be full of joy.

Update: This newspaper is now for sale.

I have been somewhat obsessed with the eccentric figure of Walking Stewart for a number of years, since first encountering him in some dusty library, at the unpopular end of De Quincey’s “Collected Works”.

A strange, liminal figure, Stewart seems to stalk the margins of the Nineteenth Century, his own, multitudinous, works forgotten, but his footsteps echoing through the recollections of his contemporaries. I’ve wanted to do something with him for ages.

When Newspaper Club offered me another chance to make a newspaper – following the summer’s Book Club Boutique paper – I decided to attempt that something.

One of the odd qualities attributed to Stewart was his ubiquity: a perceived ability to be in more than one place at a time. Following a lifetime of walking across the known world, his final years in London were spent in seemingly unending peregrinations across the city, and more than one commentator recorded encountering him in impossible positions: sat steadfast upon Westminster Bridge, and minutes later, as steadfast upon a bench in St James’ Park. De Quincey himself records passing him at Somerset House, and then overtaking him again on Tottenham Court Road – despite having taken the shortest route through Covent Garden.

Drawing upon OpenStreetMap, styled with Cloudmade to resemble antique atlases, I collected these routes and anecdotes, and present them here in newspaper form. But the newspaper is a foldable, pliable thing, just as Stewart himself seemed to fold the cityscape around himself. And so we have maps that can fold upon themselves to delineate not only the narrator’s journey, but that of Stewart himself. Folded correctly, the maps reveal how Stewart breaks the margins of the map to travel, invisibly, through space and time.

There is also an introductory essay – a meditation on ubiquity, immanence and time travel, drawing on Stewart’s life, Jewish mysticism, Deleuzian metaphysics and special relativity – together with selected quotes and sources.

The first edition of the newspaper is produced in a limited run of five copies. Following investigation and use, there may be a second edition at some future point in time – or space…

Update: This newspaper is now for sale.

Full image set at Flickr →

Quote above from Alex Petridis’ review of the decade in music from Monday’s Guardian.

And it strikes me that this is increasingly true of the publishing business too, and perhaps it is something we should be concerned about. My own approach has always been: literature first, technology second. What are the needs of writers and readers, and how can publishers use technology to address these needs?

Increasingly, we seem to be flailing about in a sea of formats, models, and philosophical digressions into the meaning of publishing when what we should be saying is: we have writers, we have readers: how do we serve both sides of what we do?

The recent decision by Simon & Schuster and Hachette to hold back ebook publishing until four months after hardback (admirably, as always, investigated by Booksquare) is a good example of this. Technology allows us to serve readers and writers better than this, but the move is all about serving publishers themselves. “We’re doing this to preserve our industry,” says David Young (Hachette chief) but if all our efforts are spent fulminating over and attempting to corral technology, we’re going to lose sight of what our industry actually does.

A couple of weeks ago, Russell Davies noted that most podcasts of the kind we (meaning, I think, Russell, me and some like-minded folk) listen to while wandering around are quite long for most of our wanderings – typically 30 minutes or more, like the radio programmes we post at Speechification. There’s room in the world for shorter, regular podcasts – micropodcasts if you will – to fill the shorter gaps: bus stops, changing trains, a stroll to the shops, that kind of thing.

Lots of non-podcast content works well at this length – things like Thought For The Day (OK, there is a podcast of that) or Channel 4’s 3 Minute Wonder films.

TFTD – or rather, the Humanist Society’s secular version, Thought For The World – collided in my head with the daily readings we had to do at school. At my (rather posh) school, every student was issued a mini Gideon Bible on arrival, and the first lesson of every day was 5 minutes longer than the rest to accommodate a mandatory daily reading. “Today’s lesson is taken from Matthew Chapter 5, beginning at the third verse…” and so on. Together with the increased ease of creating podcasts these days, I thought I’d give it a go – with a literary bent, obviously.

Mattins is a daily reading, every weekday, no more than 5 minutes long. The 5 minute limit is imposed by Audioboo, which makes podcasting from an iPhone startlingly simple. Every morning over my mandatory first coffee I take a book down from the shelves, hit record, and read a short extract. Audioboo takes care of uploading, hosting and syndicating each “boo”, and I can also extract this quite simply by munging the RSS to a standalone site with Feedburner and a bit of Simplepie tweaking. The choice of extract is almost-random – I like finding bits I’ve dog-eared in something I read a long time ago, or a good bit I read the night before, or I might just read the first couple of pages (five minutes is a lot shorter than you think).

I hate the sound of my own voice, but I’m aware that’s pretty common, so I’ll let it go. I’m also not a great reader-out-loud in general, and given it’s first thing in the morning and I’m only half way through the first caffeine shot, it’s not exactly broadcast-quality material. I stumble occasionally, and mispronounce stuff. But it is a nice thing to do for myself, and some people might like it too.

So, here’s Mattins: a daily reading. If you like that kind of thing.

Micropodcasting is officially easy. I look forward to seeing more things made this way.

I’m pleased to announce that Artists’ eBooks, a project first mooted in this post a couple of months ago, is now live at www.artistsebooks.org.

eBooks, as we’ve been saying for some time, have massive potential to revolutionise not only how we read, but what we read. The incorporation of audio and video, the possibilities for curation, quotation, linking and sharing, the vast scope of low-to-no-cost distribution and the low barriers to entry should excite us all.

In particular, I’m fascinated to see how artists and writers respond to these new opportunites, platforms and technologies. It was in conversation with the writer Tony White that the idea for Artists’ eBooks first surfaced, and I’m very pleased and grateful that Tony has allowed three new short stories to form the opening line-up at Artists’ eBooks.

These stories, part of Tony’s ongoing “Balkanizing Bloomsbury” series, were written using a process which included cutting-up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a number of sources including travel writing, Hague tribunal transcripts and mass media texts, to create completely new works of fiction which explore ideas of European identity. Each comes complete with notes on the text and links to the sources – allowing readers to explore beyond the boundaries of the traditional text, in ways unique to the eBook format.

This is but one example of the many conceivable routes the project could go down. We have more titles coming in the near future, and we’re very interested in hearing from artists and writers who would like advice, assistance, and collaborators to help them explore this territory. But for now, please visit the site, download the books – and send us your feedback.

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I’ll do a follow-up post at a later date about the ebooks, strategy and so on, but I’m indebted to Liza Daly at Threepress for some invaluable advice on ebook production. I also urge you to read Tony White’s other work if you haven’t: his widely acclaimed novel Foxy-T remains one of my personal favourites.

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 talk, with slides, at shorttermmemoryloss.com/menace/.

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) and so on – and adding exclusive additional content, and the real coup: full text-to-audiobook synchronisation. The latter means you can switch between the text and the audio without losing your place, and we hope it’ll get people excited, and prove that ebooks really can go to new places, over and above the physical book.

For my part, I’ve written a number of posts over at the Enhanced Editions blog explaining some of the thinking behind the design and user experience, such as serif vs sans-serif and audiobook integration. Other members of the team have also written about designing icons for the iPhone and our attitude to DRM.

We’ve been working on Enhanced Editions for just over a year, and it’s been great to have been part of the team, and great to have produced an app we’re proud of. There’s more to come here – and we should really talk about ebook pricing and convergence at some point – but until Obama arrives, go check out Bunny Munro in the App Store now.

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P.S. The trailer’s another fine job by our friends at Asylum Films, who made 25th Estate: This Is Where We Live.