Archive
  • To Frankfurt, and Australia
    A quick reminder that I’m speaking at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you there. Worth noting that the talk description cited on the website is bobbins. I’ll be talking about the challenges, limits, and possibilities of ebooks, particularly when it comes […]
  • Bus-Tops: London, screens and the Olympics
    Back in January, I was approached by Art Public and asked to build an application and website as part of their Bus-Tops project. This has just gone live over at http://bus-tops.com/shelters/, so it seems like a good time to talk about the project. Bus-Tops is part of the Cultural Olympiad, and benefited from a grant […]
  • A journey through formats: Blair, Hardbacks and Ebooks
    I won’t get into the politics here, because this isn’t the venue, but since the lying, warmongering scum former Prime Minister Tony Blair is all over the news today, I thought I’d look around to see where and how his book is available. A Journey is officially released in hardback today, with the RRP of […]
  • 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 […]
  • 99 Delights: London
    A few weeks ago, while filming Battersea Power Station from the roof of a pub, I got chatting to Katie Bonham, a ceramics artist whose recent work includes pieces fired from the mud of the Thames itself. As a result of this encounter, I’ll be showing a short film at a pop-up exhibition this weekend, […]
  • CoverSpyLondon: In ur tubes, reading ur books
    I should have mentioned this earlier, but I am joining the shadowy forces behind CoverSpyLondon for one week only. If you have any tube book sightings, please follow @coverspylondon and send us a direct message. I thank you.
  • A Wide Arm Of Sea: Newspaper Club & The Design Museum
    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 […]
  • Everything Broken, Everything Burned. Or not.
    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 […]
  • SxSW: An open consultancy offer
    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 […]
  • 2009: The Booktwo/STML Year in Review
    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 […]
  • Immanent in the Manifold City: A Newspaper for Time-Travellers
    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, […]
  • Vastly more ink
    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 […]
  • Mattins: A micropodcast of daily readings
    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 […]
  • Artists’ eBooks
    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 […]
  • 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, […]
  • Enhanced Editions: Bunny Munro and eBooks for the iPhone
    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 […]
  • Going Solo; in which there is an announcement, a few observations, and an offer.
    A couple of months ago, I drew this on the back of an envelope: That’s pretty much the best representation I could come up with of what I do. I encompasses all my major projects of the last few years: this site; Bookkake, my print-on-demand, experimental small publisher; bkkeepr, the web app for tracking your […]
  • India Ho!
    I’m going to India in two weeks. I’ve been shortlisted for the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2009, for my work on Bookkake, bkkeepr, LL+, here, and elsewhere, and for which I am extremely pleased and grateful. Part of the judging process is seeing what we get up to in […]
  • 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 […]
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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.