Archive
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 year ago this week, I went freelance. So this seems like a good time for a recap. In the last year I’ve been extremely lucky to work with clients including Hachette UK, Bonnier, Art Public, Six To Start, Airlock, Newspaper Club, Proboscis, Dennis Publishing, and a number of others. I’m continuing to work with […]
The Museum of Obsessions accepts donations on loan from collectors, enthusiasts and the sentimental. The things that enthral us, but which we cannot give a home to; our treasured possessions from which we cannot bear to be parted, yet cannot keep: these are the contents of the Museum. If you have no more room in […]
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, […]
Recently returned from Mexico, and still too jetlagged to write up my experiences and talk at SXSW, I present instead some rambling recollections made up from my notes on Mexico City, where I walked a lot (in one very small area of the central city), went to bookshops, and, in one of those out-of-place experiences […]
So, I’m off to the SXSW Interactive festival in a couple of days, where I’ll be going to lots of talks, meeting people, and appearing on a panel. You should come to that if you’re around on Tuesday. It should be fun. The panel’s about post-digital design, or what we could and should be thinking […]
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 […]
I’ve just started Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future (indeed, I read a bit of the opening of the first of the seven short stories therein on today’s Mattins). The second story—an excellent and extraordinary fantasy of the Eiffel Tower run amok—begins with a meditation on reading and bookmarking. You know when you’re reading an […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Recently, I did some work with Newspaper Club, the new startup from from the fine folks at the Really Interesting Group, building on their rather wonderful Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet project. Looking to test the systems they’re working on and start building a portfolio of possibilities, they offered me the chance […]
In case you don’t read Times Emit (which you obviously should), Apt just released a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data): It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from […]
Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book. (For those of you who don’t get Twitter, and those who are just bored by it’s sudden, seeming ubiquity: move along. Nothing to see here.) → The full photoset is here. […]
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 […]
As a little end-of-year project, I’ve just launched jocelynbrooke.com, a site dedicated to the life and work of English writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908—1966). I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Brooke in the last few months, and have begun a small campaign to revive his reputation. Brooke’s writing, which clusters in the decades around the Second World […]
I’m very pleased to announce that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a collaboration between my employer Apt and The Institute for the Future of the Book, is now live. Several months ago we heard that the Institute was setting up in the UK, and we approached Chris Meade with a view to working with if:book […]
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.