Archive
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft, and everyone who came, for a really great time. I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily. This, despite efforts like the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (which, incidentally, is kept in a shipping container). William Gibson spoke recently at BEA. He said this: “If you’re fifteen or so, today,... Read the rest of this post →
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
After the recent, ongoing hullabaloo over Amazon’s attempts to monopolise the print-on-demand market, I thought I’d point to some interesting uses of POD that might change some peoples’ perceptions of the technology, and show it’s not all vanity presses and Lulu photobooks. First up is PublicDomainReprints.org, a project by book geek and hacker Yakov Shafranovich, which takes texts from The Internet Archive and Google Books (over 2 million works) and automatically formats them and sends them to print. It’s a non-commercial project based on his own commercial POD company, and while (confessedly) ropy, it’s... Read the rest of this post →
I wanted to post this quickly, before it gets lost in the weekend. Authors and publishers who use Print-On-Demand printers in the US have recently been hearing that Amazon will only continue to carry their works if they switch to Amazon’s own POD property, BookSurge. WritersWeekly has the full story. This is a pretty big deal. Amazon has around 15%-20% of the total book market (in the UK), but the vast majority of the online book market, which is growing all the time. Meanwhile, POD has been turning from a vanity publisher’s niche into a mainstream printing... Read the rest of this post →
The Great Escape cover above, designed by Abram Games for Penguin in 1951, is one of my all-time favourites. And when, Moleskined-out, I needed a new notebook, it sprung to mind. So here’s what I did. I scanned in the cover, and created a dummy edition, complete with 200 blank, numbered pages, which I had printed by Lulu – a replica edition for my own use. It cost £5, which I thought was pretty reasonable. If you’d like to do the same, here’s the blank, numbered interior pdf for a 200pp paperback notebook (what Lulu calls... Read the rest of this post →
The above image is from the Future of Web Apps conference which happened in London last week – unlike the Print Is Dead blog, however, I was there, and I know that Richard Moross of Moo‘s next slide was “Oh no, it isn’t.” Moo’s presentation was entitled “How we turn virtual stuff on the web into beautiful stuff in the real world” and explained how they’ve use the latest web technologies to redeply a 500-year-old industry: printing. Expect to see more of this – here and elsewhere… [Photo courtesy of Pixelm's Flickr stream]
One of the subjects touched on in the fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle which I linked to yesterday was the Bookmobile, an on-demand books service in the back of a van connected to the Internet Archive’s hundreds of thousands of free, digitised texts. The set-up, which cost around $15,000 including the car (breakdown below, no pun intended), consists of a mobile satellite connection, a couple of laptops, a laser printer, a guillotine and a book binding machine. It can produce books anywhere in the world that can see a satellite, in minutes, for a cost price of $1 a... Read the rest of this post →
Our spy at the recent Digital Print World expo at London’s Earl’s Court reports that Canon was displaying a new set-up they call “One Book” – a digital printer combined with a perfect binding machine. The system requires the addition of a separate colour/litho printer for the covers, which are then fed into main set-up, but this doesn’t sound too difficult to automate, and can deliver about ten copies an hour according to our souce. Also quoted is a report in Print Week magazine about a different printer which combines all these steps, and is being touted as... Read the rest of this post →
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.
