Archive
Kate Pullinger’s column in today’s Guardian – Writers deserve a better deal from digital publishing – is very good on why authors should get a better, not worse, deal from digital publishing, and on the role of publishers in the new digital world. But it’s particularly priceless for this anecdote: At the moment the entire infrastructure of the publishing industry is geared toward shifting retail units; the head of digital publishing at a large publishing house told me that because their accounting system is entirely warehouse-based, for a time they had to find a way to represent... Read the rest of this post →
So, I signed up for Blog Action Day, and then promptly forgot about it. It was yesterday. Here’s what I’d planned to talk about, with a lot less research than the original idea. Sorry about that: I’m pretty angry about the environmental state of publishing. We are not, by any extent of the imagination, a green industry. Let’s start with returns. Returns are the process by which booksellers can return unsold stock to the publishers. It’s been around for a while, but publishers don’t like to talk about the actual figures. Some have admitted that return rates have... Read the rest of this post →
So. I wrote a book. It’s out today. Yeah, I know. You’ve been reading this site for ages, waiting for booktech revelations, when you realise it’s just been a plog all along. Yes, I wrote a book, and if you want to buy it, that would be sweet. It is pretty awesome. But that’s not the point. I did get all booktwo on it as well. Check out this site I made for the book. I’m sticking to all my principles; I retained full electronic rights to the work, and the whole text is available online, for free,... Read the rest of this post →
I was quite interested when I heard about StoryCode.co.uk (via Zero Influence – there’s a .com version too). At first sight, I thought it might be a newer, better version of WhichBook.net: a way of classifying books to create a more accurate “If you liked this, you’ll love…” recommendations system. The advantage it has on WhichBook is to encourage visitors to “code” books they’ve read, which are then added to the system along with the data – a great advance on using professionals behind the scenes to classify books, which has only managed a couple... Read the rest of this post →
Matt Webb, of Schulze and Webb, gives this explanation, which pretty much nails it: A book is designed and manufactured… We discover a book, somehow. We wish for it. We select it, maybe out of a possible half dozen alternatives. We purchase it, then show it off. We discuss it, reviewing it if it’s great or if it’s terrible. We might sell it on. A bookstore on the street, a traditional bookstore, now seems quite inadequate. Or at least, inadequate before they started doing evening book talks, supporting book clubs and having employee recommendations. But inadequate—it’s really only... Read the rest of this post →
In the great future lit debate, there’s one thing we keep coming back to, that we hear over and over again: “I can’t read from a screen.” Never mind that most of us spend far more time reading from a screen (as you’re doing right now) than we do reading from paper (especially if you count text messages, display boards, TV titles and subtitles and many other instances). Is fiction different? Is the novel or other long work uniquely suited to paper? Novelists like Margaret Atwood certainly believe so, in her vociferous opposition to all things electronic, and who... Read the rest of this post →
I just received some rather wonderful news. As a direct result of my recent talk at the British Council, one of the international publishers who was present, Anuradha Roy of Permanent Black in India, has set up a blog to talk to the world about their books. http://permanent-black.blogspot.com/ Publishers of the finest work on South Asia’s history, politics, culture, and ecology. Run by Rukun Advani and Anuradha Roy. Located in Delhi and Ranikhet, India. View our full catalogue at www.orientlongman.com. You’ll find lots more. According to the Internet & Mobile Association of India (whose physical address is... Read the rest of this post →
Something Twitterered, something new… Lots of interesting things come my way via other peoples’ Twitter streams, and this afternoon, via Tom Coates, I heard about Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger’s new book about “Digital Disorder” and “how we’re pulling ourselves together now that we’ve blown ourselves to bits.” Looks fascinating, and I’ll try and get my hands on a copy. From the EIM blog, I imagine there will be some book-related stuff in there, not least that based on conversations about libraries and education and media literacy. From a publisher’s point of view, the... Read the rest of this post →
I’ve written about Google Book Search before, but it’s time to do so again – particularly after their PR barrage at the London Book Fair, some aspects of which I wrote up at the time. For a while now, I’ve been broadly in favour of GBS, at least in as much as it’s forcing publishers to look seriously at digitisation strategies and becoming the driving force for change within the industry. Google’s PR drive has also stepped up a notch, with their flacks becoming increasingly informed about the book trade, a number of high-profile panels at book... Read the rest of this post →
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 →
Here’s something that passed me by, but that makes fascinating reading: yesterday was International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day (via Boingboing). On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if it hasn’t, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood. The root of IP-ST Day lies in a (coherent and self-described) rant written by Howard V. Hendrix, well-published author and current Vice-President of the Science Fiction and... Read the rest of this post →
This week saw the first meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Publishing at the UK Houses of Parliament. The APPG was set up last month, largely on the instigation of Sonny Leong, who is chairman of the IPG, a body which does an excellent job of representing independent publishers in the UK (full disclosure: my employer is a member, but that’s a personal opinion). It’s great that indie publishers will have such a voice in the house, although the APPG was set up to communicate with the industry as a whole. The chairman of the APPG... Read the rest of this post →
And so it ends. But what a work of genius. I can’t help but hear a rueful quality in the words of Penguin’s Chief Executive: ‘not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history’. Basically, that’s a publisher’s worst nightmare.
This morning, Penguin announced the launch of A Million Penguins, a wikinovel project in association with De Montfort University. Students from De Montfort’s MA in creative writing form the basis of the projected community of writers, which will edit and expand upon the short first chapter provided over a period of six weeks. (I think six weeks – the timescale is a little unclear. Rather sweetly, they’ve left lots of setup notes on their blog, such as the inspiration gained from this Lost fan wiki.) The students will also form the core moderators of... Read the rest of this post →
Lots of recent activity in the British press concerning future books: last weekend’s Sunday Times contained not one but two pieces on the subject. The first piece, Google plots e-books coup, reports on the Google Unbound conference we mentioned last week. Unfortunately, it’s all fairly techless, reporting that “the internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry” (er, Gutenberg?) and “commuters in Japan were already reading entire novels on their... Read the rest of this post →
From the Guardian: “Touchstone, an imprint of the publishers Simon & Schuster, yesterday launched First Chapters, a competition designed to find writing talent through the internet. It is inviting unpublished authors to submit the first three chapters of a manuscript to the scrutiny of the voting public. The winner’s book will be published and distributed by Touchstone and the author will enjoy a $5,000 (Ł2,575) cash prize.” As publishers seek ever new ways to attract an audience, such gimmicks as this seem increasingly common – the UK’s Richard & Judy show’s How to get Published was a talent... Read the rest of this post →
One of the many things we missed while we were away was the appearance of Forbes Magazine’s special Books edition. It’s right on the ball, with a number of fascinating articles from the people who really know what they’re talking about, so you’ve got the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Ben Vershbow on The Networked Book, Boingboing’s Cory Doctorow on giving books away for free, and UC’s Jonathan Enfield on new challenges to copyright. It’s a really good selection, and all the commentators seem to be saying the same thing: technology is coming, but... Read the rest of this post →
We quite clearly can’t get enough of McKenzie Wark (not least because he just dropped by to tell us about an older network book project, Speed Factory), and he’s recently been interviewed at Creative Commons. As well as quoting Laurence Sterne, always a good sign, he notes that Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (which we like almost as much as Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life) has been available for free online for years, but the print edition still sells well too. Giving away content for free is the great taboo of the publishing... Read the rest of this post →
Last week, The Industry Measure, an American trendwatcher, released part one of its report series The Multichannel Mix: The Role of Print, Web, Wireless, and Other Platforms in Today’s New Media Environment, focussed on publishing (Available online here, summarised here). The report, which I can’t possibly afford, does note that “in Summer 2006, 26% of all publishers cited “competition from online/Internet formats” as a business challenge, the highest this challenge has been in a decade.” There’s a slight wording change there from publishers’ usual characterisation of such competition as a ‘threat’ rather than a ‘challenge’, but it’s still... Read the rest of this post →
Welcome to booktwo.org. This site was inspired by the following piece of writing first posted at shorttermmemoryloss.com. This should give you some idea of where booktwo came from, and where it’s supposed to be going. There’s been a bit of a creative block in these parts for a while. Half-formed thoughts. Unfinished articles. Sweaty, 5am thinking jags. Please ignore the elephant in the corner. He’s not really there. La la la la la. The book is going to die. It’s over. Five, ten years. No more books. And we really, really need to start talking... 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.
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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.
