booktwo.org » Stop Press

Stop Press for June 17th

James Bridle — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Spam ‘Books’ Flooding Kindle Store – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic "This is some kind of bizarro remix culture in which everything sucks and is for sale."
Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation | Books | guardian.co.uk In which a prediction nearly comes true.
parting gifts (tecznotes) "The complete image and data collection is close to 700MB, so with a bit of compression I could probably cram it all onto a CD and stick that in the back—animated GIFs of popular rappers don’t print well." Mike brings the awesome with several years of web-collected images, printed. The post-experience artifact.
Meet Amazon.com’s first employee: Shel Kaphan – GeekWire "One of the things that attracted me in the first place about Amazon is that I could easily describe how we were going to make money, to anybody. We are going to sell books. People will send us money, and we will put it in the bank. And then we will ship them a book. And we will do that a lot…"
Random House unveils e-book series at FutureBook Innovation Workshop | The Bookseller The return of the Penguin Special, cf Zer0 books and the general weight of the new non-fiction.
Language Isn’t A Firehose: James Joyce And The Future of Computerized Translation (Bloomsday Edition) | Fast Company "To borrow Joyce's quip in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow." Instead of Ireland, read Google Translate."

James Bridle — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Leanpub Not the first blog-to-(e)book self-publishing tool, but a slick and smart one.
Matt Langer · #longrants "And this is a weird thing to me? Not only because we’ve got this bizarre celebration going on of The Triumphant Return Of Long Form (which, I mean, it didn’t actually ever go anywhere?), but more so because of this widespread fetishization of length that we’re seeing (I promise you I tried to think of a better way to say that), a consensus that long is good and longer is better (again, see previous parenthetical)." AKA despite that, most people still reading

James Bridle — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Yes! It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub What happens when you mash up literature and OpenStreetMap.

James Bridle — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing — by Craig Mod Craig's latest, unmissable essay.
Internet Archive starts backing up digital books on paper "If you want real long-term backups of digitized ebooks, then look no further than dead tree. At least, that's the consensus of the Internet Archive project, which has announced an incredibly ambitious plan to store one physical copy of every published book in the world." This is slightly mental.

James Bridle — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon Publishing Announces 32 Diverse Books for Late Summer and Early Fall "We're excited to be growing Amazon Publishing's imprints, as well as the number and variety of titles we're able to make available to more readers," said Victoria Griffith, Publisher, Amazon Publishing. "We hope readers enjoy books from both the new and established authors on our list."

James Bridle — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Digital Publishing in the Developing World | Publishing Perspectives "Digital publishing models that work in the United States and Europe cannot always be applied to China, Latin America and the developing world." You should listen to Octavio.

James Bridle — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

EBooks are "attacking our freedom" | News | PC Pro I met Richard Stallman when he was giving this talk. Once you get over the buying-stuff-with-a-credit-card bit, it's basically (cough) Open Bookmarks.
Your Agent Should Not Be Your Publisher « Redhammer "Let me be absolutely candid with you. Although various excuses have been put forward by agents for doing this – it’s mostly about lining their own pocket." An agent writes.
BBC News – British Library launch classic book reading app "The paid-for app will be launched in full this summer, but until then a thousand titles can be

James Bridle — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Faber launches The Waste Land app – video | Books | guardian.co.uk "Could the saviour of publishing be battery powered?" Stab stab. It's a good-looking single-platform enhanced ebook.
Information overload, the early years – The Boston Globe "But around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention."

James Bridle — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet | Wired [Linkbait alert] (1) See book guilt. (2 & 3) See Open Bookmarks. (4) Confused. (5) See social reading.

James Bridle — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

James Daunt: ‘I don’t recognise that books are dead’ | Books | The Observer "He knows the digital age must be embraced and plans to invest in a first-rate website."
Announcing a new Read API « The Open Library Blog "The idea is, you can hit the Read API with an identifier or a series of identifiers or an array of identifiers, and it will tell whether there is a readable or borrowable version available through Open Library. As you render a page in your own bookish website, you can paint links into Open Library based on the response."

James Bridle — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Letters of Note: A library is many things "A library is many things. It’s a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It’s a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books." via BERG

James Bridle — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Borders are out of the ebook business | The Digital Reader And with them, potentially, the ebooks that you bought. What should we do about this? Oh, hello Open Bookmarks.
Porn, Cyberterrorism, The Russian Mob and the Future of Literature | arcadesunshine "While bookstores and print publishing are under assault, digital sales are taking off, and expected to grow 400-500% in the next few years. This rate of change is simply unsustainable for any industry, let alone one as ossified as traditional publishing." A fine, variegated primer on change.
The Millions : The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels
Guess How Much Money Amazon Spent On The Lady Gaga Promotion Last Week Deep discounting at network scale.