booktwo.org

Cycling to work today, I saw this advertised on the side of a bus: Bob Books. Bob Books allows you to create and order books using your own text and digital photos – the examples on the website heavily emphasise personal photo albums of the baby/wedding/holiday variety.

It’s a beautiful site and the downloadable software to create your own book looks and feels much the same – really intuitive and easy to use, even for novices.

It’s a fairly basic service actually, and it’s certainly no threat to traditional publishers or printers, or even to new POD services like…

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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…

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With little fanfare, if:book released a very early version of Sophie, their rich content creation tool, last Wednesday. You can download it here. Sophie has been described variously as the next step in ebooks, a publishing tool for the rest of us, the first base of the networked book, so I was eager to see what it actually was.

After a short time playing around with it, I pretty much gave up. I’d show you the result, but I can’t figure out how to show it off as there’s no documentation and everything I did manage to do…

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I’ve been playing with Twitter recently (and if you’re a regular reader, feel free to join me). Initially, I thought it was annoying and intrusive – and it still is – but it’s also such a simple, open and versatile platform, that lots of interesting things can come of it. And nothing gets that much use from people unless it has something going on. Does it?

Some good examples of cool stuff made with Twitter include BBC News Feeds, Weather tracking, and Twitter Tube Updates.

So, in the interest of forcing lit into every…

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Best bookish news from this years CES show in Las Vegas: iriver, best known for their pretty iPod competitors, have announced a rather pretty ebook. A direct competitor to the Sony Reader, iriver’s ebook takes the looking-like-a-pbook game to the next level: two facing e-ink ‘pages’, both touch-sensitive for easy page turning. It takes AAA batteries for what iriver claims will be up to six months use, and to top it all off it comes handsomely bound in leather.

The prototype E-BOOk (which is apparently the annoyingly capitalised name) runs Adobe Reader LE – a mobile version of…

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Via MobileRead, an extraordinary visualisation of the possibilities of e-ink by a London-based designer. Instead of book pages however, vast expanses of the London Underground are papered over:

For a higher-res version, see Alex Griffin’s website (under Design > E*Ink).

A very Happy New Year to all Book Two readers. I hope you had a good one and are all ready to look to the future once again. Christmas was not a good time for the UK book trade and I’ll be talking some more about this later, but in the meantime I’m flagging up an upcoming conference I’ll be attending, which isn’t all about books, but perhaps it should be.

Carson Workshop’s Future of Web Apps is in London in February. Now in its second year (details of past events here), FOWA brings together the people…

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There’s been a bit of a fuss recently when it was reported that an Indian engineering student had developed a new technique for data storage which not only massively outperformed the most modern competing techniques, such as DVDs, but did so using the far more ancient medium of paper.

Sainul Abideen’s “Rainbow Technology” uses multicoloured geometric shapes to store data on a printed page. This data can then be read back into a computer using a simple optical scanner. The original article claimed that text typed on 432 pages of foolscap paper could be stored on a four square…

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Whenever I try to tell people how the traditional book is on the way out and we’ll all be reading very differently a lot sooner than people think, the standard response is that people like traditional books, they like the look and feel, and nothing will ever substitute for that.

Well, sorry, but it will. I believe that a majority of people will switch to reading ebooks very quickly once the technology closes the look and feel gap between trad books and eReaders. And one of the key advances in this is electronic paper: a neutrally coloured, flicker- and glow-free…

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