Archive
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 […]
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).
This looks like it should be very interesting: Six centuries ago, a German metalworker tinkered with a wine press, metal alloys and oil based ink, perfecting one of history’s great inventions: the printing press. With the rise of mass publishing, more people than ever were able to access information. Books proliferated. Today, digital technology offers […]
The Poetry Archive is a fantastic example of what the connected, high-speed web can do for literature. Inspired by a meeting in 1999 between the UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and the recording producer Richard Carrington, it provides recordings of English-language poets reading their own works. It’s a wonderful idea, exactly the sort of thing […]
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 It is inviting unpublished authors to submit the first three chapters of a manuscript to the scrutiny of the voting public.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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Via Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s Status-Q blog, I came across this fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive, which has been working to provide universal access to all human knowledge for more than fifteen years. Play audio file It’s a couple of years old, but Kahle’s major point – that […]
A little late for your Christmas presents, but ‘vE-“jA: Art + technology of Live Audio/Video’ is a book about the global VJ scene: creating and producing live audiovisual mixes. The standard edition of the book comes with a DVD containing hundreds of images and video clips by artists featured in the book (the accompanying and […]
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 […]
I recently talked about ICUE, a company developing a reader application for mobile phones. One of the presentation modes used in the ICUE applications, alongside manual and ticker-tape scrolling, was Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP. RSVP has been around for a while but is only now on the point of becoming widespread. A simple […]
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 Gowers Review of Intellectual Property is published today as part of the UK’s pre-Budget report, and is now available as a downloadable pdf from the Treasury website (which, it must be said, is a joy to use, right down to the lovely red box favicon). The Gowers review is a year-long independent review of […]
I was invited to participate in a discussion convened by the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE) on the subject of future publishing. Unfortunately I can’t attend, but I highly recommend going if you can – it’s a very interesting panel who should have plenty to say. Details follow: Educating the Next Generation […]
Yesterday I was given a fascinating demonstration of ICUE, an application which allows ebooks purchased from the ICUE store to be read on a mobile phone. There are three reading modes: a simple down-scrolling page, a sideways-scrolling ticker, and ‘flicker’, which flashes a single word at a time, at a speed of your choosing. The […]
Back in the UK, Charles Leadbeater’s next book is available online for comment. We-think is less immersive than other network book projects, but it’s great that Profile, joint small publisher of the year, have allowed this to go ahead – most publishers shy away from releasing content free. We-think is about the power of mass […]
Over at Planned Obsolescence, Kathleen Fitzpatrick has put out a call for contributions to making MediaCommons, the Institute for the Future of the Book’s latest project. There’s lots of ideas here, not least In Media Res, initially described, and then hastily retracted, as ‘YouTube for Scholars’. Every week, scholars upload media clips and an accompanying […]
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 […]
As accessibility is the watchword of the web standards movement, it’s kind of depressing to hear that traditional publishing is serving the blind and partially sighted community so badly: research for the Royal National Institute of the Blind found only twelve per cent of maths and eight per cent of science GCSE textbooks were available […]
Last week, John Naughton, journalist, technologist, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University and author of A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet, gave an electrifying address to the Society of Editors conference, in which he attacked their newspapers’ demonisation of youth and technology. It’s reprinted in […]
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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.
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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.