Archive
I’ve noticed a trend in longtime bloggers, which I’m certainly a part of. Blogging less, linking more, generally winding down the straight blog in favour of a more distributed presence via Twitter, Delicious, videoblog apps like Seesmic. Some of these may be fed through the blog, like Booktwo’s RSS links, but it’s all getting a […]
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 […]
I love it when a plan comes together. A Sunday evening chat on Brick Lane about ways of opening up/gatecrashing/subverting the upcoming London Literature Festival has led very quickly to the creation of London Lit Plus, an open-access festival to showcase the best of London’s literary scenes: London Lit Plus (LL+) is an open festival, […]
The subject of reading from electronic screens is a matter of ongoing debate. Many claim people will simply never read off screens in the way that they read off paper now. Excepting e-ink-based paper, which promises to revolutionise our understanding of “the screen”, are there simple ways to improve our reading experience on the web?
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 […]
So, as a little experiment, I’m going to be logging the London Book Fair as it happens at www.booktwo.org/lbf2007/. For realtime updates, see the Twitter stream, and you can also grab an RSS feed. If people – particularly people attending – want to get involved, and make this more of a community backchannel – then […]
Thanks for all the thoughts that people offered in advance of my talk today at the British Council. I’ve posted the slides and a bunch of links, which you can read here, and I’ll post some more about it later. In short, I think it went well – in that I explained a few things […]
Hello. Sorry. I’m very busy at the moment and booktwo isn’t getting the attention it deserves, although I hope you’re enjoying the regular Stop Press – it’s all stuff I’d like to write more about if I had more time – also about this, and particularly this, hopefully soon. In the mean time, a heads-up […]
Steve over at the Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog has a long post on the experiences of the the We Are Smarter Than Me project. We>Me, which I wrote about last year, is (was?) a project by MIT, Pearson and others to build a community to write a book about how building communities could help businesses. […]
Kim White over at the Institute for the Future of the Book has a great post about the sea change coming to books. Alongside screen technology (e-ink, &c.) and the breakdown of the traditional author/reader divide (the networked book, &c.), White identifies another key factor in the evolution of the book: 3D visualisation. As we’ve […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Back in the summer, I visited the Royal College of Art’s 2006 Summer Show (a longer review of which can be found over at Tom Coates’ plasticbag.org). One project that caught my eye was Manolis Kelaidis’ blueBook project, part of the Industrial Design Engineering strand. Manolis was kind enough to send me some more material […]
Fascinating review of (the not terribly new) The Future of the Page, edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, over at Blogcritics.com. Immediately, we confront the first puzzle not directly discussed within the book, but nevertheless obvious the instant we pick it up in our hands. This book is palpable. It is larger than a […]
In Sunday’s Times, Bryan Appleyard wrote about the future of books. It’s a great article and deserves to be read in its entirety, but since we’re here we’ll note the key points, which are tantamount to articles of faith around these parts: “Over the past decade, power in the book industry has drained away from […]
Today´s Guardian carries a prominent article from non-specialist correspondent Stuart Jeffries on the subject of Second Life. (You only live twice), continuing the virtual environment´s increasing visibility as the next online phenomena to move into the popular conciousness, hot on the heels of myspace, YouTube, et al. This follows the announcement last week from Penguin´s […]
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 […]
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.