Archive
I’m very pleased to announce that all five Bookkake titles are now available direct from Apple’s iBookstore, and several are available on the Kindle. In addition, all Artists’ eBooks titles are also available free in the iBookstore. This has not been the simplest process, but I think it’s really important to make ebooks available in […]
Quote above from Alex Petridis’ review of the decade in music from Monday’s Guardian. And it strikes me that this is increasingly true of the publishing business too, and perhaps it is something we should be concerned about. My own approach has always been: literature first, technology second. What are the needs of writers and […]
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a panel at the Frontline Club on the future of publishing. It was an interesting evening, and I spoke alongside Tom Tivnan of the Bookseller and Chris Finnamore, test editor at WIRED. The whole thing’s now online if you’re so inclined: During the talk, one particularly […]
I’m pleased to announce that Artists’ eBooks, a project first mooted in this post a couple of months ago, is now live at www.artistsebooks.org. eBooks, as we’ve been saying for some time, have massive potential to revolutionise not only how we read, but what we read. The incorporation of audio and video, the possibilities for […]
I’m working on a couple of eBook projects, and thinking about distribution. Sales figures are important: in the music world, we’ve already seen the move to recording downloads in addition to physical sales for compiling charts. (Chris Heathcote has some thoughts on the latter, and notes we’re not yet at the per-play stage – c.f. […]
Re: today’s announcement about Google and Sony. It doesn’t appear to be a deal as such, but what’s clear is that half a million scanned books from Google Book Search will be made available as epub files, with millions more to come. Epubs. Ebooks. Now, cast your mind back, if you will, to the London […]
Last night I attended the launch of Semina, a new series of experimental novels from Book Works, at Housmans. The novels are the result of an open call for submissions, and are being selected by series Commissioning Editor Stewart Home. The first two titles in the series, Bridget Penney’s Index, and Maki Kim’s One Break, […]
If you’ve not been keeping up, Amazon is making a massive and highly controversial land-grab for POD and the long tail of publishing. More info here. As this is a very big issue indeed, and no worthy body on this side of the pond seems to be making a fuss, I’m only too happy to […]
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 […]
So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it. There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to […]
Tony White, author of one of my favourite books, Foxy-T, and literary editor of The Idler, has just published a series of extracts from Balkanising Bloomsbury, a work in progress, in the Diffusion eBooks format. He writes: The ebooks are the result of a residency with Proboscis that I’ve been undertaking in recent months, working […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
For me, there’s a few answers to that – the most important one being: very rarely from a high street bookseller. I don’t see why anyone would. On the rare occasions when I want a newly-released book, and I’m not just rooting around in a second-hand shop, my first choice would be to buy it […]
Via Macmillan chairman Richard Charkin’s blog, an interesting half-way house on the ebook: a USB memory stick that comes pre-loaded with an ebook. The book in question is The Study Skills Handbook by Stella Cottrell, a “best-selling guide to academic success” providing “practical, no-nonsense advice on all aspects of study skills such as writing, revision […]
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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.
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.