booktwo.org

Today sees the launch of Fiction Uncovered, a new UK literary promotion for writers who deserve recognition but have yet to receive a major literary prize or media attention, or be picked for retailer promotions.

The brainchild of Sophie Rochester, who is also behind the excellent Literary Platform site, Fiction Uncovered places itself squarely where it can be of most help to writers and readers: at the intersection of publishers and retailers, encouraging the former to promote their lesser-known authors and titles, and giving the latter a strong incentive to support and promote them.

I…

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Saturday was the second Papercamp. There are some write-ups appearing online already, such as these from Ben and Roo, as well as photos on Flickr.

I couldn’t make it unfortunately, but Matt suggested I create some briefs to get people going, and so I did. Apparently, there weren’t many formal responses to them (with this glorious exception), which is all to the good, but I hope they added something to character of the day, and might inspire some more responses…

5 Briefs for Papercamp

ONE: FOLDING

Create a new fold or codex type. A…

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I spoke earlier today at Tools of Change in Frankfurt. The short version is that many of the things we think about ebooks are wrong: but they are very interesting. The future of the book lies in its aura not in its copies, and that’s why I’m launching Open Bookmarks. For the longer version, read on… (As ever, far more was said on stage than these notes, but there you go).

4 things: introductions and what I do; the form of the ebook; bookmarks etc.; and an announcement.

Regular readers will know my history. CompSci / AI…

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A quick reminder that I’m speaking at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you there.

Worth noting that the talk description cited on the website is bobbins. I’ll be talking about the challenges, limits, and possibilities of ebooks, particularly when it comes to bookmarks and annotations, and making an announcement. Do come.

The week after, by some miracle, I’ll be in Sydney, talking at Web Directions South, on not dissimilar but less industry-focussed topics. Looking forward to that.

We need to talk about something. It’s quite serious. It affects a lot of people. And I genuinely believe it costs the book industry millions of dollarpounds every year, in addition to incalculable personal misery. We need to talk about book guilt.

When I created bkkeepr, it had (still does) three commands: start, finish and bookmark. I assumed a happy, linear model of reading. You start a book; you finish a book. Simple, right?

But almost immediately I started getting feature requests: with one, overwhelmingly popular one: abandon.

The problem was that when you started a book, and…

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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 as wide a number of ways as possible, and in particular in ways that make it easy for people to find them—an issue I recently addressed in the discussion of Tony Blair’s multiformat memoir.

Initially, I made ebook editions…

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Ever since I took the above photo from a boardroom high above the Euston Road, I’ve had this image in my head of what London looks like at 300 feet (~ 100 metres). So, as usual, I got it out of my head by making something, while also using it as an excuse to have a play with Polymaps.

So, this is what Docklands looks like at 300 feet:

And this is the City:

You can explore the map at shorttermmemoryloss.com/maps/300ft/. Usual disclaimers apply.

(Ben, does this count?)

Back in January, I was approached by Art Public and asked to build an application and website as part of their Bus-Tops project. This has just gone live over at http://bus-tops.com/shelters/, so it seems like a good time to talk about the project.

Bus-Tops is part of the Cultural Olympiad, and benefited from a grant from Artists Taking The Lead, a nationwide series of arts projects sponsored by the Arts Council and London 2012. In short, we’re putting screens on the top of bus stops across London, and we’re going to let people play with them….

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On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft, and everyone who came, for a really great time.

I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily. This, despite efforts like the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (which, incidentally, is kept in a shipping container).

William Gibson spoke recently at BEA. He said this:

“If you’re fifteen or so, today,

…

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I won’t get into the politics here, because this isn’t the venue, but since the lying, warmongering scum former Prime Minister Tony Blair is all over the news today, I thought I’d look around to see where and how his book is available.

A Journey is officially released in hardback today, with the RRP of £25 in the UK. you can order it direct from the publisher Random House’s ecommerce site rbooks.co.uk for £22.50. You don’t want to though, because Amazon’s doing it for £12.50, as is Waterstone’s online, while WH Smith’s are offering

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