December 2011
5 posts
Predictions for 2012 →
Blog post with predictions for digital publishing in 2012. In summary:
- Biggest Christmas yet
- Ebook sales to reach 20% on many titles in the UK
- Amazon to expand publishing operations
- Waterstone’s to play their hand
- Android marketplace to come good
- General gloom everywhere; a few busts
- “New Publisher” to take centre stage
Britain and the EU
In all the analysis of Britain and the EU over the past few days I have been very surprised by the absence of historical perspective, because here is where the roots of the present situation lie. Europe and Britain’s divergent histories shape their present positions and, unfortunately in my view, make them ultimately incompatible. Both Europe and Britain seem to have an inadequate grasp of...
Digital Publishing Startups →
As promised my list of digital publishing startups. Both the definitions of digital publishing and startup are very broad. Please get in touch at @ajaxlogos if you have one I have missed, I am keen for this list to be as comprehensive as possible.
NY times on publishers and news sites →
Frankenstein - Awesome Interactive Literature →
I’m genuinely excited by this project. It is about telling old classic stories in new ways; it’s about taking new media writing, game books and choose your own stories to an audience that has never seen them before. It’s about continuing a fine tradition of recreating great stories for new ages. It’s about proving that fiction apps are possibility. It’s about kids in...
November 2011
2 posts
Europe is the new USSR
At one stage the USSR was making huge gains on the USA: it’s industrial production was rising fast, with living standards being hauled behind it; it’s military capacity was vast and growing; it’s scienctists and engineers were world leaders, ahead of the US in the Space Race; Communism was on the march around the world, from Cuba to China. But then it became a car crash in slow...
Occupy Tax Havens, Not Cities
The Occupy protest movement has attracted a fair amount of criticism and acclaim, David Cameron helpfully informing us that protesting is something he believes should take place on two feet. Presumably surrounded by pepper-spray wielding policemen intent on causing maximum intimidation and harm, but only if you are a harmless student.
Like many people, Vince Cable and Ed Miliband included, I...
October 2011
3 posts
Metadata
I’ve been talking about metadata a lot recently - on Publishing Perspectives about SEO, and on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog about metadata more widely. Next week at the fair I will be delivering a presentation which examines the history behind the recent changes to Google’s search methodology. After that I will take a break…
WatchThis presentation on marketing agencies from BBH’s Mel Exxon was most enjoyable.
In E-Books, Publishing Houses Have a Rival in News... →
September 2011
2 posts
WatchProfile Books Spring 2012 catalogue.
August 2011
5 posts
Self Organising Systems and the UK Riots
I have written before on acephalous institutions, trying to connect the organisational principles behind the shadow banking system, al-Qaeda and Anonymous, as examples of loose, unstructured, self organising yet homologous and efficacious organisations. All three mirror the structure of the internet, created by the US military as decentred network without a central node, which could survive an...
Light Reading - the FT on digital publishing →
Generally a good well rounded overview of the State of Digital Publishing, Summer 2011, with comments from some guy at Profile Books.
The Enlightenment and the Tea Party
Modern right wing movements have almost completely rejected the Enlightenment, which has provided the back bone to economic growth, political stability and general well-being for 300 years. This manoeuvre has catastrophic consequences not just for the waning powers of the West, but for the world as a whole.
The Enlightenment is difficult to nail down and define – scholars have deconstructed it,...
July 2011
2 posts
Music critics need to read Pierre Bourdieu
A new critical commonplace is occurring in music. And to paraphrase Run DMC, it goes a little something like this: contemporary music is dead; it has lost all sense of originality and differentiation, and simply recycles the sounds, styles and motifs of previous generations. It is hence devoid of true artistic merit, atemporal, decontextualised and lacking when compared to the musical innovations...
June 2011
1 post
May 2011
2 posts
Blog post - are enhanced ebooks dead? →
“Having whipped themselves into a frenzy of excitement over enhanced ebooks, publishers seem to be taking a hard, cold shower of reaction at these amorphous and strange entities. At last month’s London Book Fair, Bloomsbury’s Evan Schnittman poured ice on the froth, claiming that enhanced ebooks were a fad that would never take off. Novels are novels, books are books, text is text, and...
Blog post on "fractured partial attention" →
April 2011
1 post
Defence of the (e)book as a container →
March 2011
9 posts
Fourth Wall Studios Secures $200 Mil Commitment... →
Mervyn King Admits Validity of the Concept of... →
Not in so many words, but effectively. Here is what he says: the City is responsible for the crash, and the ensuing bank bailouts; these, between them are responsible for the recession and the parlous government finances; these mainly effect people who had nothing to do with what caused them; he is surprised there isn’t more anger about this.
How could this be? That hoary old Marxist...
Models for Revolution in the Middle East
Everyone can basically agree that the events in the Middle East are good, can’t they? Well, yes, to a point. But it got me thinking about how high expectations are structurally built into the revolutionary moment both domestically and internationally, and how in the past these have always (inevitably) been let down. In the case of the Middle East there the models of the post-revolutionary...
February 2011
8 posts
Two Rules for Digital Conferences →
Latest blog post arguing:
Forget ebooks, apps, Kindles and iPads – what people in digital publishing really like is a good conference. Most of us involved in the area have benefited from the discussions, the copious coffee and even the occasional invitation to present. However, frequent attendance at such events can leave one jaded at the similarities, so I propose two simple rules that should...
Radiohead again prove they get the implications of... →
Last year I gave a talk at the printers, Clays. Rather than tell them their business was in terminal decline, I said that there was always a future for print books, and in an age of digital delivery premium books would have a greater value.
Hardbacks would become limited edition special editions, boxed and embossed and coloured in exciting, rare new ways. The material, collectable, craftmanship...
Cool News
London and Cape Town: For Immediate Release
WORLD’S FIRST DECISION MAKING ENGINE IS LAUNCHED
Profile Books and award winning start-up Cognician team up to produce an interactive way of making decisions.
Based on the international bestseller THE DECISION BOOK this is the first book adaptation for the new “iTunes for ideas”, Cognician.
Imagine being able to sit down with the authors of a book and...
Thoughts on the Music Industry
Last Thursday I was lucky enough to attend Universal Music’s Open Day: an event designed to showcase a new more transparent and discursive positioning of one the biggest of the majors in an attempt, largely successful, to start regaining the street cred lost over the past few years. I learned a lot. Here a few thoughts from the evening:
- Record labels are the cooler younger siblings of...
Corporate Bullshit Leaked →
It can be easy to forgot quite how depthlessly psychopathic corporate culture can be, so it’s refreshing to see a nice leak from the heart of the “web content generation process”. Business Insider have managed to get hold of a massive AOL strategy and workflow document that is as interesting for the nature of it’s content as for the content in itself.
Firstly the content...
Industrial and Economic Policy: Part I
There are, for me, several structural problems with the British economy where the belief in a free market overshadows the economic logic that underlies a society. If the British economy is ever going to have a sustainable future it should address the following:
- Foreign takeovers. The logic of allowing foreign takeovers is that the movements of capital should be unimpeded to produce the...
January 2011
12 posts
4.01: The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool →
10 Digital Trends and Questions for 2011 →
Latest blog post for Bookbrunch a bit late but outlines the following trends:
- The year of Android
- Apps coming of age
- Interesting start ups
- The normalisation of ebooks
As well as a bunch of questions that we should see answered, primarily because of the data we collect over the coming year.
Gaming and Narrative Part II
A further observation on gaming. Techradar’s analysis of the technology behind team Bondi and Rockstar’s new game, LA Noire, makes the point that sophisticated new facial scanning techniques can bridge the “uncanny valley” that makes quasi-realistic computer characters a lot more unsettling then straight forward cartoons. Allied to this is a whole new invisible interface, a...
Fractured Partial Attention
Tom Armitage’s excellent piece on the iPad and the Kindle has provoked a general positive response, and for good reason. His point is similar, although more developed, nuanced and paying closer attention to the materiality and objectivity of the devices, to that I made in a review of devices for the Frankfurt Bookfair. My point was that while the iPad is unquestionably the superior device...
Henry Jenkins: Introduction to Communications... →
Brief Thoughts On That Website Everyone Keeps...
Yes, that one. You can’t look at Twitter, or one’s RSS feeds without seeing it plastered everywhere. Quora. There are two things I think worth mentioning. 1.) what the discussion around Quora reveals about digital culture, and 2.) more prosaically the potential of the site.
1.) Digital culture is built on an economy of backlash. As soon as Quora became remotely popular, the start up...
Narrative and Gaming
People often seem to say that while computer games’ narratives have greatly improved in recent years, they still haven’t reached the level of mature narrative forms like novels, films or perhaps the signature form of our age, the high end TV serial. For me it’s been a long hiatus from serious gaming stretching back to when I started university and in truth before them. The last...
Literary Lists
Over the holidays I visited Italy and as is my want read books around the country, one of which was Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. A great book on so many levels its pointless to discuss here. Reading about the novel I cam across this list of the top 100 twentieth century novels - as voted for my the readers of Le Monde, which immediately put in mind of various English language versions...