Booktwo.org is a blog created in 2006 which aims ‘to investigate, analyse, catalogue and debate the future of literature and the publishing industry.’ Among the big fuzz, discussion and reading junk being published everywhere about the end of books and the future of literature in the digital age, I must say this is one of the must reading blogs. It’s author, James Bridle, has worked in (as well as started) the widest range of projects related to publishing in the digital era. What’s interesting in his projects and also so captivating about his blog is that he deeply explores and discusses aspects of digital/print publishing that speak straight to the heart of book lovers!
Though he says that ‘Booktwo.org was founded out of a frustration with the failure of trade publishing to engage with new media and technology (…)’ from which one might infer to be hearing from a digital publishing partisan, we end up reading interesting articles about how to translate book’s related practices and traditional usage to digital books and readers. He explores for example concepts like ‘dog ears,’ a common practice between readers, transporting them to the digital reading domain and trying to figure out how can one work with e-books in the same way, how to make the experience more personal and in some way, physical.
Another subject that caught my attention was the idea of ‘digital reading souvenirs‘, resulting of the same kind of approach and being a kind of a metaphor for the moment when you finish reading a physical book and place it on your shelve, and trying to translate that to some sort of experience in the digital world. A digital reading souvenir would then be something physical that stands for the digital book and that you can actually own, and store in your shelve, after finishing an e-book. Check it out. I’m not sure if this is an idea with much potential to be commercialized but it surely makes us think about traditional reading related practices maintained for centuries and what are we possibly to loose or to keep at the moment we totally adopt digital reading. This seems particularly relevant two days after Google had just launched it’s American online e-book store – Google eBooks – and announced its European counterpart service to be launched in early 2011. Google eBooks happens to be the first e-book store working under the ‘cloud’ scheme, a kind of service where the e-books you actually purchase keep stored in the server and not in your e-book reader, and as so, you never happen to possess the virtual product that you are buying.
Photo by jørngeorg on Flickr. System of physical blocks that represent a week of your online activity. Project by Svein Inge Bjørkhaug, in response to a brief in the topic to the Interaction Design Students of the AHO Institute of Design.
