In hindsight it was always going to happen: we had seen the leaked pictures and the sheer weight of good taste pressuring down on the product development team at Amazon meant that the Kindle would have to get a redesign. But it was still a relief to see that the “retro cool” of the original [...]
Kindle 2: Return of the Design Conscious
Posted on 10 February, 2009
Posted in Reading devices, eBooks
Digital Books Are Already Here
Posted on 3 February, 2009
Posted in Development, General, eBooks, read/write culture
Quite frequently I hear people talking about the future. They will argue and pontificate about when the new digital book, the new digital fiction, the new digital culture will arrive. In the world of digital publishing futurologists abound as we all try and work out what will happen next, even as we are still working [...]
Two Presentations
Posted on 23 January, 2009
Posted in Publishing, read/write culture
Recently I gave too little presentations and thought that the time had come to stop keeping these things secret. The first was at the Digital Forum of the Publishers Association and the second was at the awesome Bookcamp 09.
The former presentation is fairly straightforward and deals with how publishers can and should be getting more [...]
Publishing and Tech Trends 08/09
Posted on 16 January, 2009
Posted in General
Thanks to @STML for pointing out this map of publishing trends. Nice to see Pan Mac, The Digitalist and our own Sara Lloyd on there. Pretty much everything you’d expect is in, plus some cool stuff we haven’t seen before. Very cleverly put together to.
Myopia: A Tale of Two Companies for 2009
Posted on 8 January, 2009
Posted in General, Publishing
In 1960 the economist Theodore Levitt wrote an influential essay in the Harvard Business Review entitled “Marketing Myopia”. In it he discussed the parlous decline of the US railways in the twentieth century. Decimated by the widespread use of automotive transit, by the 1960s the railways were a shadow of their former selves- broken and [...]
Highlights of 2008
Posted on 22 December, 2008
Posted in General
With roughly a day and half of 2008 office time to go, thoughts inevitably turn to the year that was. Despite the near unbearable profusion of phatic and irritating “best of [insert year]” lists it seems worthwhile highlighting some of the, um, highlights from 2008 as this really was the year things kicked off for [...]
Visuals and Text
Posted on 12 December, 2008
Posted in Search, read/write culture
There is often a perception that digital text is somehow different to print. It hyperlinks, is easy to update and is, according to the argument, filled with pointless invective and ephemera. It doesn’t allow for deep and considered reading, catering as it does for the atrophied attention spans of the Youtube generation. Despite their recreation [...]
Stuck
Posted on 19 November, 2008
Posted in Advertising
[see below the fold for the photo] You may remember Benrik from the Facebook app or the Recession Blocker we previously featured on The Digitalist.
Well this is a whole new level. A Benrik super-fan agreed to have himself pasted to an advert on Old Street for as long as it takes. For all I know [...]
Second Life / Second World
Posted on 18 November, 2008
Posted in Development, read/write culture
A few years ago Second Life was everywhere. It wasn’t just in the papers; the papers were in Second Life with Reuters famously employing a journalist, Adam Reuters, to scout for interesting in-world news. There was a political riot when the French Front National set up shop; companies like Rivers Run Red sprouted [...]
ARGitrage #2
Posted on 31 October, 2008
Posted in Development, General, read/write culture
In Here
ARGs are maybe seven or eight years old, if we take The Beast as a starting point. A few things are becoming clear: they are, conceptually at least, one of the hottest things around; they are a genuinely exciting web native form of storytelling; there is the glimmer of a business model behind them [...]
