FutureBook

What would George Valentin make of 21st century book publishing?

THE ARTIST is a widely hailed homage to a bygone era and an excellent film about the inexorable march of technology. Spanning a few crucial years in the transition from silent movies to the ‘talkies’, it’s a cautionary tale of the perils of being superseded by progress itself. Read more »

'We've become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organise, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data.' Simon Reynolds, Retromania

‘I’m bringing sexy back.’ Justin Timberlake Read more »

Special treat this Friday lunchtime! Andrew Goodfellow (@aagoodfellow), deputy publisher at Ebury Publishing, talks us through the Lives Less Ordinary ebook series, the challenges of imprint identity online and the significance of the digital short. Read more »

 Osama Bin Laden is dead. Read more »

This weekend I came across an interesting observation from 2002 by Alistair McCleery, concerning ‘the general erasure of the human from book history’, being: Read more »

 The great journalist Robert Fisk wrote a piece in the INDEPENDENT newspaper in 2005 which has stayed with me ever since because it articulated a feeling that had been growing since I’d left university a year earlier, a suspicion of the Read more »

The publication of a new book by Stephen Fry was always going to be interesting in digital terms. And the myFry app for his memoir The Fry Chronicles carries the weight of expectation. Read more »

I got up early(ish) on Saturday to attend ORGCon, a conference organised by the Open Rights Group. I wanted to go because the ORG seem to provide a much-needed bridging point between the most vocal sector of digital consumer, activists and commentators, many happy to brand themselves as geeks, and government. The ORG organises, and is organised by, digital zealots who believe in the rights of the creative and the consumer. Read more »

Tomorrow is the FA Cup Final, the official end of the football season, when Chelsea will probably blow away the remaining ashes of Portsmouth’s beleaguered football club. And it’s one month and counting before the World Cup – the world’s greatest sporting event – kicks off. So I have been thinking about football, and how it relates to book publishing, particularly digital publishing. Read more »

This time last week I was exploring the ancient village of Carn Euny in the centre of the Penwith Peninsula of Cornwall. The origins of the village can be traced back to the 5th Century BC and the Iron Age; it was occupied for 900 years and abandoned in the 4th Century AD, when the Roman occupation of Britain was in its twilight. Read more »