You’ve changed, man

Posted by The Author on 24 Jan, 2012 in Digital Publishing | 4 comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Apple, Inc. in the last few weeks. After spending the holidays reading the Steve Jobs biography, I returned to work to find a major announcement around ebooks in the offing. So I start blog watching around the big A. One post in particular caught my eye. In his upcoming expose-style book on Apple, Adam Lashinsky talks about Apple’s policy of not providing lunch to its employees.

The culture at Apple is described as “the polar opposite of Google’s,” and one small but noteworthy difference between the two rival companies lies in lunch. Unlike at Google, where lunch is free, Apple employees must pay for their “quite good and reasonably priced” lunch at the company cafeteria. There is one exception: new employees are given free lunch during their first-day orientation.

At first, I was astounded that this would be considered in any way remarkable—so unlike Google, apart from your first day, Apple is just like every other employer in the world—but a picture of the company’s mindset emerged from this strange and kind of stalkish anecdote. Any largesse is short-lived at best. You know you’re going to have to pay for those sandwiches, right?

Apparently this was still in the back of my mind when I sat down early Friday morning to watch Apple’s Phil Schiller take the stage. Schiller duly proved the rumour-mongers right when he unveiled the first major revision to iBooks, Apple’s ereader app for the iPad, and iBooks Author, a new authoring tool to create media-rich electronic books.

Hand Made High Tech

Posted by The Author on 20 Dec, 2011 in Digital Publishing, He Edits, Stuff That Happens | 1 comment

Throughout 2011, if:book Australia commissioned essays from ten Australian writers on the future of writing and reading in a future tilted towards the digital. Each writer drew on his or her experience in fields diverse as publishing, transmedia, gaming, and comics to observe the changes taking place in ‘books’ and discussing where this might lead for authors, readers, and reading culture.

Originally posted at the if:book web site, the articles have now been compiled (some updated) into a single volume under the title Hand Made High Tech with an introduction by me and a brilliant cover design by Daniel Neville.

It’s free to download in any format or to read online. If you have any interest in books and publishing futures, it’s worth a read. Check it out.

Browsing Books: Chattering Incunabula

Posted by The Author on 28 Nov, 2011 in Digital Publishing, Stuff That Happens | 0 comments

In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame, Claude Frollo looks from a book to the cathedral and says, ‘Ceci tuera cela.’ (‘This will kill that’). Apparently we’ve never been all that good with pluralism (witness the seemingly endless moaning that digital is killing print, regardless of how little hard evidence emerges to support such a position).

The reference to Hugo comes via Books in Browsers speaker, Corey Pressman, who naturally begged to differ when it comes to print and digital books. This does not replace that. This actually does a pretty crappy job of replacing that, because paper and screens do subtly different jobs: one houses fixed text and images, the other is fluid.

Browsing Books: Social Reading

Posted by The Author on 14 Nov, 2011 in Digital Publishing, Stuff That Happens | 0 comments

I recently returned from San Francisco and the fabulous Books in Browsers 2011 conference therein.

I tried hard to keep live tweeting from the event (via the @ifbookaus account), but alas I’m no @ebookish (forever now known as The Thumbs of Fury). I was reduced to desperately taking notes and occasionally copy-and-pasting in the Twitter app.

The event itself is organised by the awesome Peter Brantley and hosted at the Internet Archive. Books in Browsers is a small event attended by some of the finest people at the techie end of publishing (and me). Because of its size and the quality of its attendees, there was no need to waste time arseing around discussions of paper versus screen or on the relative merits of digital workflows. It was like a welcome homecoming.

Column Inches

Posted by The Author on 14 Nov, 2011 in He Writes, Stuff That Happens | 0 comments

I’ve started a regular column in Brisbane newspaper the Courier-Mail pointing to cool or interesting things in the booky-technology area: apps, audiobooks, webby things, and so on.

It appears to be a print-only experience thus far, but locals can check it out in Saturday’s LIFE section.

Each column includes links so, if you can’t get a copy of the paper, you can at least see what’s piquing my interest this week via the link timeline.

The Karinthy Connection

Posted by The Author on 21 Sep, 2011 in Stuff That Happens | 0 comments

Few people know of Hungarian writer and poet Frigyes Karinthy, but you would know the phrase he coined, “six degrees of separation”.

Every Tuesday after 5.30pm, a music lover is invited onto Drive with Bernadette Young to continue a musical chain called The Karinthy Connection.

Yesterday was my turn. I had to pick up from where Brendan Gallagher left off last week with B.B. King. So here’s my six degrees.

Muted (R)evolution

Posted by The Author on 10 Sep, 2011 in He Writes, Stuff That Happens | 0 comments

A small piece pondering the impact of digital on street press and the music industry generally has been published in the September issue of Meanjin (volume 70, number 3).

You have to knock. If you’re supposed to be there, someone will let you in. The exterior broadcasts little; only a small sign in the window marks the name of the magazine.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Come on in.’

Inside, the walls groan with the weight of history hanging from them. Posters old and new jostle for the limited space available: Powderfinger bidding farewell to the world, the Smashing Pumpkins touring their new album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. To the left, a reception desk curves away from me around the corner of the room, overlooking the entire area. No one sits behind it. To the right, stacks of papers line the wall by the front door without any discernible order to them: the reformed Saints here, the Residents there. There’s at least fifteen years of history lying at my feet, almost discarded on the floor.

It’s available in all good bookshops or you can buy a copy online over hereabouts. Go buy it. Go on.