More Bookcamp thoughts

So James at booktwo got me into Bookcamp, and have been trying to articulate some thoughts in the last few days. Was at a Christmas party last night in which I met a YA author, who was telling me about their recently published book. Apparently their publisher, Hodder, have cut ties with Amazon for now, because Amazon wanted to sell their books for lower prices while still retaining the same profit that they would take on the higher price. Thereby passing along the price cut as a loss to the publisher and thus writers. Suck, Amazon!

Filed under: Uncategorized , bookcamp, Publishing Resources

Bookcamp; The Publishing Industry

Penguin have announced Bookcamp, a day of discussions in London about the future of the book. It’s a riff on BarCamps (“an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants”).

Filed under: Uncategorized , conference, Publishing Resources

Pre-Presentation Thoughts

So in January (January 15, to be precise) I’m giving my first presentation of my MPhil/PhD career. It was supposed to be practice for a conference in February, but my proposal wasn’t accepted. So it’s going to be for Goldsmiths’ English Department’s graduate seminar series, GLITS. This is good because I’ll be presenting to (some of) my friends, and it will be a more comfortable environment. I spend most Thursday nights (when I attend the GLITS seminars) rambling at most of these people about my research problems anyway, so it’ll just be a more protracted version of that, with a formalised question-and-answer session afterwards during which I can steal some of their suggestions.

Filed under: Uncategorized , presentation, Research Links

McSweeney’s and the Econopocalypse

After doing one a couple of weeks ago, McSweeney’s are doing another sale:

Apparently something’s going wrong with the economy. An econopocalypse, we heard. Thus, we have put together an emergency bailout package for the book-buying public. Once again, almost everything on our site is half-off, or even cheaper, for just a few more days — soon it’ll be too late to guarantee Christmas delivery, so now is the time.

Filed under: Uncategorized , ephemera, marketing, mcsweeneys

Reading Practice, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love bkkeepr

A little break from my ongoing project of reconceptualising conceptualising McSweeney’s.

A month or so ago a friend recommended I use Book-keeper, or bkkeepr. It’s a tool for keeping track of your reading habits, powered by Twitter. It has various functions, including letting you bookmark what page you are in a page, and when you start and finish a book, but I use it primarily for keeping an online record of every book I encounter in my daily work. My page has been a bit dominated by my teaching reading lately, will pick up as I try and plough through some new stuff over Christmas.

Filed under: Uncategorized , bkkeepr, research practice, visualisation