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Art Space Tokyo: Shared Making

July 30th, 2010 by karenmartin
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Art Space Tokyo is an intimate guide to the Tokyo art world by Ashley Rawlings and Craig Mod and a very beautiful book describing the buildings and neighbourhoods of 12 distinctive Tokyo galleries. There are maps for each of the areas, illustrations of the galleries by Nobumasa Takahashi  (the cover is a composite map of Tokyo by Craig Mod) alongside interviews and essays.


Inside pages from Art Space Tokyo

In the Preface to Art Space Tokyo Ashley and Craig write:

“We believe that art is not just an end goal, but a process involving all manner of people. Aside from the artists themselves, the art world is made up of collectors, curators, architects, businessmen, npo organizations and the patrons — those of us who gain pleasure from simply viewing and interacting with art — all taking part in some way to foster the creation and consumption process.”

Although here they were referring to the people who work in and with galleries and art they also applied this philosophy to the creation of Art Space Tokyo. Originally printed in 2008 the book was sold out by Spring 2009. In 2010 Ashley and Craig decided that they would like to update and reprint the book as well as create a free web edition for the iPad extending the original concept with videos of the spaces and interviews with local characters, sound-recordings that reveal the ambience of the neighbourhoods and rich interactive maps.


Illustration for GA Gallery, Yoyogi / Harajuku

In the spirit of shared making, it was at this point that they turned to Kickstarter as a way to raise the money necessary to achieve their goal. Kickstarter allows people to advertise their project and ask for contributions towards realising it. Requested contributions for any project range from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars – with your reward increasing alongside your contribution. For example, a pledge of $25 Art Space Tokyo would have got you a PDF of the book plus access to all project updates. At the other end of the scale for a pledge of $2500 you would have received all of the rewards of the other pledge amounts (e.g. copy of the book, original artwork) plus a 1-day tour of the art spaces of Tokyo with Craig Mod.

Is this shared making? Well, yes, I think it is.. As they write in the preface art – or making – is a process not just a product and through Kickstarter Ashley and Craig were offering the opportunity to become part of this process. And I hope the benefits were mutual – they got to reprint the book, contributors got a tangible reward (and presumably a warm fuzzy feeling from helping out two artists).

p.s. If you were thinking of contributing you’re too late… Ashley and Craig wanted $15,000. By 1 May when the pledges closed they had 265 backers and had raised $23,790!

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3 Ways to Share

July 29th, 2010 by karenmartin
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I came across these three ways to share via Russell Davis who attributes them to Clay Shirky.

Sharing Goods – the hardest to do, because if you give a physical good you no longer have it, you’re deprived of it.

Sharing Services – like giving helping someone across the road – you don’t lose out on physical stuff but it’s an inconvenience.

Sharing Information – like giving someone directions – you don’t lose stuff, it doesn’t take much time, no inconvenience.

Also interesting are Russell’s further thoughts on this where he discusses the relative value of mixtapes vs playlists and how the tangibility of mixtapes actually increases their value.

I find this an incredibly useful way to think about sharing in relation to bookleteer. Give away a printed eBook or StoryCube and you lose that object – but the person you give it to feels valued as a result of that exchange. Email someone an eBook or StoryCube and you don’t lose anything except the time it takes to write the email – but the value may be diluted as a result. Sometimes you won’t have a choice about which way you distribute your eBooks (see A Little Something About Me for one example of why this might be) but when you do the question to ask might be – how do you want the recipient of your eBook to feel..?

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How can you have a pop-up book on the iPad?

July 28th, 2010 by karenmartin
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This was the question I typed into Google as I wondered how the iPad, Kindle and other eBook readers (or rather, developers of eBooks for these platforms) might accommodate the tangible properties of books such as size, paper type, pop-up illustrations and so on, that vary from book to book and make paper books such a pleasure to touch, hold and feel.

In answer to my question Google came up with a couple of examples of projects that claim to be bringing pop-up books to the iPad. The first is Pilgrim’s Progress by Tako Games. Although entirely computer-generated the video that accompanies this eBook suggests that Pilgrim’s Progress combines moving around a 3-dimensional scene that closely resembles a paper pop-up book (the ‘cover’ of the book is a very literal digitisation of an antique leather book) with some dynamic elements such as changing text within the text box. I found it difficult to tell from the video how much of this would be controlled by the reader.

The second suggestion by Google was Alice in Wonderland by AtomicAntelope. While clearly drawing on pop-up books for inspiration this feels like it is also pushing the format into new areas by exploiting the touchscreen to trigger events and, quite beautifully, using the built-in accelerometer and orientation sensors to control visual effects such as flying cards, Alice growing and shrinking and rocking the pigbaby to sleep.

While I have to confess that watching the Alice in Wonderland video made me wish I owned an iPad so I could play with this, I also wonder – if every book feels like an electronic device then, however visually compelling the eBook, won’t this somehow feel like a sensory reduction of the reading experience?

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If you want to continue reading, scroll down

July 27th, 2010 by karenmartin
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I’m not sure if Choose Your Own Adventure books count as shared making or shared reading (or both?) but I would certainly claim it as an augmented reading experience. The Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books was published by Bantam books between 1979 and 1998, however, the format was used for several other series of books including Fighting Fantasy (which was the Choose Your Own Adventure books of choice for my brother and I when we were kids).


Genuine Choose Your Own Adventure book covers from a fabulous collection at superduper.shapesofsweetness.com

In case you’ve never come across them, the premise is that you – the reader – take the role of protagonist in the books and at the end of each short section of narrative you are presented with a number of options representing your next actions. For example, in The Cave of Time, the first choice you are required to make is:

If you decide to start back home, turn to page 4.
If you decide to wait, turn to page 5.

Turning to the page for your chosen option the narrative continues, eventually leading to one of multiple different endings. Like I said, my brother and I read these a lot as kids and while the narratives tend to be quite similar and the range of options can be frustrating (“But why can’t I throw my frying pan at the King of the Ants?!”) they were also truly engaging as we tried to figure out the potential consequences of our actions.


More from superduper.shapesofsweetness.com

Of course, the branching structure and constrained options translate easily into computer programs and computer games might be seen as the multimedia, all-bells-and-whistles version of Choose Your Own Adventure. In my current reflection on the nature of books though I begin to wonder if the format of these books creates a different experience for maker/readers? For my brother and I these books were very definitely a collaborative experience – just as computer games can be – but they are also slower paced and with the opportunity to take a sneaky look ahead and see what happens if you choose a particular path. While I wouldn’t say that Choose Your Own Adventure books are more engaging than computer games (we gave them up around the time we got our first computer..) I think they might offer a unique type of reading – constructive, collaborative and accountable.

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James Bridle: Bookcubes and bookleteer API

July 26th, 2010 by karenmartin
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A set of Bookcubes generated using the bookleteer API

James Bridle of booktwo.org was one of the participants at the Pitch Up and Publish: Augmented Reading a couple of weeks ago, and he talked a little about the idea of books as symbols and the related BookCube project he’d done using the bookleteer API.

Here, I’ll just give a summary of the project. James has written a post on booktwo.org describing the project which I really recommend you to read because it’s seriously interesting and covers more topics than I describe here…

James started with the idea that the lifespan of a book looks something like the drawing in the image above. There is a short period of the book-as-object acting as it’s own advertisement, then a period of time where you are reading the book and taking in the content, then during the final, and longest, amount of time the book-as-object acts as a souvenir of the reading period.

James has already begun to address the idea of digital souvenirs for eBooks with his bkkeepr project and with the bookleteer API he extended this to create automatically generated Bookcubes. These cubes display the information collected by bkkeepr and includes an image of the book cover. Over time James imagines the Bookcubes to build up on your shelf as a visible and tangible souvenir of your eBook reading. For bookleteer, this is an interesting tangent – instead of being an object to read it becomes an object that marks the fact that reading has taken place – and the content becomes separated from the form.

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Shared making of the Oxford English Dictionary

July 23rd, 2010 by karenmartin
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Yesterday I wrote about Storybird and how it enables a form of shared making through an online interface using email to notify authors when it is their turn. This reminded me of a very definitely non-technological example of the shared making of books..


Making the Oxford English Dictionary

From when the gargantuan project of compiling the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857 it would take 71 years until the first edition was published. The third editor, James Murray, worked on the project for 36 years but died before he saw it completed. As part of his tasks Murray oversaw hundreds of volunteer readers and contributors who would painstakingly search out early examples of the use of words and send them to Murray by post. As a result of this mail-enabled shared making method, the first Oxford English Dictionary contained 414,825 words, and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations.

Contributors were not all academics and linguists. J.R.R. Tolkein was a volunteer while one of the most notorious, and prolific, contributors was Dr W. C. Minor, a murderer and certified inmate of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Confined at Broadmoor with his collection of rare books, Minor happened upon Murray’s call for ‘men of letters’ to become Oxford English Dictionary volunteers in the early 1880s and began scouring his collection for the first or best uses of words.

If the project took place today it would almost certainly be termed a ‘crowd-sourcing’ project and would be built as a wiki (see en.wiktionary.org/wiki/). What does this non-digital shared making project suggest? That times change, technologies move on but ideas remain the same, or perhaps that we shouldn’t let technology get in the way of carrying out a good idea..?

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Storybird – collaborative storytelling

July 22nd, 2010 by karenmartin
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Storybird is a website where you can create your own online illustrated storybook. Aimed at children from 3 – 13 books can be created collaboratively and they positively encourage families, friends and school classes to work together. The artwork for your stories is provided by illustators and visual artists who are able to upload their drawings to the site. Making a Storybird is free though they plan to charge for their printing service when it starts later this year. You can browse by artwork or themes as inspiration to start your book and I have to say I like the look of the site and the illustrations very much.

When collaborating on a Storybird each person can jump in and make changes any time they like, however, they have also put together a more formal collaboration process based on turn-taking. One person starts the Storybird and when they want to pass over to their friend they let Storybird know and an email will be sent to their friend telling them it is now their turn. Storybirds can be kept private or published to the library when complete so that other people can share it too.

As I said, I love the look of the site and the illustrations they currently have in the library. It seems it would be difficult not to create a visually beautiful book from these pictures – and I imagine you can upload your own artwork if you want to illustrate your own stories. Storybird suggests that contributing artwork to Storybird has several benefits for artists including making money from your work. However, I’m unclear how this happens when making a Storybird is free… (If you find out please do let me know!)

How does this relate to bookleteer eBooks? I think it’s interesting that the Storybird exists only as an electronic online storybook (at least for the moment) and I don’t find that this detracts from the reading experience – though perhaps I’d feel differently about this if I was reading with a child, or group of children. On the other hand I can also imagine that if I was a child and had created my own Storybird that I would love to see it printed out as a proper little book that I could take home and show my family and friends. I wonder what it is about tangible, hold-able items that makes them feel so personal and intimate compared to things on a screen?

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Sneaky Peek at Alice’s Desk

July 21st, 2010 by karenmartin
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While Alice was out getting lunch I took some sneaky photos of the 3-dimensional illustrations she’s been working on. The drawings for these come from the ones made in Brixton and Coventry for the Empty Shops Network tour. Parts of them have then been cut out, folded and re-attached to give a diorama feel.

I’d love to see my pop-up eBook experiments and Alice’s drawings come together some day to create a colourful hand-drawn eBook pop-up extravaganza.

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Can A Million Penguins be wrong..

July 20th, 2010 by karenmartin
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“Software is rarely written in a vacuum and indeed the “open source” movement is built on the premise that collaboration is the only way to get bugs spotted and move forward. Scientific research, too, is more often than not a collaborative activity – and peer review is key to checking and honing the development of scientific ideas.

However, is the same true in artistic fields? We are used to the romantic notion of the artist or the novelist working alone in an attic room, or in the shed at the bottom of the garden. As James Joyce memorably put it, the artist forges in the “smithy of [his] soul”. Yet many of the most highly regarded television programmes of recent years are written by teams of writers; and the majority of films go through rigorous screen testing exercises (and are often altered as a result) before they reach the paying customer. The painters Holbein and Titian, among any number of their contemporaries, used students to add the detail to their pieces before signing them, a tradition continued to this day by Damien Hirst who openly acknowledges the contribution of his studio team.

But what about the novel? Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door?”

And so it began – Penguin’s 2007 experiment into the online collaborative novel. I came across the A Million Penguins project as I begin my investigation into sharing the making of books or in this case, a novel. Penguin set up a wiki where authors could contribute, edit and delete a collaborative novel. You can read the novel – and about the process that went through – at www.amillionpenguins.com.

On the Institute for the Future of the Book blog there is an insightful and analytic post by Ben Vershbow discussing the merits of the project as an idea and as a novel. Ben concludes that a wiki is probably the wrong format for the online collaborative novel. So if not wiki – what?


not quite a million penguins (via penguinsland.blogspot.com)

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Oh! The Places You’ll Go!

July 19th, 2010 by karenmartin
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My original time for working on bookleteer was up last week so I thought I’d write a little round-up of my highlights of that time.

I set out to think about books-as-objects and explore the tangible qualities of bookleteer eBooks and StoryCubes. This gave me the perfect excuse to research and write about all kinds of paper artists who make the most fantastic books involving cut-outs and pop-ups and flip books. Then, being naturally inclined towards the technological I also looked at where electronics and paper combine and the kinds of reading experience this leads to.

It was at this point that I set about making the first pop-up eBook. Of course, this was more difficult than I first imagined (though the pop-ups were easy enough to do..) and the book is currently in an almost finished state waiting for me to be hit by inspiration on how to include the instructions without it turning into a 120-page eBook (even if that was possible!)

Next I began to wonder what all of these technological, tangible, paper pop-ups and cut-outs had in common and I came up with the idea that they all augment the reading experience – using form, movement and interaction to go beyond text. The outcome of this conceptual wandering was the Pitch Up & Publish on Augmented Reading where I met fabulous folk who were already thinking about this area and who challenged and inspired me.

So here we are… And where do we go?

Giles has asked me to do another couple of months on bookleteer so I’m currently thinking of where to take the projects I’ve begun so far. Completing the pop-up eBook is an exciting practical challenge and gives me the perfect excuse to browse more websites and blogs by paper artists. Alongside this I’m planning to explore the broader role of books-as-objects – a topic that came up in the Pitch Up & Publish. This might mean thinking about books as symbols of knowledge, identity, or markers of reading achievements. Another strand I’ll follow will look at sharing – sharing the making and sharing the reading. I’m not sure where this will go yet but if it’s anything like the last couple of months it’s going to be an interesting journey…

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Alice Angus: 12 Month Schedule

July 16th, 2010 by karenmartin
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This 12 Month Schedule by Alice is my new favourite eBook. It has one month per page with pages for notes  and every page is decorated with illustrations by Alice. It’s designed as a notebook to carry around and use as a way to keep yourself organised, jot down ideas or make sketches. But seriously, could you bring yourself to write on top of Alice’s amazing drawings??

Cover image (from In Good Heart series)

The Schedule eBook can be downloaded at diffusion.org.uk. And if you have access to an A3 printer then you are even luckier because you can make it up at the new A5 size and enjoy the illustrations at twice the size (or have twice the room for making notes..).

If you want to see more detail of the pictures check out Alice’s Flickr stream.

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Access Art: The Scrappy Sketchbook

July 15th, 2010 by karenmartin
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bookleteer eBooks have often been used as sketchbooks or notebooks for people to draw or write in (as seen in yesterday’s post on ‘A Little Something About Me‘!) and one of the things I love best about them is that they are such a manageable size and look so handmade that it’s almost impossible to feel intimidated by the ‘blank white page’ and feel that your ideas are not going to live up to the notebook.

And now I find that Access Art understand precisely how a sketchbook can be a constraint as well as an inspiration! In Sketchbook Space, amongst all of their fabulous examples of sketchbooks, ideas for sketchbook activities and answers to the question ‘When to use a sketchbook’, they also provide the Scrappy Sketchbook. This is a 13 page PDF to download with a title page and 12 ‘blank’ pages each with an image of a different type of paper or surface. Download the PDF, make up the book using hole punch and string and you have a ready-made scrappy sketchbook that is totally blank and completely filled in – at the same time! You’ll never need to feel intimidated by the blank page again..

Some of the pages from the Scrappy Sketchbook

Of course, if it seems too much trouble to get out the hole punch you could always upload the PDF to bookleteer and generate it as an eBook, then all you need are scissors to complete your scrappy sketchbook.

Read more about the Scrappy Sketchbook and download the PDF here..

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Bev Carter: Umulogho -> Watford

July 14th, 2010 by karenmartin
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Schoolchildren in Umulogho; Schoolchildren in Watford

Writing yesterday about the importance of the tangible paper form of bookleteer reminded me of the ‘A Little Something About Me‘ project by Bev Carter carried out in 2007 – 2009 as part of Proboscis’ Generator Case Studies Residency Programme.

Bev wanted to make connections between her local school in England and the schoolchildren in Umulogho village, Imo state, Nigeria and the eBooks provided her with a way to do this.

The first eBook of the project, ‘A Little Something About Me‘, contained paintings, pictures and information by the students of the local school in Umulogho. The children were asked to write ‘a little something about me’ describing what learning meant to them, their hopes, fears, likes, dislikes etc. These eBooks were brought back to the UK and taken into Bev’s local school where the British children read and responded to the Umulogho eBooks helping to devise the questions for a second eBook called ‘Kedu? How Are You?‘ which was made online then printed out and sent out to Umologho early in 2008.


From Kedu? How Are You? eBook: Questions about Umulogho by British schoolchildren illustrated with pictures by students in Umulogho from the A Little Something About Me eBooks

The ‘Kedu? How Are You?‘ eBook (Kedu means ‘How are you? in Igbo, the main language spoken in Umulogho Village) was designed as a notebook to be completed by the children in Umulogho, responding to questions asked about them and their lives by British schoolchildren. Filling in the eBook also enabled the children of Umulogho to ask questions of the children in Watford such as ‘what seasons do you have in England?’ and ‘what religions do you have?’


Response to the Kedu? How Are You? eBook by students in Umulogho

In October 2008 the completed Kedu eBooks were taken back to the school in Watford that had asked the original questions. The students were delighted to see the answers to their questions, such as ‘are there any crocodiles in the village stream?’ (some Umulogho students had seen some and others hadn’t) and got the students talking about the differences between the everyday lives of the Umulogho children and their own – for example, what time they wake up in the morning and what they do before school as most students in Umulogho were awake by 5.30 am and had gone to the village stream and back to collect water before going to school.


Response to the Kedu? How Are You? eBook by students in Umulogho

Even though the school in Umulogho doesn’t yet have a computer or internet access, it was still possible to send and receive paper copies of the eBooks, and by scanning in the completed eBooks the results could be shared online. In this way a conversation was able to be held across continents, cultures and technological formats.

Read more about the project and download the Umulogho eBooks at diffusion.org.uk

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Battle of the Reading Formats

July 13th, 2010 by karenmartin
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An iPad disguised to fit in on a book shelf. * See the bottom of this post for more.

Fitting in very nicely with our discussions on Augmented Reading, Jakob Nielsen, the legend of usability studies, has conducted a test on the relative reading experience of reading a short story (Ernest Hemingway, in case you’re interested) on the iPad, Kindle eReader, PC and printed book.

Twenty-four participants read the story in each of the different formats. On average the story took 17 minutes 20 seconds to read however both the Kindle and the iPad came in slower than the printed book by 10.7% and 6.2% respectively.

In terms of user satisfaction, readers were asked to score each of the formats on a scale of 1-7 with 7 being the highest score. The iPad, the Kindle and the printed book all recorded similar scores (5.8, 5.7 and 5.6 respectively) all of which were significantly higher than the score for the PC at 3.6.

In their comments participants said they found the printed book more relaxing than any of the eReaders and that the PC reminded them of work. I guess Carlton hadn’t seen this study when they launched their AR books for children – to be experienced on a PC.

However, it’s also good news for eReaders and suggests that they no longer offer a worse reading experience than printed books and that in the end your choice of reading format might come down to personal preference as in the case of music listening where, despite the ease of CDs and MP3s, some people still prefer to listen to music on vinyl. This is another conversation I had at PU&P: Augmented Reading where I was discussing the topic of choice and formats with the guys from getmorelocal.co.uk in the context of trying to reach people who might not be inclined to go online to look for information. Indeed, this was one of the motivations behind the tangible format of bookleteer eBooks.

Read more about the study on Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. Found via the Guardian.

* The Book for iPad by Longlivebooks via Design-Fetish and seen on a bookshelf at the top of this post

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Carlton say Books Come Alive

July 12th, 2010 by karenmartin
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New Scientist reports that UK publisher Carlton have launched two titles in their Augmented Reality series. The books – Fairyland Magic and Dinosaurs Alive – include a CD with software to install on your PC. Once this is done you point your webcam at the pages of the book and the webcam image of the book displayed on your computer monitor is augmented with hand-drawn, moving fairies or dinosaurs. The New Scientist article does a great job of describing the perceived need for books to embrace technologies and the potential complications resulting from this. You can also watch Carlton’s video promoting Fairyland Magic on YouTube.

I find the books interesting in the context of a discussion we had at the Pitch Up & Publish Augmented Reading last week when David suggested that interactive digital content of this kind (we weren’t talking about the Carlton books at the time) diminishes the experience of reading rather than augmenting it. David’s argument was that adding screen-based computation to a book imposes rules and restricts interaction in a way that a paper-and-ink book doesn’t.

Books Come Alive seem a good illustration of this argument as the book has to be in proximity of the computer screen and webcam in order to create the digital images. This sets up what seems to me to be a quite unnatural reading position as the priority becomes orienting the page to the webcam. Instead of reading being an intimate experience between one person and a book this opens it up to a wider audience for whoever happens to be in sight of the computer monitor. I wonder what the effects – good or bad – will be of this?

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Seven Days in Seven Dials

July 9th, 2010 by karenmartin
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This week bookleteer has been supporting the project Seven Days in Seven Dials: a week in the life of London’s Culture Quarters organised by Dan Thompson of the Empty Shops Network. Over the past days more than 30 young staff of 9 arts organisations based in Seven Dials, Covent Garden, London have been working to put together a temporary exhibition at 18 Shorts Gardens. The exhibition opens tomorrow (Saturday 10 July 2010) and runs until Friday 23 July.

Working with professional podcasters, photographers and artists the participants have been exploring the history of the area, cultural and historical links between the organisations involved in the project, and individual experiences of the participant’s day-to-day activities within their organisations. There is a short video on YouTube that gives an idea of the work they’ve been doing and the fun they’ve been having.

Alice has been in Seven Dials all week along with Karine and Shalene from Proboscis to show participants how to use bookleteer and helping them transform their material into eBooks and StoryCubes.

Read more about the project on artistsandmakers.com and see pictures of it on Dan’s Flickr stream.

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Report Back on PU&P 10: Augmented Reading

July 8th, 2010 by karenmartin
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Pitch Up Publish 10: Augmented Reading took place last Thursday and thanks to our excellent participants I had a fantastic afternoon. Alan Chamberlain from Mixed Reality Lab, David Crowley and Jeremy Millar from the RCA, James Bridle and Josh, Rob and Fabia from getmorelocal were knowledgable, inspiring, provocative and entertaining and I ended the afternoon with more questions than answers and hope that we can get together for another attempt to unravel the potential of augmented reading in the future!


Plenty of arm waving during discussions – got to be a good sign!

Each of the participants had their own take on what counts as augmented reading and it was great that this covered online and offline, technological and no-tech concepts. Discussions around questions of whether augmenting written text with audio, video or intereactive content augments or diminishes the reading experience, what role do books-as-objects play in our life as we move towards electronic readers and iPhone apps and how much we can expect readers to construct their own reading experience were fascinating and opened up new ways for me to think about books, their place in our lives and authoring and reading.


Getting hands-on and exploring augmented reading through a bookleteer project that combined eBooks, StoryCubes, Second Life and QR codes

One of the most interesting conversations for me was hearing everyone’s ideas about the bookleteer eBooks and StoryCubes and how these might be used to augment the creation, reading and symbolism of books and text. We talked a lot about collaborative construction of stories and text especially how the StoryCubes hide some stories at the same time as they allow you to reveal others and considered how bookleteer might allow groups to collaboratively produce eBooks. This was such an intriguing question that we’re currently trying to figure it out as we collaborate with the Augmented Reading participants to produce an eBook of our cumulative notes. I’ll let you know how it turns out.. 

Stripes rule! But checks are pretty cool too..

(All photos by Karine and Shalene – good work girls!)

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Programmable Origami

July 7th, 2010 by karenmartin
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Alan Chamberlain, one of our PU&P Augmented Reading participants, posted a link to the bookleteer Facebook page about a programmable surface that has been created by researchers at MIT and Harvard. The composite material which looks pretty much like a piece of paper can fold itself into a number of predetermined shapes (in this case a boat, a plane and a tent) when an electric current is passed through it. The ‘paper’ contains a number of foil actuators to make it fold and tiny electromagnets to ensure it stays folded.

Researchers believe that one application might be to create containers that can change their size to adjust to the amount of liquid being poured into to them. Another might be to make StoryCubes that can expand and shrink depending on how much is written on them or how many people are collaborating. But they probably haven’t thought of that specific use yet..

Read more about it on wired.com where you can also see a video of it in folding action.. (Thanks Alan!)

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Private PU&P for Brunel Creative Writing Students

July 6th, 2010 by karenmartin
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Tony and the students from Brunel getting to grips with bookleteer

It was a busy week in the studio last week. Thursday was PU&P 10: Augmented Reading which I’ll write about soon and on Wednesday we hosted a private PU&P for Tony White and his creative writing students from Brunel University.

Tony has been working with the Brunel students to encourage the use of writing as a way of understanding different disciplines. The students have been given the task of producing a piece of work inspired either by the working-class social history archive at Brunel University or by conversation and encounter with a person working in a different discipline. Wednesday gave them the opportunity to visit the studio and play with Bookleteer which is the format they will use to present these pieces of writing. I’m looking forward to seeing what they produce.

Tony is an old friend of Proboscis and an experienced bookleteer. In the summer of 2009 he created a  series of eBooks as part of the Balkanising Bloomsbury project while he was writer in residence at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) supported by the Leverhulme Trust through their artists in residence programme. The story for Balkanising Bloomsbury was created by cutting up, remixing and re-narrativising fragments from various sources including the Sydney Morning Herald, transcripts from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Richard Burton translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. You can find the Balkanising Bloomsbury eBooks on diffusion.org.uk.

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Crowdfunded Publishing with bookleteer : a concept

July 2nd, 2010 by gileslane
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Here at Proboscis we are very excited by the quality of the new PPOD service we’re offering users of bookleteer, but we also recognise that there are still economic barriers to people wanting to break into publishing their own eBooks & StoryCubes. Despite our ground-breaking service offering low-run printing (from only 50 copies per title, much lower than the industry standard of 500 or 1,000 copies) this still requires bookleteers to pay up front for printed versions of their eBooks & StoryCubes. Our aim is to open up publishing with bookleteer by removing as many of the traditional barriers as possible.

With bookleteer you can currently create shareable eBooks and StoryCubes that you can send or allow people to download anywhere in the world at no cost; you can also have high quality professionally printed & bound versions made. Our pricing for this has been set to make it as affordable as possible, so that users can sell on their printed eBooks/StoryCubes and add their own profit margin. But, for many people, the cost of printing even just 50 copies might be more than they can afford or justify on the basis of anticipated (or hoped for) future sales.

In trying to resolve the puzzle of how to allow people to use bookleteer not just to create things which they pay for, but which also allows them to earn money from their creativity, we’re now researching a concept for a crowdfunded marketplace. What we’d like to implement in the future (possibly in the beta version later this year) would be a bookleteer marketplace where the users can submit their eBooks and StoryCubes (either individually or a series / collections). We imagine that the user will set the retail price of the publication, add an ISBN number (if they have one) and set a target number of sales to be achieved before the publication will be printed via our PPOD service.

The marketplace would be public for anyone to browse and, using some kind of crowdfunding platform, pledge to buy a copy or copies of the eBooks/StoryCubes. Payments from buyers would be held in escrow until the sales threshold is reached and the printing and shipping of the publication triggered. At that point we would transfer the creator’s share of the sales to them (minus our printing & shipping costs). If there aren’t enough pledges within a given time frame to trigger the printing, then the buyer’s money would be returned to them. This approach, also called threshold pledging, would reduce the risk to both creator and buyer.

We are just at the very beginning of developing this concept and its going to require more resources and expertise than are currently available to us to actually turn into a reality – however we would really like to know what other people think of this. We’d love to hear from anyone with experience in building crowdfunding systems or using crowdfunding platforms to see if this is possible and what the average ratios are of successful to unsuccessful targets being reached.

We’d like to think that this idea could make it possible for anyone to be able to create a publication and have it professionally printed and bound without having to find the money to do so up front. With bookleteer they would be able to make the Diffusion eBook PDFs available for people to make their own handmade versions, then choose to buy the PPOD version (thereby economically supporting the creator). In this way we could create a whole new generation of publishers, crossing economic as well as cultural divides, allowing more people to find different ways of sharing their ideas, stories, knowledge, artworks – whatever they value and wish to share.

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