Year: 2011

Categories
news updates & improvements

New pricing coming soon

We’re presently working on a simpler and more flexible ordering system for our Print & Publish On Demand (PPOD) service. The key changes are :

    the minimum total order for StoryCubes will be just 50 cubes (the minimum per cube design). We will print orders as soon as we have received enough for a print run (1000 cubes)
    eBooks will be available to order in multiples of 50 (the minimum per title) up to 500 copies, then 750, 1000 and custom orders for over 1000
    StoryCubes will also be available to order in multiples of 50 up to 500 cubes, then 750, 1000 and custom orders for over 1000
    the website and app will have an estimate calculator for all variables of eBooks and StoryCubes including prices for shipping to the UK, European Union, North America (USA/Canada) and Rest of the World.
    the ordering system will support both online payment via Paypal (including credit cards) and pro-forma invoicing for institutions and for larger orders where electronic bank transfers are preferred.

We are keeping in general to 2010 prices, although since we are changing our shipping methods there may be some small variances in total cost compared to last year. Members overseas will now be able to estimate prices for their location and order direct.

The key difference is that members will be able to order just 50 StoryCubes at a time – much more affordable than our previous minimum of 250 cubes per order. We hope this enables lots more people to experiment with making and using StoryCubes in their own projects and work.

We’re aiming to have the new system in place within the next week or two – meanwhile the 10% discount offer is open until Friday February 4th.

Categories
inspiration

Young Blood Zine – Call for submissions

Instead of a Zine Highlight, I thought I’d give a shout out to a Zine which hasn’t even been created yet. Young Blood is “a UK based zine dedicated to showcasing work by young creatives from around the world under the age of 25; covering art, photography, music and literature.” They are currently asking for  submissions for the debut issue, which will hopefully be published in late March. I think it’s a great way for young uns’ like myself to showcase their work, and am considering doing a similar zine with bookleteer, so for anyone interested, drop me an e-mail at: haztag@msn.com. It’s likely this would take the form of a literary / short story / poetry zine, but I’m open to input.

Categories
news

New Year Discount!

Beat the January blues, make something beautiful to share with bookleteer!

10% off your first bookleteer PPOD order with this offer code : hnyjan2011

Valid until 4th February 2011 – one order per account.
Sign up for an account here

Categories
news

Outside The Box – Prototype

Here at Proboscis, we’ve just recently finished a prototype of “Outside The Box”, created by Many Tang.  The project was conceived back in September, spurred by the Love Outdoor Play campaign, and we’ve been constructing and tinkering with it since. Last week blazed past in a frenzy of activity, with everyone pitching in to get a working set finished. On Saturday, Alice took a set to “Re-Thinking Space”, a day-long discussion in Nottingham organised by Learning Space, to play around with.

A set of  27 Storycubes to inspire children’s play, indoors or out, alone or with others, this cube of cubes has 3 layers of games which can be used in endless variations. We’re currently thinking about different ways to play, and producing an eBook of game suggestions, so we’ll soon be having fun testing them on ourselves and with kids. See more photos here.

Categories
inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: Sea Shanties

Next in the Songs trend is “Sea Shanties” – two volumes of songs sung at sea, selected and introduced by Francis McKee. He states “Beyond society’s canons of literature there are the outlaws – songs and stories that survive in the wild.” It seems these songs are memorised and passed on through their performance alone, rarely being recorded on paper, so it’s unlikely they would be heard outside of sailing circles. Shanties are work songs, the rhythms in time with sailors hauling, and barely sung today due to modern rigging changes. This compilation ensures these tales are not lost to time; these eBooks can be downloaded and reproduced anywhere – perhaps even on deck!

Read more at Andrew Draskóy’s website, Shanties and Sea Songs.

Categories
news publishing on demand updates & improvements

bookleteer API

Just before Christmas we implemented a major new feature on bookleteer – an API (application programming interface) enabling eBooks and StoryCubes to be generated by users direct from their own web applications and stored in or downloaded from their bookleteer accounts.

Realising Tangible Souvenirs
This has been a long-cherished ambition for us – harking back to plans we made for linking the earlier Diffusion Generator to our Urban Tapestries public authoring and mapping platform in 2004 – where we imagined people being able to select or collate material on Urban Tapestries by theme or around a geographic place and outputting it in different paper formats (Diffusion eBooks, postcards and posters). This was the origin of our concept for creating tangible souvenirs from digital experiences – bridging different media (online/offline, digital/analogue) with the different capabilities that people have. Our experiences of working with local communities in social housing and other contexts showed us how important it is not just to be able to share things in many ways, but to tailor a range of modes of interaction to the capabilities and capacities of the people who had the knowledge and experience to share, but not necessarily the familiarity with web and mobile technologies to be engaged by the opportunities we saw them offering.

We’ve continued to develop our tangible souvenir concept through other projects – such as the Sensory Threads prototype – but the bookleteer API now represents a crucial milestone for us in building the links between our earlier work on public authoring and media scavenging and the current ecosystem of web technologies and public/open data initiatives. We hope to see lots of exciting ideas building on the first experiments – bookcubes – we commissioned from James Bridle last spring. Look out too for some forthcoming experiments by Simon Pope & Gordon Joly.

Accessing the API
Access to the API is limited for the time being to Alpha Club members and guest testers whilst we put it through its paces and explore how it can be used (our resources are rather limited for supporting it). We’re hoping to organise some events in 2011 where people can come along and explore what they might do with the API. In the meantime, if you’re taking part in Culture Hack Day this weekend (January 15th & 16th) then you can ask to test it out using the special account we’ve created for participants (ask the organisers for access details on the day).

If you do have an exciting idea for mashing up the bookleteer API with your own web service or public data please do get in touch, we’d love to hear from you and see how we can help.

Categories
inspiration

Zine Highlight: The Gentleman Caller

I’ve just ordered “The Gentleman Caller” by Andrea Kearney, but can’t wait for it to arrive, so I’ll highlight it instead. This caught my eye whilst browsing the Zines page on Facebook and seems to be a piece you need to appreciate in physical form, so I might post a few more photos of it when it’s in my mitts.

Its a beautifully surreal and cinematic illustrative zine, making use of double spreads to convey an amazing and disorientating sense of perspective. I love the bizarre imagery and the shading – it’s like a dream (or nightmare) rendered in a book.

It’s available to order here.

Categories
events news

Commission a local City As Material event


Reflecting back on the 5 City As Material events of last Autumn, we’re really pleased both with the reception of the events themselves by participants and that of the resulting publications with friends and colleagues. Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing the personal contributions of the guests (Tim Wright, Ben Eastop and Simon Pope – Alex Deschamps-Sonsino’s is already available) and an overview eBook of our own. And we will print a special limited slipcase edition of all 10 eBooks using bookleteer’s PPOD service and launch them in the Spring.

Future Plans in 2011
This year we hope to take our Pitch in & Publish series of City As Material events outside of London to other towns and cities in the UK (or abroad). We’d love to hear from people or organisations interested in commissioning us to devise and run a one-day (or possibly longer) collaborative urban exploration and publishing event in their own town or city.

A typical event…
We’ll work with the local hosts to devise a topic, plan the exploration route and design customised notebooks. At the end of each walk we’ll need a space (with WiFi access and ideally a printer) to sit down with the participants as a group and work on planning/drafting the collaborative eBook that will be the record of the day. As before we’ll be using a range of online and social media to post up photos, audio, video etc taken during each event by all taking part – and we’ll be encouraging all the participants to sign up with bookleteer to create their own personal eBooks (and/or StoryCubes).

How to book an event
Please get in touch with us to plan an event in your town or city. Our basic fee for each event (payable by the host) will be £600 + VAT and travel expenses (and accommodation where needed). This fee covers pre-planning, facilitation by 2 members of Proboscis on the day and post-event coordination of the collaborative eBook (+ publication on diffusion.org.uk), as well as printing of a limited edition run (50 copies) of the eBook.
Local hosts will be responsible for recruiting the participants to each event. Proboscis will also help promote each event across our own networks to engage as broad a group of participants as possible.

Categories
inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: New Worker’s Songbook

Continuing the theme of songs and music, I’m looking at the “New Worker’s Songbook – Song Writing Work Book for New Songs” (phew). In collaboration with the Worker’s Arts and Heritage centre in Hamilton, Ontario, Dodolab and Tiny Bill Cody (Tor Lukasik-Foss) created this eBook to inspire songs that reflect the current realities for workers in Hamilton. It asks the reader about their working experiences, both positive and negative, as well as their identity and responsibilities, to form verse and chorus for their own personal chant. The songbook also provides techniques to memorise lyrics, and how to sing with emotion and purpose, complete with iconic stick figure illustrations.