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.
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..
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.
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?
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!)
While I was thinking about augmented reading in preparation for yesterdays PU&P (which was fab – thanks guys!) Giles showed me the Trail Song project by Julie Myers who he commissioned as part of the Transformations series.
The Whyte Museum Archive, Banff, describes a Trail Song in this way:
“A Trail Song uses a well known song or tune but replaces the lyrics with words of its own. These words reference objects, people and places experienced on the journey” (Trail Songs Magazine (1954) – The Whyte Museum Archive, Banff, CAN).
In 2009 Julie created her own Trail Song around a journey from San Francisco, US to Banff, Canada – 1,345 miles by car, coach and ferry. The Trail Song lyrics were captured in an eBook while a set of four StoryCubes show photographs of the people and places she encountered on different stages of the journey. Julie writes:
“In the tradition of the Trail Songs of North America, we invent lyrics as we travel from place to place. Like modern day Songlines these songs tell about the geography and the people of the landscape, each song refers to a direction or path taken and is matched to the video footage we shoot en route. The original tune is something we might overhear on a street corner, in a café or on the car radio.”
I think my favourite part though is the video where you see snippets of her family’s journey as they travel north and hear them singing their Trail Song as they go. Augmented reading indeed!
You can read more about the project and download the eBook and StoryCubes at the diffusion website.
In my search for augmented cubes I came across these LED-lit origami cube by the Evil Mad Scientists. They are made from a single sheet of paper folded to make a cube with an LED and battery inside. The components are your basic LED Throwie however the way the cube folds calls for what the scientists call ‘3-D circuitry’.
For this, the scientists mark the circuit on the paper with a pencil then attach aluminium foil to either freezer paper (Do we even have this in the UK?) or a laser-printed image of the circuit. Once you’ve attached the foil to the paper using the heat of an iron, you fold the cube, insert the LED and battery and Bob’s your uncle!
The cut-out aluminium foil and the laser-printed image of the circuit
I have to admit I haven’t had a chance to try this out, and I’m certain that it’s a more challenging process than the very detailed instructions suggest, but I love the idea of combining this with the bookleteer eBooks and Story Cubes. I can imagine an eBook where the pages consist of circuit diagrams that the reader prints out and completes by ironing on aluminium foil. Of course, that would probably mean the reader putting as much work into making the book as the author..
Recently I’ve written about a few artists who combine cut-outs with books (Yukon Terya, Nicholas Jones and Chisato Tamabayashi to name three..) and Brian Dettmer fits right into that category. For The Book Autopsies Brian takes old books which have ceased to be valued for their content and gives them new life as art objects. The books are cut by hand and no text or image is repositioned to create the final ‘autopsy’. Beautiful, pain-staking work.
A blog post from 2007 on centripedalnotion.com contains a statement from the Toomey-Tourell Fine Art website (one of the galleries who represent Brian Dettmer) about the process of making this work. I couldn’t find the statement on the website but included it anyway because I think it gives an insight into the motivation and the method.
Explanation of Book Dissections-
In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the cover of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.
Reading a boing boing post about Brian’s work I was interested in a commenter who said they would prefer Brian to make their own books to treat in this way and not use discarded books. While I think (as was pointed out by someone else in the comments) that this kind of goes against the concept of Brian’s work I think it’s an interesting idea in relation to bookleteer.
As with the pop-up eBook I’m working on, it would be possible to design a bookleteer cutout book where the designer does not cut the book but produces an eBook template showing where it should be cut in order to complete the book. How does this alter the idea of book-as-object and the role of book artist when the work of making the book is completed by the person who downloads it?
Augmented Everyday Objects by Yuken Terya: A McDonald’s Happy Meal Bag and a Toilet Roll
Ok, I have to confess that I came across these two images (above) of Yuken Terya’s work first and then I hunted around in the hope of finding that he had also worked with books and written material. And luckily for me, I came across the two projects below on Yuken’s website.
Lost and Found (above) features cut-up copies of The New York Times in which the image on the front page has been cut to form what look to me like dozens of pieces of clover (I could be wrong about that – there’s no information on the website about what they represent).
The Giving Tree Project (below) is a cut-out of a tree made from a book which stands out from the page in such incredible detail.
I’ve shown these projects because they fit with the augmented reading theme but I really recommend you visit Yuken’s website. to see his other projects.
Guilherme Martins has made a printable paper version of the Arduino board. This amazing project allows you to download the PDF file, print out the top and bottom layout, glue them to whatever support you like and start adding components. The PDF files, a list of the necessary electronic components and instructions are all available at Guilherme’s site here..
Perhaps it might be asking a little too much of your readers to ask them to build an Arduino board before they can read your book but I find the concept of printed and shareable electronics fascinating. Arduino boards are powerful pieces of electronics capable of a great variety of control tasks, but what if you printed simpler circuits onto paper for people to download and connect up. I imagine some of the circuitry that controls the Electronic Popables might be suitable for this kind of project.
Of course, if you also have a printer that’s able to print in conductive ink then you would save yourself a lot of time..
