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Islington & Wembley Pop Up Publishing Workshops

More workshops are being held next week in Islington & Wembley Libraries as part of the Librarypress project. Below is the presentation I’ll be using to illustrate my talk on bookleteer to participants and explore the kinds of things they can do with it.

Pop Up Publishing with bookleteer from Giles Lane
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events news pitch up & publish

Pop Up Publishing with Librarypress


This month I am running 6 pop up publishing sessions across three libraries in London : Hounslow Library; Islington Central Library (First Steps Learning Centre) and Wembley Library. All the sessions are free and last for about 3 hours in the evening. The sessions are part of the Librarypress project which aims to get more people publishing.

The aim is to introduce bookleteer.com as a simple way to create and share publications that can be both physical (paper) and digital (readable online). Everyone is welcome, no technical/computer experience required or previous publishing experience. Bring stories, pictures, ideas and we’ll help you turn them into simple publications you can make and share.

We are hoping that some gems will emerge over the sessions – we have arranged with Librarypress to select up to 12 books by participants for inclusion in the Periodical, to be printed professionally and posted out to subscribers.

The sessions are :

    Hounslow Library : Tuesday 6th & Thursday 8th May 5-8pm
    Islington Central Library : Monday 19th & Thursday 22nd May 4.30-7.45pm
    Wembley Library : Tuesday 20th & Friday 23rd May 5-7.45pm

To book a place at one of these sessions, email Librarypress : news@librarypress.org.uk

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events pitch up & publish

New Pitch Up & Publish Events

From Friday 2nd December we’ll be running a free monthly meet up event for people wanting to find out more about using bookleteer or to get together with others and share tips and tricks for getting the most out of it. Donations will be welcome for refreshments and, most particularly, anyone choosing to sign up for the Alpha Club to help support the ongoing costs of maintaining and hosting the platform.

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events news pitch up & publish

More dates for Pitch Up & Publish sessions

We’ve added some more dates (with different times of day) for Pitch Up & Publish sessions where you can find out more about using bookleteer for your own projects. These sessions are limited to just 6 people at a time so we can respond to your particular interest – whether you’re a complete beginner or want to explore more advanced uses. If you’d like to take part, but the times or the dates don’t suit – please get in touch and we’ll do our best to arrange an alternative time or day.

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events pitch up & publish

Pitch Up & Publish 2011

We’re starting a new regular series of Pitch Up & Publish workshops to help people get started and make the most use out of bookleteer as possible : guiding them from concept to publication and beyond. The 2 hour workshops will be held at our studio, will have a maximum of around 6 places and will probably be held every 2-3 weeks.

We’d like to hear what sort of things you’d like help with: from basic level introduction to specific topics – such as designing project notebooks, embedding multimedia links via QR codes and preparing books for printing via our Short Run Printing Service. If there’s interest we can run specific workshops aimed at transferring our experiences of working with kids in schools to use bookleteer, or with other community groups.

Each workshop place will cost about £20 (UKP) and will include complimentary Alpha Club membership, discount on Short Run Printing Service orders and a free pack of new Medium size StoryCubes. You’ll be able to book places online via eventbrite.

We’d also like to hear whether people would prefer the sessions to be run during the day or evening – we may alternate if it helps more people take part.

Please contribute with your suggestions and requests – we’d like these sessions to be as useful and focused on your needs as possible. You can post comments here, or add them to the discussion on Facebook.

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pitch up & publish

Report Back on PU&P 10: Augmented Reading

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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pitch up & publish

Private PU&P for Brunel Creative Writing Students


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.