• A free bookleteer account

If you haven’t signed up for a free bookleteer account yet, do so here.

• A4 single label paper, suitable for Inkjet or Laserjet printers

Full sheet label paper, available from any decent stationers (Avery code: DSP01).

• Blank StoryCubes

Read about StoryCubes, and order blank packs here.

Firstly, design your StoryCube.

Sign into bookleteer. If you’re a new user, read the help page.

Design your cube using the bookleteer templates, export the file as a PDF, then upload to the Create A StoryCube page, or upload each image individually.

Select Generate StoryCube and download the file, from the top right corner of the screen.

Next, print and make.

Print using the label paper, and cut around around only the faces of the cube, not the tabs – it should look a crucifix (You can also protect your cube by using adhesive cellophane, by affixing a layer on top of the label sheet, then cutting out).

Peel off the backing paper, and stick onto a blank cube.

Fold your StoryCube, and voila!

You can even use this method to make your own A3 size StoryCubes, without even owning an A3 printer.

Simply crop the A3 cube PDF into two documents, so that it can be printed across two sheets of  A4 paper.

Then, cut out the two segments as shown, to form a two-part crucifix shape.

Stick onto to a blank A3 cube and fold…

… and you now have an A3 cube, using a standard home printer.

If any bookleteers discover more clever ways to make StoryCubes, do share!

On Jonathan Kaczynski CV, the Piccadilly line has been transformed into ‘Education ‘ a timeline reflecting his progress throughout education and the ‘Circle line’ shows off his extra curricular activities, wheres as the longer ‘District line’ demonstrates his computer skills.

However, each line on Kevin Wang’s ‘tube map CV’ reflects places he has worked instead of different categories like Kaczynski’s. It doesn’t matter which way this format is set up, I’m a fan either way! Just how the purpose of a tube map is to figure out how to get you to places, one destination to another, this format for a CV I feel may reflect the same purpose – moving from one job to another, trying to gain more and better skills to get yourself to that next destination – a higher paid job or to become more qualified . An interesting concept, one which I may use myself in the future.

D.Currier’s article I found on ‘A Portfolio Book for the 21st Century’ talks about something which I have not seen before and is a concept binding the online world and ‘real life’ together perfectly! Sean Busher created a portfolio where an iPad has been embedded into the actual portfolio itself, which not only sounds weird and wonderful but looks great too!

Busher has not only embedded an iPad into this rectangular box, but he also created an app showing only his work and the app is the only item on the iPad. I think the motion on the iPad along with the imagery in the portfolio book compliment each other really well and brings his work to life. As the article mentions, this is a fantastic way for artists who are showcasing their work which include both still work and motion. I also love the colour – the bright zingy orange in contrast to the black works well! Along with its ability to also be shipped due to the structure of the box, this really is ‘a portfolio book for the 21st century.’

Jesse Rieser has also used this concept of bringing print and digital together through the use of an iPad and a portfolio book. What I like about Rieser’s portfolio, apart from the iPad, is the colour scheme applied to different categories of his work, which continues on his website too. The pocket inside the portfolio book which securely hold his business cards is a nifty little touch too!

I’m glad I’ve finally found a portfolio which has the best of both worlds, print and digital, a concept which will definitely make portfolios more interactive and creative.

It is now a year since we launched the short run printing service so now seemed like a good time to reflect on what people in different areas have been using the printing service for. In this post we reflect on its use in two projects connected to the British Museum.

Julie Anderson, the Assistant Keeper of Egyptian and Sudanese Antiquities at the British Museum used Bookleteer to create 1000 books in Arabic and English about the 10 year Sudan excavation to share the findings with the local community in Sudan.

Following the distribution of the book, teenagers began coming to our door in the village to ask questions about the site / archaeology / their own Sudanese history… connecting with their history as made possible through the booklet. It was astonishing. More surprising was the reaction people had upon receiving a copy. In virtually every single case, they engaged with the Book immediately and began to read it or look through it….The Book has served not only as an educational tool, but has empowered the local community and created a sense of pride and proprietary ownership of the ruins and their history.

Bookleteer was used in the Melanesia Project to record, Porer and Pinbin, indigenous people from Papua New Guinea discussing objects in the British Museum collection. Bookleteer was used first to create simple notebooks that were printed out on an office printer and handmade. Anthropologist James Leach used them to note the discussion in both English and Tok Pisin, next to glued in polaroid images, to produce a record that involved;

capturing the moment of what we were doing and what we were seeing.

Once filled in, the notebooks were scanned and professionally printed to share with the local community in Papua New Guinea (who have a subsistence lifestyle without electricity).

“[…] As something to give people, they’re an extremely nice thing. People are very keen. I also took some to an anthropology conference before I went [to Papua New Guinea] and would show them to people and they’d immediately say “Oh, is that for me?” People kind of like them. They’re nice little objects.”

Researcher and community education worker Gillian Cowell has used the books as part of a community project with Greenhill Historical Scoiety:

“I think, for community work, it’s really important that you engage in much more unique and creative and interesting ways as a way of trying to spur some kind of interest and excitement in community work […] The books are such a lovely way for that to actually fit with that kind of notion.”

Bookleteer is an online service to help you create and publish booklets and StoryCubes. It’s simple, quick and free – print and make them in minutes using only a pair of scissors, or share them online, anywhere there is an internet connection, computer and standard inkjet or laser printer.

If you are interested in finding out about how you could use Bookleteer, come along to one of our Pitch Up & Publish Workshops or Get Bookleteering sessions this summer.

Once clicked on your desired interest, there is a wonderful large picture frame hanging from the bookshelf which displays an example of the work as you click through the list beside on the left hand side of the frame.

I like the way this has been designed. Everything is on one page, without being taken away to another page once clicked. Each graphic makes me curious, leading to me wanting to click and find out more. I think this concept works and is a fun, adventurous and creative portfolio.

Wilson created ‘An Interactive Hand Made Package‘ known as the ‘Soap Box.’ I think his idea here is genius. Firstly, I like the fact that it’s handmade using recycled cardboard and wood. Not only was the box handmade but he also hand bound and stitched the portfolio too! For the printed materials he used the old printing method known as Letterpress. This method of printing, whereby a raised surface is inked and then pressed onto a sheet of paper, was invented in the 15th century and was the traditional form of printing right up until the 19th century. This printing process was widely used for books up until the mid 20th century.

The idea of the Soap Box was to create an item which the recipient could actually be apart of and the way Wilson did that was by recording his voice inside the Box, as the portfolio.

I think this is a perfect example of how, even though technology has expanded immensely since the 15th century , you can still stick to the basics and create a fantastic and unique portfolio, compared to if your were to print or create it online.

So, what sort of reaction did the eBook receive? Simply put, its reception, both in Khartoum and in the rural farming village of Dangeil, exceeded expectations. We produced 500 English copies and 500 in Arabic, the local language. We ran out of the latter. In retrospect, we should have produced a greater number of copies in Arabic. Copies were given to the local school and arrangements were made so that every household in the village received a copy.

Although our eBook takes the form of a more traditional and perhaps somewhat static publication, its impact cannot be underestimated. The Dangeil villagers, and indeed university students and antiquities staff in Khartoum, viewed the publication as written for them, about them, and in their own language. The eBook has served not only as an educational tool, but has empowered the local community and created a sense of pride and proprietary ownership of the ruins and their history.

Julie Anderson
Assistant Keeper
Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, British Museum

On the fabulous The Literary Platform I came across this video Ideo have produced showing three concepts they have created around the future of the book. I love Ideo, they consistently come up with inventive and imaginative technological developments that take account of social factors and personal practices. However, I have to say, I am disappointed with their ideas for the future of the book and I’m surprised that they appear to have overlooked so many of the interesting questions around books as objects, the challenges of e-Readers and the augmented reading experience that are currently being considering in so much detail by others.

All three of the concept designs (called Newton, Coupland and Alice) are shown as prototypes for the iPad. This suggests to me that the idea that a book might be a souvenir of an experience (e.g. James Bridle) or an object for sharing (e.g. Bookcrossing) does not appear to have been considered in the design process. In my exploration of augmented reading over the past few months I have come to think of a book as the amalgamation of object, content, design, distribution method, author and reader. It might be getting a little pedantic but I would say that what Ideo have produced are prototypes for the Future of Reading rather than the Future of the Book.

So what will this future reading experience be? We are offered three versions.

Newton might best be described as an application for managing material already published on the Internet. It allows you to collate, compare and contrast different sources and materials around a particular topic.

Coupland is a form of book-related user-generated content and social network. Reading lists and recommendations can be compiled and shared allowing everyone to see and comment on the most popular books within a professional network. Individuals can contribute book reviews and content can be shared between different organisations and networks.

Alice combines hypertext, hypermedia and location-based services to create an augmented, reader-created narrative path through a story. Primarily presented as text-based Alice suggests that readers actions (in the example, tilting the iPad in a particular direction) might open up new branches to the story. Other actions might include being in a specific location where a particular set of GPS co-ordinates would trigger more of the story.

One of the most interesting aspects to me is how these future ‘books’ conceive of authors. While all three concepts require authors for the ‘book’ to be complete they each have a different model. Newton relies on writers who are producing content elsewhere on the Internet and Coupland relies on people within an organisation creating content for the ‘book’. Only Alice has bespoke writing and a dedicated author at the heart of the project which is then augmented by existing content. These approaches to authorship are not new of course but I find it fascinating that Ideo consider all of them to be examples of ‘books’ and I wonder how these fit with my concept of book-as-object-plus-content-plus-design-plus-distribution method-plus-reader. I can’t help feeling that the ecology of books is broader and more diverse than these concept designs acknowledge.

ps. There’s a fascinating commentary and discussion going on around this video at facebook.com/ideobigconversations

Each Piece of Paper Press publication is a run of 150 books and each book is made from a double-side-printed sheet of A4 paper, folded three times and cut and stapled to create a 16-page A7-size book. Once printed the books are given away to people who attend the publication launch, to participants and to supporters of Piece of Paper Press. Despite the technological developments that have occurred in the 16 years since Piece of Paper Press began the production process is the same as it was at the beginning and Tony believes that it’s simplicity and low cost are the reasons why he has continued putting out these books for such a long time.

In a fascinating post on The Literary Platform, Tony writes that he feels the flipside to these methods of production and distribution is that “producing something this ephemeral in such relatively small quantities seems to go against the grain.” I would argue that Piece of Paper Press’s methods of making and sharing are actually adding value to their books in ways that digital accessibility is often unable to do. Printing only 150 copies gives a rarity to the books that will only increase with time and touches on ideas in this post on 3 Ways to Share.

In the same post Tony describes the process of physically making the books as a simple, repetitive and social occasion.

“for the past 16 years once or twice a year I’ve sat down for a morning or an afternoon with a pile of printed A4 paper, a stapler and a Stanley knife. With me more often than not will have been an artist or a writer who will have spent a year or more producing a literary or graphic work that is suitable for a 16 page, A7 book. A few cups of tea and some conversation form the backdrop to a task that is a by definition repetitive, but which is also very social and above all is simple and functional.”

With only 25 publications in 16 years very few people will have had the chance to sit down with Tony and enjoy this time and these conversations and it seems to me that these social aspects of Piece of Paper Press publications have a value in terms of the relationship between author and publisher and book and reader that may not be as easy to achieve with digital books despite being able to reach a wider audience.

Label. Share. Follow. That’s how bookcrossing.com describes the process of setting your book free to go out and explore the world while you follow it’s adventures, the places it goes and the people it meets from the comfort of your home. According to the Book Crossing website almost seven million books have been registered by over 850,000 active BookCrossers and are traveling around 130 countries as I write.

The way it works is that each book is tagged with a label recording its unique Book Crossing ID (BCID) and starting location. The books are then shared, either being passed onto a friend or stranger, mailed to a Book Crossing reader who’s advertised for that title, or released ‘into the wild’, for example, on a park bench, a café table or at the train station. They can also be taken to Official Book Crossing Zones where books are regularly caught and released.

When your labeled book is ‘caught’ the finder enters its BCID into bookcrossing.com to find out who released the book and where it’s previously been. The finder can then record a journal entry telling the next stage of the book’s story. In this way you can find out where your book is, who’s reading it now, and follow where it goes next. Leave your book at an airport and it could cross continents!

Of course, theory is all very well but practice is what counts so I set out to catch a bookcrossing book. I chose my quarry carefully, discounting books that had been released on the tube or park benches as I couldn’t believe they would last more than a few hours in these locations. Eventually I settled on hunting down a book at the Camel and Artichoke pub behind Waterloo station where 89 books were listed – suggesting that I had a good chance of finding one!

I entered the pub and casually browsed around as if I was looking for a friend. And there, at the top of the stairs was my target. Four book shelves all stuffed with books. They were even spilling onto the floor. There was a wide variety of authors, topics, even languages (Simone de Beauvoir in German anyone?) but I finally settled for revisiting my childhood with The Silver Chair by CS Lewis.

My caught book

Returning home and entering its BCID into bookcrossing.com I discover that Lydiasbooks left it in the Camel and Artichoke as she had a duplicate copy. It’s been there about a month and I am the first person to pick it up.

My plan was to complete my bookcrossing experience before writing this post by releasing my book back into the wild. However, I kind of feel like re-reading The Silver Chair now. Perhaps this is how bookcrossing works. Serendipitous and random sharing leads to serendipitous and random reading..

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a couple of posts about libraries, librarians and what services and characteristics they might provide in the future based on the talks and discussion at Be2camp Brum 2010.

To my mind,  a  library’s primary function is to lend books to people and this service of sharing books in a community is beautifully carried out by this library-in-a-phone-box in Westbury-sub-Mendip, Somerset.

The phone box was bought from BT for £1 in 2009 and then a tea party was held to decide what to do with it. The idea of a mini-library was instantly popular as the nearest public library is four miles away and the mobile library stopped visiting the year before.

There is no full-time librarian and the phone box is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week for members of the village to pop by and drop off books and borrow new ones. There are four wooden shelves of books and the children’s section is a red box on the floor.

I think it’s a great reminder that libraries don’t have to be huge to be valued and makes me wonder what an eBook library might look like and where it might be located. Perhaps a cardboard box in the corner of a café or an old cupboard at the end of the street is all that is needed..

A few days ago we published a ScrapBook made at the Vintage Festival for a project Proboscis is participating in called Graffito – a collaborative iPhone/iPad app that lets people draw on a shared canvas. It was used in the Warehouse tent (which had a 1980s theme) as a collaborative VJ system displayed on a giant LED screen. A number of iPhones were lent out to people to draw with, as well as remote users playing from all over the world (the App is free to download from the AppStore).

For part of the 3 day festival, Jennifer Sheridan (Graffito’s project lead) sat in the control booth capturing snapshots of the screen and printing them off using a Polaroid PoGo printer (a very small portable printer that uses USB & Bluetooth to print ‘zero ink’ pictures from mobiles or digital cameras). She then stuck them into a blank eNoteBook I had designed especially for Graffito. Once back from the festival we disassembled the ‘ScrapBook’, scanned it in and republished it so anyone (whether at the festival, a remote participant or just someone interested) could have a hand made tangible souvenir of the project and the event. The process was very simple (though not helped by Apple’s blocking of Bluetooth connection to the PoGo printer on the iPhone) and points the way to similar uses for lots of other projects. In fact the whole process could easily be copied by anyone with an iPhone : simply download the Graffito app, start drawing and use the ‘snapshot’ feature to capture pictures of your favourite screens. Then download the blank version of the Graffito ScrapBook from diffusion.org.uk, print out and stick in the screen shots to make your own personal Graffito ScrapBook. You don’t need a PoGo printer (though they’re now very cheap to buy, around £20) – you could just print out the pictures on normal paper and glue them in.

As we develop Graffito further, part of our thinking will focus around how to personalise the creation of tangible souvenirs from the project even further. It could be possible, for instance, to request a series of screen shots to be taken from a particular time sequence and made into an eBook or StoryCube. This could be particularly fun for a group of people using it to draw collaboratively and could be combined with maps of where users are located in the world (there’s a short movie demonstrating this on the Graffito website).

I think this ScrapBook is a great example of just how simple it can be to design and make custom eNoteBooks or ScrapBooks for projects and events with bookleteer. Using simple and cheap tools like the PoGo printer, its possible to capture and print images using mobile phones (or cameras via USB) which can be stuck in and notes written around them. Whether its for festivals, art events, schools projects, field research or sports events, its possible to create beautiful and engaging ScrapBooks ‘in the field’ – as they are happening – that can be shared with anyone afterwards.

Get in touch if you’d like us to design a way of creating tangible souvenirs like this for your project or event.

One of my favourite sets of Story Cubes is the Pharmaceutical Cubes created by Kenneth Goldsmith in 2008.

Inspired and intrigued by the extensive warnings and disclaimers that accompany advertisements of pharmaceutical drugs, he found that these documents sometimes covered 43 pages or almost 7000 words. Kenneth took six of these documents and re-formatted them for the Story Cubes. Fitting all of the text on one cube meant that the font had to be reduced to 1-point. When justified and coloured the result is a set of unreadable Story Cubes created entirely out of words.

Describing the ideas behind the cubes and their construction Kenneth writes:

“I have often talked about how today in writing, quantity has trumped quality; it is the writer’s job to manage the amount of available language. In sculpting these documents, I found my perfect material. Squeezed into 1-point type, then justified, I created columns of unreadable texts: words as texture. When folded into cubes, these warnings – secretly embedded into the pills we take – are reconstituted into three-dimensional forms, creating a new type of placebo.”

I love the idea of words as texture or words as material. It places writing firmly in the realm of craft and making, reminding us that through the length and flow of the text writers are shaping books as much as any designer. For example, these images by Dave McKean would probably look quite different with more or less text on the page. It’s also a reminder that when I’m thinking about the form of the eBook and Story Cubes with projects such as pop-up eBooks and cube cameras I shouldn’t forget about words entirely..

Read more by Kenneth Goldsmith about his inspiration and download the Story Cubes at diffusion.org.uk

And now I’m off on holiday for a few days and Hazem is going to be writing for the bookleteer blog while I’m gone. I think I’ll let him introduce himself.. Enjoy!

Today’s post is another presentation I heard at Be2camp Brum 2010 last week. (It was truly an inspiring and thought-provoking day!) Tales of Things was presented by Andy Hudson-Smith from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL. Tales of Things explores social memory and asks what happens if we can tag objects in our everyday environment and track these objects – even after we’ve passed them on to someone else.

Entering details of an object into the Tales of Things website allows you to generate a unique QR code for that item which can be printed out and attached to the object. When the QR code is ‘read’ by a camera the web page for that object is triggered. Because Be2Camp Brum was loosely focused around the theme of libraries Andy used tagging books as an example, suggesting that tagged books would be able to use Twitter to keep previous owners up to date with the book’s current location and status.

The Tales of Things website suggests that:

“The project will offer a new way for people to place more value on their own objects in an increasingly disposable economy. As more importance is placed on the objects that are already parts of people’s lives it is hoped that family or friends may find new uses for old objects and encourage people to think twice before throwing something away.”

Promoting the sharing and exchange of objects in this way is obviously interesting in the context of bookleteer and I did actually tag a couple of eBooks with QR codes generated by Tales of Things for Pitch Up & Publish 10: Augmented Reading a few weeks back. Perhaps it’s time for me to go back and revisit that and see where it might lead..

If you want to read more about the project see here, or if you just want to get on and tag your stuff then look here..

Alison Smith, the founder of Pesky People spoke at Be2camp Brum 2010 last week and gave us a sense of the difficulties faced by deaf and disabled people everyday as they access the web. For example, very few online videos are subtitled making them often inaccessible to deaf people. As this was an ‘unconference’ about where the built environment meets Web 2.0 architects didn’t get off the hook either as she pointed out that fire alarm systems that rely purely on sound can easily be missed by deaf people and illustrated the difficulties that even supposedly accessible toilets raise for disabled people. She also showed this short film imagining equal access for deaf criminals..

I found this a powerful presentation and it certainly made me realise once again how much I take for granted and how easy it is for this to slip into design decisions that unintentionally marginalise deaf and disabled people. And if you’re a web designer and a warm and fuzzy feeling of being good to fellow humans isn’t enough to persuade you that we should work towards accessibility for everyone then Alison pointed out there is also a legal responsibility to make your website accessible…

Lots more information on the Pesky People website including Alison’s Top Tips for maximising the accessibility of your website.

And if you want to add subtitles to your videos then Alison suggested checking out the accessible media player provided by The Workshop.

Continuing yesterday’s library theme, I thought I’d tell you about Nick Booth’s (from Podnosh) talk at Be2camp Brum 2010 last week. Nick asked, what could a librarian do if their libraries close as a result of digital technologies?

Nick roved the audience collecting answers while Alex Hughes represented them as cartoon images drawing live onstage.

Answers from the audience suggested that librarians carry out searches, that they act as signposts pointing people towards the information they are looking for, they host public meetings, they have indexing and cataloguing skills, they provide social contact.

Two answers didn’t make it onto the picture. One was that librarians watch over a quiet and neutral space and the other was that they watch over a potential dating space. Perhaps these didn’t make it into the cartoon because these are roles played by the library building as much as the librarian. To me this suggests that spaces have important social roles to play as well as people. If mobilising services means losing these spaces then I wonder what the social consequences of this might be? I feel that this is in some way related to the discussion we’ve been having about the role of books and eReaders. From finding that books have a number of roles that eReaders haven’t taken on I wonder if this is also the case for libraries and librarians where the relationship between the two has a very particular role beyond the obvious one of being a place where you go to borrow books.

About a month ago I mentioned that Alice was spending the week in Covent Garden as part of the Seven Days in Seven Dials project organised by Dan Thompson of the Empty Shops Network. For a week ten artists and thirty young people employed on placements in some of London’s leading cultural institutions used 18 Short’s Gardens as a studio. During the week the group explored the area gathering local stories, histories and connections and captured a snapshot of life in Seven Dials in film, sound, photography and writing.

Three books made by participants in the project are now available to download at diffusion.org.uk.

Seven Days in Seven Dials: A week in the life of London’s Cultural Quarters, documents the project and its workshops describing the partners, artists and participants. Snapshots of the area, photographs of the making of the Seven Streets in Seven Dials film, notes and sights from A Walk Round the Cultural Quarter and pictures of the recording of the audio tour come together to give a sense of a lively area and action-packed week.

Photographs by Amelia Martin, From Seven Days in Seven Dials: Photography

Seven Days in Seven Dials: Photography shows work from the photography workshop. Photographs of the area taken by 8 workshop participants show details of architecture, food, people and signs.

Map and sights from The Alternative, Whistle Stop Tour of the West End Cultural Quarter

The Alternative, Whistle Stop Tour of the West End Cultural Quarter acts as a guide book to the area and takes you on a tour of the Culture Quarter. Written by participants the eBook combines photographs, navigational directions and local trivia including financial scandals, martinis and phone boxes.

The Seven Streets in Seven Dials film and podcasts of the audiotour can be heard on www.emptyshopsradio.com

Over the weekend I found myself thinking – what if eBooks (for eBook readers not the bookleteer type of eBooks..) become the dominant way of reading? What will this mean for people who buy secondhand books?

It’s clear that many people are thinking about the possibilities of secondhand eBooks – and that this fits in with the 3 ways of sharing I wrote about last week. In their posts Nick Harkaway on Future Book and Chris Meadows at teleread discuss how secondhand eBooks aren’t currently possible because of their intangibility (when you download an eBook you essentially ‘lease’ the code which you can’t legally pass onto anyone else) and because secondhand eBooks are indistinguishable from new eBooks (so their value doesn’t decrease in the same way over time). Which is very interesting but I feel it doesn’t really address the potential social effect of increasing dominance of eBooks except to mention that the lack of secondhand eBooks is bad news for second-hand booksellers. And that’s true.. but I think it’s also bad news for second-hand book readers..

What if you can’t afford full-price books? Textbooks especially can be prohibitively expensive and often aren’t needed for more than the duration of the course. At the moment the cost of the book can be regained in part by selling the book on when you graduate. This option will be lost.. As will the option to buy a secondhand textbook for less than full-price. Or what if you’re a teenager beginning to explore the wide world of literature – secondhand bookshops are fantastic sources for classic books at low-cost. Will eBooks be able to match this? Not to mention of course that the teenager would have to be able to afford an eReader in the first place..

Perhaps this will all work itself out in the future when the entire publishing / reading experience has become digital and eReaders are as accessible as library cards. However, I imagine there’s going to be a transition before this happens that might need to be negotiated if secondhand book readers aren’t going to lose out.

I took the photo above in the Kenrokuen gardens, Kanazawa. We were standing beside the lake at the centre of these beautiful and historic gardens when I saw these two ladies. Standing side-by-side one lady was sketching what she could see using a pencil and paper notebook, the other was using her mobile phone to photograph the same view.

I was reminded of this picture when I read this post suggesting that pen and paper are mightier than the laptop. It describes a meeting of high-powered business men in which paper notebooks outnumbered the electronic version. The blog author, David Hornik, describes what he sees as the advantages of a paper notebook.

“Notebooks have certain enviable characteristics. They are instant on — even faster than a laptop with a solid state drive. They have virtually unlimited storage — just boot a new notebook when the pages are filled. And they perform better than tape for archival storage. Direct sunlight is no problem for a bright white piece of paper. And power management is rarely a problem (although your pen may run out of ink). Notebooks don’t require any connectivity. They aren’t susceptible to viruses. And they are highly portable. [1]

[1] I realize Notebooks aren’t perfect. They perform about as well as laptops when exposed to the elements. They are a terrible collaboration tool. And I have yet to see an effective way to backup your notebooks.”

Obviously, this is a relevant topic for bookleteer which uses digital processes to produce paper notebooks and it got me thinking – what are the pluses and minuses of paper vs computer notebooks?

I love my laptop but I don’t carry it more than I have to because it’s heavy (well, heavier than a paperback book), it’s precious – I don’t want it stolen or lost, and it contains *everything* – I don’t want my photos, dissertation, emails, music and to-do lists destroyed by a wayward cup of tea! On the plus side it contains *everything* and I never find I’ve left something important at home. My paper notebooks, on the other hand, are lightweight and tend to be more focused – a work notebook, a sketchbook, a project notebook.. And they hold stuff too – flower petals, tickets, business cards and so on. They’re still vulnerable to a spilt cup of tea but the consequences are probably not so serious.

So perhaps it’s not so much about ‘better’ or ‘worse’ but about being the most appropriate object for the situation or person.

What do you think? Do you prefer paper or computer notebooks? Any opinions welcome..

As if to emphasise James Bridle‘s point that books-as-objects act as souvenirs of the reading time, a few days ago I came across the blog bookshelf porn. The premise of the blog is simple – it shows photographs of bookshelves, contributed by readers, and adds a new picture of two every day. But I never would have imagined the variety of book shelves that exist, or how beautiful they look when they are collected together in this way.

This isn’t all about aesthetics – this is a blog with a message. While there’s very little text on the site occasionally, in between the photographs, there is a quote such as this one from The New Yorker’s The Book Bench writing about Bookshelf porn:

“Featuring a book on your bookshelf is akin to displaying a trophy. You’ve accomplished something in reading a book; it feels like a victory. The opportunity to display your literary conquests in unique or unexpected ways is something I will greatly miss with e-readers.”

This message – that bookshelves have a beauty and purpose that is not found in e-readers – is carried across the site. And looking at the photos I couldn’t really argue with that, however, I am excited to see how e-readers might begin to address that challenge…