Categories
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.

Categories
publishing on demand

Crowdfunded Publishing with bookleteer : a concept

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.

Categories
inspiration

Julie Myers: Trail Song

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.

Categories
inspiration

Evil Mad Scientists: Paper Circuits

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..


Attaching the foil to the image of the circuit

Categories
events

Don’t Forget – PU&P 10: Augmented Reading Tomorrow!

Just a little reminder that we’re running Pitch Up & Publish 10: Augmented Reading tomorrow afternoon between 2 and 5pm.

We already have some great people signed up and there is still room for a few more so do drop us a line if you’d like to come along. You can reach us at bookleteer at bookleteer.com

The PU&P session will explore the many different experiences of making books that augment reading. Through conversation and hands-on making we aim to discover how digital technologies might inform the design of future reading experiences.

Date: Thursday 1 July 2010
Time: 2pm – 5pm
Location: Proboscis Studio, 4th Floor, 101 Turnmill Street, London EC1M 5QP
Map : http://bit.ly/PEBbb
Cost: Free!

Categories
inspiration

Brian Dettmer: Book Autopsies

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.


Brian Dettmer is represented by Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, Toomey-Tourell Fine Art, San Francisco and Haydee Rovirosa. There are more images on these websites and on Brian’s Flickr stream.

Cut-outs, book artists and bookleteer

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?

Categories
inspiration

Yuken Terya: My works have a right to simply be beautiful

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.

Categories
examples publishing on demand

Printed Ethnographic Notebooks

Last summer I collaborated with James Leach (Anthropology Dept, University of Aberdeen), Lissant Bolton and Liz Bonshek (Ethnographic Dept, British Museum) to help document the visit to London of two people from Reite village, Papua New Guinea – Porer Nombo and Pinbin Sisau. Porer and Pinbin had been invited to come to the British Museum to help identify and provide information about hundreds of the objects from their locality which are in the BM’s collection. It was an amazing privilege and an education to spend time with them watching how their knowledge of their world was rooted in a multi-sensory memory, triggered as much by touch as by seeing. Several eNotebooks were completed which were immediately scanned and printed to make further copies for Porer and Pinbin to take back home with them, and were published on our diffusion site.

On Sunday (June 20th) I got an email from James asking if it was possible to have some copies of the eNotebooks we made last year printed up via bookleteer’s PPOD service for him to take to Reite village on his next trip to Papua New Guinea in July. I just had to remake the scanned-in versions into new eBooks with bookleteer (which took about an hour for all 4), and I then sent the eBooks to press first thing on Tuesday morning. In a super quick turnaround time, I collected the printed versions this morning (Friday 25th).

Porer & Pinbin’s visit was part of the larger Melanesia Project, a conference for which happens next week (June 28th & 29th) at UCL’s Anthropology Department. We’re looking forward to sharing the printed eBooks with colleagues there and getting their feedback and ideas on using bookleteer and the eBooks as innovative ways to capture and share field work, both with each other and with the communities they work with and study.

We’d love to hear from other anthropologists and ethnographers (and any other disciplines too) interested in using bookleteer and the eBooks as creative and shareable notebooks for fieldwork – please get in touch.

Categories
inspiration

Guilherme Martins: Printable Paper Arduino

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..

Categories
inspiration

Pop-up eBook update..

I’m only at Proboscis one day a week and what with blog posts and organising the Pitch Up & Publish on Augmented Reading my own eBook-and-Story-Cube-as-object experiments have taken a bit of a back seat. This week though I found time to work on my pop-up eBook and have now completed the two eBooks that contain the pop-up bases and the pop-up figures.

All of the pop-ups I’m using are downloads from Robert Sabuda’s website. To put them into the eBook I had to cut all of the pop-up base images in half because they will span two eBook pages. These split images then had to be aligned vertically and horizontally so that they were at the correct spacing for the pop-up figures. This is the point I’ve now reached.

The cut-out butterfly figure ready to be attached to the butterfly page in the pop-up base eBook

The idea is that you will download both eBooks and cut out the pop-up figures and fold and stick them onto the right page of the pop-up base eBook. I’m also going to be putting together an eBook of instructions for you to follow. But that’s something for next week..