Animated Taylor Mali Poem
/
'One Book, One Twitter' launches worldwide book club with Neil Gaiman
/Last year Edinburgh residents tackled Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaur adventure The Lost World, last month Dubliners were taking a collective look at The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Brighton’s readers are currently engrossed in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel From Russia with Love. Now a new project is hoping to take the “one book, one city” initiative a step further, and get the whole world reading the same novel.
The brainchild of Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing and a contributing editor at Wired magazine, the One Book, One Twitter scheme launches tomorrow. Readers have been voting for the book which they’ll be tackling for the past month, with Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods eventually triumphing over titles including Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
“The aim with One Book, One Twitter is – like the one city, one book programme which inspired it – to get a zillion people all reading and talking about a single book. It is not, for instance, an attempt to gather a more selective crew of book lovers to read a series of books and meet at established times to discuss,” explained Howe at Wired.com. “Usually such ‘Big Read’ programs are organised around geography. Seattle started the trend for collective reading in 1998 when zillions of Seattlites all read Russell Banks’s book, Sweet Hereafter. Chicago followed suit with To Kill a Mockingbird a few years later. This Big Read is organised around Twitter, and says to hell with physical limitations.”
Gaiman, whose novel follows the story of ex-convict Shadow, released from prison and embarking on a bizarre journey across America with the mysterious Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a former god, said he thought One Book, One Twitter was “a great idea – a sort of worldwide book club”.
He was, however, slightly concerned about the choice of American Gods, describing himself as “half-pleased and half-not”, because it’s “such a divisive book”. “Some people love it, some sort of like it, and some people hate it … It’s not a book I’d hand out to everyone, because the people who don’t know anything about what I’ve written and who hate it – who might have loved Stardust, or Neverwhere, or The Graveyard Book or Sandman – probably won’t go and look any further,” the author explained on his blog.
“But it’s happened, I’m kind of thrilled that I get to help kick off something this new, and I’m going to do all I can to help. Which, today, will consist of making sure I let all the publishers around the world who have American Gods in print know about this, and, over the next few months, sending helpful or apologetic tweets to people who are stuck, offended, or very, very confused.”
On Twitter at @1B1T2010 – with more than 1,500 followers days after launching – and hashtag #1b1t, the One Book, One Twitter project begins officially tomorrow.
via guardian.co.uk
Curious to see how many people follow this. I loved the book. http://amzn.to/chfk08
The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books : The New Yorker
/According to Grandinetti, publishers are asking the wrong questions. “The real competition here is not, in our view, between the hardcover book and the e-book,” he says. “TV, movies, Web browsing, video games are all competing for people’s valuable time. And if the book doesn’t compete we think that over time the industry will suffer. Look at the price points of digital goods in other media. I read a newspaper this morning online, and it didn’t cost me anything. Look at the price of rental movies. Look at the price of music. In a lot of respects, teaching a customer to pay ten dollars for a digital book is a great accomplishment.”
In Grandinetti’s view, book publishers—like executives in other media—are making the same mistake the railroad companies made more than a century ago: thinking they were in the train business rather than the transportation business. To thrive, he believes, publishers have to reimagine the book as multimedia entertainment. David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, says that his company is racing “to embed audio and video and other value-added features in e-books. It could be an author discussing his book, or a clip from a movie that touches on the book’s topic.” The other major publishers are working on similar projects, experimenting with music, video from news clips, and animation. Publishers hope that consumers will be willing to pay more for the added features. The iPad, Rosenthal says, “has opened up the possibility that we are no longer dealing with a static book. You have tremendous possibilities.”
via newyorker.com
Must read article available in full at the link above.
The Requisite End-Of-Year Lists Continued
/Continuing the end-of-year, end-of-decade list compilation started here, interspersed with some of the best creative work of the year.
• The Awesome Brain Pickings Best Of 2009.
• Discovered in the Arjan Writes music blog, here is MPHO:
• The Big Picture, Christmas 2009.
• The Decade In Words.
• The New York Times The Year In Culture Slideshow.
• Inception Trailer:
• Wired’s The 15 Most Influential Games Of The Decade: Portal is still my favorite.
• BBH Labs’ A Quick Glance At 10 Of Their Best Blog Posts.
• Milton Glaser’s Ten Things I’ve Learned: From 2001 but still relevant.
• DJ Earworm’s United States Of Pop 2009: Amazing. Do you recognize all the references?
• Ten Gadgets That Defined The Decade.
• LA Times’ Top 10 Moments In Social Media In 2009.
• The Impossible Cool: A fantastic blog curating incredible images that are the essence of the impossibly cool.
• The Dieline: Another gorgeous blog curating the best in package design.
• Netflix’s Top Ten Most Rented Movies.
• The Year In Picture Shows.
• Vimeo’s 25 Favorite Videos Of 2009: Including this.
• Fuel Your Creativity’s Best of 2009 In The Creative Industry.
• Danger Room’s Top Ten Stories From A World Gone Nuts.
• Epitaphs For Our Favorite Folded Magazines Of 2009.
• Honda’s Everything Ad: Let’s celebrate the brilliance of good editors.
• The Decade In Communications Technology.
• Charles Isherwood’s Best of 2009 Theater.
• Slate’s Troy Patterson Selects 26 Cultural Moments Of The Decade: From A to Z.
• Macworld’s Top Ten Tech Stories Of The Decade.
• Picturing The Past 10 Years.
• 2009 NYC Holiday Window Displays.
• New Scientist’s Favorite Picture Galleries: Featuring a gallery of snapshots from an imploding star.
• Macworld’s 2009 Game Hall Of Fame.
• The Pogie Awards For The Year’s Best Tech Ideas.
• Top 10 Documentaries of 2009.
• Best Of The Decade’s Architecture.
• Fimoculous’ Year In Review: A mega list of eccentric lists, including a list of the worst renderings.
• Top Ten Book Cover Designs.
• The Decades 14 Biggest Design Moments.
• Ads We Hate, The Year’s Worst Commercials.
• The Year For Creatives.
• The Best of Open Culture 2009.
• Flicker’s Your Best Shots of 2009, The Seasons.
• KCRW’s The Business: The Hollywood Year That Was [Podcast, iTunes Link]
And the predictions:
• JWT’s 100 To Watch in 2010.
• 50 Trends For 2010.
• 32 Of Our Most Anticipated 2010 Entertainments.
And lastly:
• Ringing The New Year With A Drink For Each Time Zone.
J.K. Rowling And The Benefits of Failure
/“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling gave the commencement speech at Harvard a year and a half ago, but it feels more relevant today. She is delightful and in 20 minutes gives damn good advice on imagination, empathy, creativity and above all failure, heart-breaking, empowering failure. And how to get up and keep going.