Um Milhão de Penguins / A Million Penguins

From A Million Penguins Research Report, by Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas, 24th April 2008, Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK:
'In February 2007, Penguin Books and De Montfort University launched A Million Penguins, a collaborative novel open to anyone who wanted to help write it. The novel was to be created on MediaWiki, the same software as Wikipedia, with a similar ethos of collective authoring but the added spice of a risky experiment in the heartland of commercial publishing. "Can a community write a novel?" asked Penguin Digital Publisher Jeremy Ettinghausen. "Let‘s find out…"
Seeded with a first line taken from a volume in the Penguin Classics series, the wiki invited contributions over a five week period. The result may not have been a novel as we know it, but it certainly produced a community of collaborators who created what John Mackinson, the Chief Executive of Penguin Books, called "not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history".
The Penguin wikinovel, as it came to be known, touched a nerve in many quarters of the literary world and provoked great excitement in the social media community. The level of reaction in the media and across the web showed that there was a real interest in the project despite the fact that many critics dismissed it as a "PR stunt", "badly written" or, in the words of Jordan Jack writing in the Yale Herald "the worst book I‘ve ever read".
Linux.com solicited the views of Douglas Rushkoff, and the Internet guru was not optimistic: "A Million Penguins looks like fun, but it's still likely to remain more a million penguins than a cohesive or coherent bird", says Rushkoff, who points out that every book needs its author.
Other commentators suggested that the wiki was likely to be a failure, albeit a "delightful" one.
It was certainly unorthodox. The authors who came together were not the usual writerly stereotypes scribbling away alone in attics, but an intriguing mix of "gardeners" intent on nurturing the novel; "vandals" determined to ruin it, and "performers" hoping to make it showcase for their talents. What they created together turned out to be quite unique. Later Ettinghausen would blog: "as the project evolved I think I stopped thinking about it as a literary experiment and started thinking about it more as a social experiment".
A year on, he now says "it‘s the best thing I‘ve ever done … but I would never do it again".'

Em Fevereiro de 2007, a Penguin Books e a De Montfort University (Leicester, Reino Unido) lançaram A Million Penguins , um romance colectivo aberto a todos os que quisessem ajudá-lo a escrever. O romance seria criado em MediaWiki, o mesmo software utilizado para a Wikipedia, de acordo com uma ética de colaboração semelhante à utilizada pela famosa enciclopédia on line mas com a novidade de introduzir um elemento de risco e experimentação no âmago da indústria editorial. “Será que uma comunidade de autores pode criar um romance?” questionou Jeremy Ettinghausen, o Editor para o Digital da Penguin, “Vamos descobrir!”.
Com o ponto de partida dado por uma citação retirada de um dos volumes de clássicos da Penguin, a wiki foi aberta a contribuições durante um período de 5 semanas. O resultado poderá não se assemelhar a um romance tal como os conhecemos, mas produziu certamente uma comunidade de colaboradores que criou o que John Mackinson, o Chief Executive da Penguin Books, chamou “não o romance mais lido, mas o romance mais escrito de toda a História”. O romance-wiki da Penguin, como acabou por ficar conhecido, abalou muitos dos quadrantes do mundo literário e provocou um grande entusiasmo na comunidade dos ‘social media’.
As repercussões nos media e através da web provaram que havia um interesse genuíno pelo projecto, apesar de muitos críticos reduzirem todo o projecto a uma “manobra de Relações Públicas”, “má literatura” ou ainda, nas palavras de Jordan Jack no Yale Herald: “o pior livro que alguma vez li”.
Linux.com pediu a opinião de Douglas Rushkoff e o guru da Internet não foi nada optimista: “A Million Penguins é muito divertido mas muito provavelmente continuará a ser um grande grupo de aves sem nunca se chegar a transformar num animal uno e único”, disse Rushkoff chamando a atenção para o facto de todos os livros precisarem de um autor. Outros comentadores sugeriram que a wiki estava destinada ao fracasso, embora um esplendoroso fracasso. Foi certamente uma iniciativa muito pouco ortodoxa. Os autores que congregou não representavam o arquétipo do escritor isolado no seu sótão, mas formavam antes um grupo de “jardineiros” empenhados em alimentarem o romance; “vândalos” determinados a boicotá-lo; e “exibicionistas” alimentando esperanças de dar a conhecer os seus talentos. O que criaram em conjunto acabou por se transformar em algo de fora de vulgar. Mais tarde, Ettinghausen escreveria no seu blog: “à medida que o projecto evoluía deixei de pensar nele como numa experiência literária e mais como uma experiência social". Um ano depois, diria que “foi a melhor coisa que fiz... mas não a voltaria a fazer”.

Faber Classics: Print On Demand

"Faber is creating a new imprint that will make out-of-print classics available through print on demand. Faber Finds launches on 2nd June with 100 titles, and aims to publish a further 20 titles every month. (...)
The books, priced from £9 upwards depending on length, will be printed by Anthony Rowe Ltd, with text reset by Libre Digital. The cover designs will be automatically generated, with an algorithm creating illustrated borders around the title. (...)
The books will be available through cus­tomer order from booksellers and through all the major web players, as well as from a new ­wiki-style website at http://www.faberfinds.co.uk/, which will encourage a community to form around the project." (theBookseller, via LerBlog)

The Night Life of Trees (Tara Publishing)

Published by Tara Publishing, a book by Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai and Ram Singh Urveti.
(via Book by its cover)

"an alternative vision of what is possible"

6,000,000 impressions: handcrafting the book experience is the name of the exhibition taking place at St Bride Library in London from 9 May to 14 June around Tara Publishing, an Indian publisher specialized in handmade books:
"A pioneering project from Tara Publishing, India, is the creation of books made entirely by hand, from the paper to the printing and binding. Content, design and craft: all of these come in to our play with the possibilities of the book. Inspired by older forms, we enjoy transforming the richness of Indian visual arts traditions – through contemporary design and artisanal expertise – into fine bookmaking.
So author, artist and book designer work closely with an organised community of book craftsmen. Whether screen printed by hand on handmade paper, or letter-pressed with tipped in pictures, beaded strings and special boxes, each book is individually made, yet matches the price and quality of a mass produced title. The challenge lies in how many times a book has to be handled, while still maintaining quality and perfect printing.
Today our printing unit is a bustling workshop, run on fair trade practices, employing 12 skilled printers and binders. We have so far created a total of 120,000 handmade books worldwide. Our publishing partners range from museums like the Paul Getty Trust in the US, to design houses like Corraini in Italy. Since each page of every book we have ever made is an original print – screen-printed individually this works out to about 6,000,000 impressions in the service of handcrafting the book experience.
The idea is a daring one, and we believe our success is largely due to the dialogue we encourage between experiment and communication, creativity and manufacture. Ours is an alternative vision of what is possible."

Helpdesk

(via InfoNorway)

Blood on paper: the art of the book

De 15 de Abril a 29 de Junho de 2008 no Victoria & Albert Museum de Londres:

"At a time when the notion of the book is challenged by the advent of the screen and computer, this exhibition aims to show the extraordinary ways in which the book has been treated by leading artists of today and the recent past. Blood on Paper will focus on new and contemporary work, and on books where the artist has been the driving force in conception and design. The past twenty years have seen outstanding work by some of the most influential and respected artists of our time.
The exhibition selects books which reveal both the creative process and the soul of the artist in question. Some are iconic works which established the genre of the livre d’artiste after the Second World War; others are surprises from artists who are best known for their work with other sorts of material. Formats and production methods vary enormously. Some works show the virtuosity of traditional ‘hot metal’ printing techniques, others take the commercially-produced book as the starting point of their statements, yet others produce stunning large-scale installations and sculptures.
Seen together, these artists’ books show a truly astonishing inventiveness, many on display to the public for the first time. Artists represented range from Matisse, Picasso and Braque to Anselm Kiefer, Anish Kapoor and Georg Baselitz. Almost all notable artists of the 20th and 21st centuries have produced books, or works that refer to books: those represented will also include Balthus, Louise Bourgeois, Daniel Buren, Anthony Caro, Eduardo Chillida, Francesco Clemente, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Sol Lewitt, Richard Long , Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and many others whose names are synonymous with art today. "
(via LerBlog)

Teia de histórias / Web of stories

217 Babel Street é um projecto on line de escrita colectiva aberta que usa como metáfora o conceito de um prédio à beira-mar em que a porta de cada apartamento leva a uma história diferente. Os quatro autores - Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod, Jeff Noon e William Shaw - trabalham independentemente uns dos outros. Novas páginas são criadas a partir de palavras ou expressões marcadas como links. Os autores podem interromper-se uns aos outros e retomar histórias que não sejam suas, levando-as em direcções diferentes. De mês para mês a narrativa muda, alargando-se a novos quartos, novas personagens e novas situações, criando novos percursos para os leitores. A porta da rua permite aceder a todos os apartamentos, onde as diferentes histórias têm início. Todas as personagens mencionadas numa determinada história são listadas ao fundo da página e dão acesso a uma página com a sua descrição, bem como uma lista de todas as páginas em que aparecem.

"217 Babel Street is a web of interconnected stories set in a seaside apartment block. There are twenty apartments in the building. Each of the four writers works independently of the others, starting off stories from different rooms. New pages are produced by creating a link from a word or a phrase on a page that already exists. Writers can interrupt and take over each other’s stories, taking them in different directions. Month by month the narrative changes, expanding into new rooms, characters and situations, creating new pathways for readers to explore.
The front door allows access to any of the apartments, where the different stories begin. All characters mentioned in a given episode are listed at the bottom of the page. Clicking on these character links takes the reader to a page describing the character, as well as a list of all the pages in which they appear."

(via ifbook)

Capital Mundial do Livro / World book capital

Durante um ano, de 23 de Abril de 2008 a 22 de Abril de 2009, Amesterdão será a Capital Mundial do Livro, uma honra atribuída à capital holandesa pela UNESCO. O Bookbid apresenta toda a programação.

From April 23rd 2008 to April 22nd 2009, Amsterdam will be World Book Capital, a distinction awarded to the Dutch capital by the UNESCO. The Bookbid presents all the events.

The machine that made us

Um documentátio da BBC4 em seis partes sobre Gutenberg com Stephen Fry como anfitrião a tentar recrear a primeira de todas as impressoras. Aqui está já a primeira parte. E aqui podem ver a segunda, terceira, quarta, quinta e sexta.

A six part BBC4 documentary on Gutenberg hosted by Stephen Fry set to reproduce the very first printing machine. Here's the first part and then the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth.

(via Kottke.org)

The future of books

Kyle Bean, Brighton, UK, 2008