In April of 2012 a group of people got together at a farm in Wales to give and listen to a a series of lectures designed to inspire the audience to go and do amazing things. It's called the Go Lectures, and this one is James Bridle, publisher, writer and artist.
Bridle helped create Nick Cave's enhanced book, The Death of Bunny Monro, which coordinated the text with the audio book, so you could switch between reading the text and listening to Nick Cave read it to you. He also wrote a special sound track for it. Bridle also was the first to publish a book of his Tweets ("I'm sorry," he says on the video.)
What I like is that he's being very playful in exploring the boundaries between traditional publishing and digital, between the internet and the real world. Anybody can do the kind of thing he talks about. You can use Print on Demand technology to have a run of only ten books, for instance, in which you create a record of your ideas or experiment with something, and the costs will be minimal. Naturally you won't make a lot of (or possibly any) money, but it could also be a way to prototype a book that you will later publish in larger numbers. Doing this digitally is even easier.
The lecture is 20 minutes long so get yourself a cup of coffee and settle in. If you don't want to watch the video, some of his key points are below the video. I appreciated him more as the presentation went on, so give it at least five minutes, or just jump five mintues into the video.
Key Points:
Adding random bits of other media doesn't make a book better. Don't do it just because you can, do it because it truly enhances the work.
Two things people value in physical books: you can write your name in the front of them; they can become souvenirs of an experience.
Creating a tangible (hard copy) version of information on the internet allows us to examine and experience it in different ways. For instance, he published several volumes of a book consisting of all the versions of an article on the War in Iraq published on Wikipedia. By reading each one in order you can see how the narrative was shaped and how it changed over time.
To me, the biggest thing to take away is that we now have the freedom to play with, explore, and apply a huge range of media. The challenge is to keep up with what it can do and figure out how to use it meaningfully.
(Want to expand your own creativity? Get my latest book, "Creativity Now," published by Pearson and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)
