"Though I lost the original notebooks, I still have the journal. It stood in a complex relationship with, and served as a feeder for, the actual writing of Climbers, which went on concurrently elsewhere; also as a record of one of happiest and most productive times of my life. The pages were carefully numbered. The photographs, especially polaroids, have become faint and dark-looking at the same time, tinged with purples and greens not present in the lived scene." Beautiful documentation of work in progress.

"Bear in Space has an unusual premise for a children's book. It is the fictional story of a bear who shares film of his vacation to the Moon with his animal friends, but that is not the unusual part." Bear faked his trip; his photographs are clearly manipulated. The child should pick up on that, but will Bear's friends? A Russian tale of space travel from 1970.

An excellent post by Priest on lists, and canons, and why you sometimes share your own. Also, strikingly, so much of this is the sf I have grown to love as an adult - the Le Guin, the Pohl, the Dick, and especially the Roberts. You make the list to stop it becoming sacred.

All very beautiful, but I like "Down and Out..." best.

"A not-so-long time ago there were no digital books. There were no Kindles or iPads. There were self-contained objects. Objects unnetworked. The only difference now is that they're touching, they're next to one another. The content is the same. But that small act of connection brings with it a potential sea change, change we'll explore as we continue to platform books." A huge thinkbomb from Craig.

"My next book is even stranger than my last. It's an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book's title, '10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10'... Despite it's relatively simple form and structure, the program produces a surprisingly intricate maze pattern using the C64's unique PETSCII graphical characters. The book discusses many aspects of this feat from different perspectives, including the history of mazes, porting, randomness, the BASIC language, and the Commodore 64 platform. It's interspersed with short "remarks" (get it, BASIC dorks?), among them discussions of assembly, the demoscene, and a variety of ports, including one I somehow wrote to run on the Atari 2600." I would like to buy this book.

"In publishing we now talk about immersive narrative, mainly because we are tense about the future of books. People who love reading are in it for exactly that: to soak themselves in story. To forget whenever possible that there even is a story outside the book, particularly the bubble-busting story of how the book was made. As a reader, I cling to the sense that this all but transcendent experience comes directly to me from one individual imagination. The feeling I have when reading fiction—of a single mind feeding me experience and sensation—is seldom articulated but incredibly powerful. As a reader, I don’t want fiction to be a group project." But, as the article points out, the role of the editor(s) means it always is. A lovely article about books, publishing and fiction.

David Markson left all the books he owned to New York's Strand bookshop; now, they are likely further spread. This blog collects annotations and commentary that people have found in books previously belonging to Markson. Brilliant.

"That’s why I like having these little printed books, or these little files of my notes, because I can literally pull up anything I want to remember from Moby Dick, and in repeating it, remember it. Annotating becomes a way to re-encounter things I’ve read for pleasure." Which is why I have a stack of eight books on my dining table, and more to come over the years - to be read, not just hoarded.

"Melville’s searing, wayward novel about obsession and the nature of evil becomes a twin-stick shooter for consoles. The twist? The playing field is 5000 miles wide, and there’s only one enemy." Christian is brilliant. (I'm pretty sure my links are full of 'Christian is brilliant' annotations)

"As a novelist, his ludic delight in finding new ways of playing with language — new ways of narrowing the ever-descending phalanx of cliché — is palpable in every sentence. So for all its contextual aberrance, this strange and disreputable book actually makes a certain kind of warped sense. And if for some reason you happen to be looking for a guide to arcade games of the early 1980s, you could probably do a lot worse." I knew of the book already - but this is a striking look at it.

"In my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology, at the start of the chapter on Carpentry (my name for making things that do philosophy), I talk about the chasm between academic writing (writing to have written) and authorship (writing to have produced something worth reading). But there's another aspect to being an author, one that goes beyond writing at all: book-making. Creating the object that is a book, that will have a role in someone's life—in their hands or their purses, around their mail, in between their fingers. Now, in this age of lowest common denominator digital and POD editions, it's time to stop writing books and to start making them." I am not totally sure I buy all of Bogost's argument, but I like his points explaining the role of artefacts. However, POD is weirder than he gives it credit.

"Mutual misunderstanding was not a new topic in fiction — or even in children’s fiction — but surely few explored it with Mayne’s insight, humour, gentle delicacy or subtlety: how children are not party to adult agendas, compromises, habits and assumptions; and of course vice versa, that in growing up adults have very often lost or set aside a valuable way of seeing the world. That there’s a thread of trust that marks the path everyone is treading, and that this thread is sometimes very fragile indeed. Can sympathetic intelligence and wisdom — wisdom precisely about such trust — sit alongside deep selfishness and a capacity to abuse? Well, yes, sometimes I think it can." Complex, thoughtful piece about William Mayne and difficult questions.

"I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a local celebrity." Books as a fluid!

An unexpected place for a Le Guin interview, but it's great nontheless.

"In this volume, people of diverse backgrounds -- tabletop game designers, digital game designers, and game studies academics -- talk about tabletop games, game culture, and the intersection of games with learning, theater, and other forms. Some have chosen to write about their design process, others about games they admire, others about the culture of tabletop games and their fans. The results are various and individual, but all cast some light on what is a multivarious and fascinating set of game styles."

Marvellous. Can't say any more - you need to read this (very) short story - but it's really, really lovely: shivers down the spine, and something heartwarming, all at once. And: set in a slightly magical part of the world.

"Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." Both the letters described, and Robin's point, are beautiful.

"I’m excited to announce that I’ve been contracted by O’Reilly to write a book about the Microsoft Kinect. The book is tentatively titled Making Things See: Computer Vision with the Microsoft Kinect, Processing, and Arduino. My goal is to introduce users to working with the Kinect’s depth camera and skeleton tracking abilities in their own projects and also to put those abilities in the wider context of the fields of gestural interfaces, 3D scanning, computer animation, and robotics." Nice. Joining this stuff together is *hard*, and getting it into the hands of designers, rather than programmers, is very important.

"Get great articles delivered to your Kindle without any extra effort." Curated content, delivered direct to your Kindle via the email interface. Will try this for a bit: it's a really obvious opening in the space, and scope for there to be many of these.

"However I am just as impressed but the extent in which Scarry’s work has in fact not dated very much at all. While the book covers an almost bafflingly broad range of occupations and includes sections on the extraction and transformation of raw materials, there is one notable omission: large-scale manufacturing. And without industry, from a Western perspective the book seems in fact almost presciently current. Some of the jobs the author describes have evolved, very few of them have all but disappeared (you can’t easily bump into a blacksmith, much less one who sells tractors); the texture of our cities has changed and those little shops have given way to larger chain stores; but by and large we still do the things that occupy Scarry’s anthropomorphic menagerie: we fix the sewers and serve the meals and cut down the trees and drive the trucks and cultivate the land and so forth. It’s almost as if Scarry made a conscious effort to draw only the jobs that could not be outsourced overseas, and had thus future-proofed the book for his domestic audience." I read this when I was very small, and loved it; fond memories, and sharp analysis

"I keep reading books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked. The imagination involved is staggering. I mean, literally." Ursula LeGuin on obscenity, swearing, and the way it's used on contemporary media. (LeGuin is someone who, for reference, has always used language precisely and carefully; she is not a prude, just bored of a lack of imagination.)

This large image (4400×2364 pixels) is completely marvellous: a genuine history, reaching back into trends from the dawn of literature, and with a healthy chunk of 19th century gothic/mystery in there. Makes me very happy, especially in terms of fond memories of books I've enjoyed.

"I have been an avid gamer since the advent of Pong in 1972. At their best, videogames strike me as a form of art. Like all art, they can augment outer reality and shape our inner reality—but they do this by the very nature of the fact that they are not reality but a Place Apart. Being awestruck at "Halo" does not entail awe any more than "grieving" for Cordelia entails grief. Rather, art at its most serious is a sort of exercise, a formative practice for life—like meditation, only more fun." WSJ review of Reality is Broken; negative, but acute.

“Cartography used to be both an art and a science. I wanted to return to that.” This was my present to myself, as a souvenir, from SF. Looking forward to reading it properly - especially all the areas I never had a chance to visit - and can already confirm the maps are gorgeous. But really, it's about the whole package.

"To celebrate the appearance of A Humument App on iPhone I shall shortly add a dozen or so newly revised pages." Awesome: the magically-changing book is taking shape.

"The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain. Here are some snapshots, month by month, of my marginalia from 2010." Marvellous stuff from Anderson - funny, wry, hard to argue with. I am not good at marginalia, resorting to dog-earing the bottom of a page, and later, trying to remember why.

"I want to love books, but if the publisher treats them merely as interchangeable units, where the details don’t matter so long as the bits, the “content”, is conveyed as cheaply as possible, then we may be falling out of love." Phil buys a new volume of Pepys, finds it's now being printed on-demand, and talks a little about the perceived quality of such books. In short: if you're not expecting it, and it's a change to the usual, it makes you feel a bit like the publisher doesn't care about it.

"Bookland is a fictitious country created in the 1980s in order to reserve a Unique Country Code (UCC) prefix for EAN identifiers of published books, regardless of country of origin, so that the EAN space can catalog books by ISBN rather than maintaining a redundant parallel numbering system." Awesome. Via Kim (who else?)

"When someone with a bad case fails to finish a book, they don’t start a new one; they go into a holding pattern, crippled by guilt over their failure and unable to let go and start over. All reading stops. People have confessed to me that it’s been months since they last picked up a book, because they still haven’t finished the last one." Yup. We really don't have to finish this book, sometimes.

"Nelson, as described by IDEO in the video above, does so much work for you. It throws multiple perspectives into the equation, killing the unreliable narrator with the gifts of foresight and hindsight. It does away with the unexplainable appeal of a surprising hit novel giving you a league table of books to pick from according to their “impact on popular opinion and debate.” You’ll struggle to form your own opinion as you jump through the layers that Nelson offers you, given a perspective like a student browbeaten by an overbearing A-Level tutor." I similarly disliked their attempts to not only redesign the book, but to try to redesign narrative, in "Alice" - as if people hadn't tried, and as if what narrative _really_ needed was just a good design firm to take a crack at it.

"More important: the game, Sand-dancer, is a good game. It is not the sort of example that exists to have one of everything in the manual. It is the sort of game that exists to make IF better. Aaron puts it together on your workbench. You can see the parts going in, and I don't mean rules and action constructs now; I mean character, background, voice, theme, and narrative drive. He explains what he's doing, and what each game element is for. He talks about story structure and shape of interactivity. He discusses what you have to do to get the player involved and what you have to do to put the player in control." This sounds great. Add-to-cart.

"The book assumes no prior knowledge of programming, but also doesn't treat I7 like a regular programming language: loops, for instance, are barely mentioned. In fact, Thinking in Inform 7 might have been a good title." This sounds great.

"The Bones gathers writing about fandom and family—about gamers, camaraderie, and memories— and ties them together where they meet: our dice. These are essays and anecdotes about the ways dice make us crazy, about the stakes we play for and the thrill we get from not knowing what the next roll will bring."

"I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people recently about how they bookmark stuff. It seems to be on a lot of peoples’ minds as more and more of our reading moves onto screens. So I thought I’d share a few things, and ask for some feedback." James on bookmarking and annotation - something I'm a big fan of.

"Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to." Answer: good things. Ben is awesome, and this work sounds great. (I can't quote a suitable passage, so George's intro will have to do).

"The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one. Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it." James, as ever, is very, very sharp. This is good.

"I keep coming back to EoPS (I am re-reading it as I write this) because it’s short, it’s easy reading, it’s funny, and much of its advice is timeless.  In a way, you could say its age is even a plus-point, because it makes it obvious which of the rules are of their time and which are fundamental." Sounds great.

Joe Moran on Daniel Miller's "The Comfort Of Things", which has gone straight onto my wishlist.

Solid illustration comedy gold, mainly from the 70s and 80s.

"I'm excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential. The illumination of, in the words of Richard Nash, that commonality between two people who have read the same book." Craig Mod, excellent as ever, on e-books. Whilst he mainly talks about type, his point runs far deeper.

"Philip K. Dick fans from around the world have contributed to this scanned collection of over 650 PKD book covers." Some of these are awesome, from the crazy french covers for VALIS to the German editions of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - retitled as "LSD-Astronauten".

"At some point, I begin to feel that I am carrying entire Latin American forests home with me. Also, I am afflicted with a terrible need to stop and write things down, at almost every corner, slowing my passage through the city and impeding motion. I am locked in this ridiculous two-step, unable to travel more than half a block before sitting down and writing out more, papering over the last thirty feet, dripping more ink onto the street: this absurd project, this incomprehensible, incompletable urge, this terror of forgetting and compulsion to record." Beautiful writing from James, which has been sitting on the "to link" pile for far too long.

"...books are souvenirs of themselves." dingdingding.

"In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad shouldn’t be Spider-Man 5, Ke$ha’s third album, or the ePub ver sion of Annabel Scheme. If that’s all we’ve got, it will mean that Apple suc ceeded at invent ing a new class of device… but we failed at invent ing a new class of content. In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad should be… jeez, you know, I think it should be art."

"But I think to succeed eReaders need to meet the needs, not just of the direct user, but of those around them, the friends and family who may not welcome their loved one’s absorption in this exciting new media. They are the “next largest context” within which the new device must win acceptance... The first question [with a digital device] is no longer “what are you reading?” It’s “what are you doing?” – a question that somehow already carries a hint of reproach."

"McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path." Sharp review of what sounds like a fascinating book; I particularly liked this quotation.

"Mattins is a daily reading, every weekday, no more than 5 minutes long. The 5 minute limit is imposed by Audioboo, which makes podcasting from an iPhone startlingly simple. Every morning over my mandatory first coffee I take a book down from the shelves, hit record, and read a short extract."

"The moment I walk into a bookstore I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it’s the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it’s the social reverence for the library-like quiet — you don’t yell in a bookstore, you’ll piss off the books." I never tire of linking to Michael Lopp.

"if the Choose Your Own Adventure books are just another Finite State Machine, it should be possible to use some of the same techniques to examine their structure." And so begins a lovely, lovely post on data visualisation, and what visualisation can tell us about the changing editorial strategy of CYOA books. Be sure to check out the "animations" at the top of the page. It's all very beautiful.

"Egmont Press and Penguin Publishing will launch a range of children's books onto the Nintendo DS in a licensing deal with entertainment software company Electronic Arts (EA). It is the first time that children's books have been developed specifically for the Nintendo DS platform in the UK." Ooh, that's kind of awesome.

"Some pages from Willard Cope Brinton's second book (1939)". Very, very lovely.

"I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books." Bookmarks, dedications, receipts, adverts. Lovely.

Russell on Joe Moran's new book, which I'm clearly going to have to read.

"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.

Haynes Manual for the Apollo 1 LM and CSM. Awesome.

"You've been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace's masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages1 ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat." Hmn. Maybe. I might want to read something else, though... but could be fun!

Well Played is now out, and can be read online and purchased from Lulu. It's exactly the sort of thing I've wanted for a while - a reader for videogames, and for the actual experiential side of them - and it's got some great authors contributing pieces on a host of games. Worth your time, for sure.

"Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Just for fun." The Penguin thing is a bit over-done, but there's a care and attention to detail here that really sets them apart.

"I'm looking forward to working with new, clever people and getting my hands dirty again. I'm charged with leading the Open Library into fresh, fun territory; to enlist many hands to make "a page on the web for every book ever published" a great resource. I'm thrilled to be working with Brewster Kahle and his crack team in an important time for books on the web." What a perfect hire. Can't wait to see what George brings to it.

"The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’" Lots of good quotations, including this, and also on fires.

Kevan is publishing parts of Diary of a Nobody on Twitter. Makes sense, really.

"The goal of this book is to help develop and define a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience. Video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis. By inviting contributors to look closely at specific video games and the experience of playing them, we hope to clearly show how games are well played." Looks fantastic - great selection of writers, great selection of titles, and what the games canon needs. More Like This, please!

"Tattoos from books, poetry, music, and other sources." As with all tattoos: some are misspelt, some are a bit blah, some are beautiful.

Jolly good, this, with lots of sensible points and a real clarity of thought for what otherwise could just be Powerpoint-by-numbers.

"The thing that caught my eye about the Unbook was the idea of accepting a book as a version: an evolving beast that spits out periodic iterations of itself before crawling away to mutate some more."

"This is not a book about the VCS, nor breakout, nor video games and video game culture; it is a chronicle of the experience of that entity we might call “the player.” Oddly, there is little I can take from it in terms of approaches to video gaming or thoughts on the VCS Breakout. But it did enlarge my perspective and help me think about physiological, cognitive, and, let us say, monomaniacal aspects of video game play. Nervous, very dreadfully nervous Sudnow has been, but why would I say that he is mad?" Sudnow passed away very recently; I really ought to read his book, more than ever.

"Something like: Trying to create a reading list that gives the best introduction to everything. This may change." Phil is trying to collect the Good Books in many fields. It's an interesting project, for sure; it'll also be interesting to see how it pans out.

"Slowly, over time, a page typeset in 1771 might start to get a whole new life, thanks to the growing authority we grant it through that elemental gesture of making a link." And this is why we need to empower the socialised book, not just through Google Books, but through the physical things themselves.

Olly Moss has now moved from movies to videogames, pastiching classic Penguin covers; the Goldeneye one is superb.

"Yesterday was the inaugural papercamp in London, alongside its big sister bookcamp. I presented a half bookish half paperish presentation about travel guides. What I forgot to mention or make explicit: how there are totally different stages and needs for guide books – especially pre-booking, pre-travel, during travel, during holiday. So here is, from memory, what I talked about, with a few additions:" This was jolly good, an a neat branching point between the Paper and the Books.

"A couple of other examples of this kind of thing we like, are the bookish experimentations of B.S. Johnson, whose second novel Alberto Angelo contains both stream-of-conciousness marginalia, and cut-through pages enabling the reader to see ahead - possibly the most radical act I know in experimental books." Yes! And which I bang on about interminably. I love this stuff.

This is for real, people. Redwood Shores or not, I'm scared.

"My Favorite Book Covers of 2008" Some I'd seen before; some I'd not. Some very beautiful things here.

"As editorial director of Ladybird Books, Douglas Keen, who has died aged 95, was responsible for the first experience of reading of millions of children." Myself included; I learned to read with Peter, Jane, and my Mum, sitting on my bedroom floor each morning.

"A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." Awesome.

"Wells has received insufficient credit as a writer of rhythmic, incantatory prose, long-breath paragraphs to cut against his tight journalistic reportage. The War of the Worlds makes the journey from sensationalist incident to moral parable. Wells predicts an era when fiction and documentary will be inseparable." Fantastic writing from Iain Sinclair on HG Wells.

"Following up on these overviews of the book industry, I thought I'd share some lessons I learned from publishing Bit Literacy." Some useful advice.

Interesting looking socially-oriented, UK-based, second-hand book sales. Probably need to poke this a bit more.