Code Meet Print

Given the the delayed SOPA/PIPA voting and Code Meet Print’s continued exploration of innovation across content experiences as well as commerce models, I thought it would be pertinent to assemble a different flavor of speakers for the next #CMPNY Meetup.*

A Call for Submissions: Please respond with ideas/suggestions or hopes/dreams of people who hold sway within media, publishing, IP law, technology, government, or anywhere at their intersections that might lend their expertise, perspectives, and/or invectives toward the state of affairs of content and its oscillating boundaries.

Perhaps one of these people is you, or a colleague, or a distant cousin?

I have some people in mind, but I think it’s time to hear more from you, those that make Code Meet Print excellent, thoughtful, engaging, cheeky. 

A possible Prompt: “Isn’t Piracy Missing the Point?”

Have at it, ladies and gentlemen.**

-GN

*Sometime in Middlemarch. Or the cruellest month.

**Feel free to post/share any pertinent SOPA/PIPA articles for our shared knowledge base here. Feel similarly about any invectives (yours or otherwise) thereof.

One of our (dear) Code Meet Print members, Mia Alvar, has a wonderful short story just published in the The Missouri Review winter issue. “‘The Miracle Worker’ is a part of a collection about Filipino exiles, immigrants and wanderers who uproot their families, settle on alien ground and struggle to connect across real and imagined borders,” says the author.

A year had passed since my husband, Ed, and I had moved from the Philippines to Bahrain, and still I thought of these three stories as “the” house—not “our” house, certainly not “my.” Expatriate families like ours were well-provided for: a car, a travel allowance, the promise of schooling if we were ever to have a child. Strangest of these provisions, to me, was the house. Too large for two people, it was outfitted with luxuries I would never have chosen myself: gold leather upholstery, curtains embroidered with camels and date trees, shelves and tables with brass frames and glass surfaces. Plush red carpeting covered every inch of floor except in the bathrooms and the kitchen. We wanted for nothing, and none of it was ours.

The Missouri Review is available in NYC at Barnes & Noble (let us know where else?). Mia is also headed to Yaddo (whose writers have won 66 Pulitzer Prizes and 61 National Book awards) next week. #Kudos

I couldn’t resist doing a list.

Please find below a little list of gifts to for friends, family, and kids across the intersections of Texts, Tech, Media, and well, great reading.  

1. The Broadcast

Since we can’t easily show off our exquisite taste in reading to other subway and coffee-shop-goers in the age of digital, why not let the world know what books you love with an iPhone cover or vintage-feeling t-shirt?  Our friends at Out of Print let you do just that.

2. The Bespoke

Our hometown favorite McNally Jackson boasts just 1 of 80 Espresso Book Machines worldwide, where you can choose from a cloud library of 7 million titles to print books on-demand.  They’re even doing a holiday special that can include “Your message on the back, your note inside” if you so choose.  Re-gift risk: low.

3. The Reader

Flipboard needs little explanation to the Code Meet Print community, e.g. saying it is pushing the edges of how we consume and experience media and enabling all manner of reading delight across our news and social feeds.  Gift it to anyone with an iOS device who doesn’t yet have it.  (They just launched the iPhone app last week.)  Oh, and it’s free.

4. The Cruellest

I wanted to call this one “The Stuffiest” but I just couldn’t avoid a mini-quote from this required collegiate reading.  ”The Waste Land” gets its iPad remix from Touch Press, including what Faber’s Poetry Editor says is a “hitherto unknown recording of Eliot reading” from 1933, featuring the poet’s signature Missouri/English accent.  Gift it straight from your IPad or iTunes on any computer.

5. The Stylus (Analog)

Because no digital medium will last longer than paper.  And because the fastest and sometimes best wireframing and brainstorming tool is still pen(cil) and paper.

6. The Dust Jacket

“Made from black Moroccan cloth and constructed using traditional bookbinding techniques” makes this iPad 2 case a bookish exterior indeed.  Last day to have them monogrammed in time for XMas delivery is today!

7. The Code Meet(s) Print

A free eBook highlighting the best articles from 5 years of Smashing Magazine, including “Print Loves Web” and “Ten Usability Guidelines and Principles”.  A must for anyone at the center of the intersection of Texts + Tech.

8. The Splurge

“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.”  Indeed.  Not quite secret-santa-priced at $2,500 at the Strand Rare Book floor, but this rare 1st edition (Paris: Olympia Press, 1955) would to be worth it to many learned scholars, and not just lepidopterologists.

9. The Graffiti

Tell the stories you always wish you could with aerosol, in a notebook.  For $17.  I’m looking at you, Banksy.

10. The Transmedia

The app that is a book about books that is a movie that is expanding the way touch screens let us experience stories.  For kids of every age.  Give it.

11. The Stylus (Capacitive Touch Screen)*

I first saw Cosmonaut Stylus via @marcoarment and can’t wait to give it a whirl.  Re: tablet compatibility: “As a rule of thumb, if it works with your finger, it will work with the Cosmonaut.” *OK, so this one doesn’t ship for another 4 or so, but, gifts can be tardy, right?

-GN

The 4th installment of our Twitter Very Short Story Contest at the #CMPNY Version 4.0 “Content + Conversation” meetup at General Assembly incited raucous (in its own way) voting, as 2 of the 7 finalists (@cmensher and @BritBlalock) were so close we had to repeat the process, just for them.

In the end, it was Corey Menscher, Co-Founder of Findings (and one of our distinguished speakers for the evening) who was the victor.*

Congratulations Mr. Menscher!  A Kindle Fire is on its way.

*His #VSS prompted a snap-survey which revealed that the vast majority of even this bookish tech group had not (yet?) read Ulysses.