Code Meet Print

Excited to have taken part in a lively and thoughtful discussion on what “social engagement” means for books in 2013 and beyond at the Tools of Change Conference here in New York on February 14th.

It was a privilege to share the stage with David Wilk of Booxtrix and Writerscast, Joe Regal of Zola Books, New York Times best-selling author Audrey Niffenegger and Pauline Hubert of BookMovement.

One question that resurfaced was the idea of authors doing more scalable “web readings” – a cross between readings at bookstores and a pre-ticketed interactive webcast. Many of us thought this might be a smart way to bridge the gap between those eager readers who simply do not live in a city where authors can engage with them in person, as well as provide an alternate and efficient revenue supplement for writers and their publishers.

Most of us stopped short of endorsing product-placement and cross-selling within the eBook. But if 30 Rock can do it cheekily, is there a way for mainstream books to do it and get away with it?

The first ever Twitter Fiction Festival is Nov 28-Dec 2nd and Code Meet Print is hosting the event “Twitter, Fiction and Prototyping” at General Assembly in NYC on Nov 29th to celebrate!

Code Meet Print celebrates the first ever Twitter Fiction Festivalby hosting a night to discuss the state of Twitter fiction, to lead a mini-workshop on rapid prototyping of Twitter/Literature products and, in the spirit of the holidays, to drink and be merry.

To Attend: Please RSVP here at Meetup.com AND purchase a ticket at Eventbrite: http://cmptwitter.eventbrite.com *

“Twitter Fiction: Then, Now and Soon”**

Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull Press and now VP of Content and Community at Small Demons and Mia Eaton, Editor-at-Large of LIT Magazine join Glenn Nano to discuss the collision of fiction and Twitter, highlight some of the choicest bits so far, and wonder out loud where things might go from here.

Very Short Story (#VSS) Contest

After having conducted four such contests in 2011, Code Meet Print teams with the Twitter Fiction Festival to present its Official #VSS Contest. See veryshortstory.net for more info, to read the submissions and see the winners.

Make Something: Prototyping a “Twitter Book Club”

Chris Steib, former Director of Product at Thrillist, Founder of online lit journal VoidMagazine and now VP of Product at Delivery.com takes us on a crash-course in Product Management and breaks us into interdisciplinary teams to bring to life different versions of a “Twitter Book Club.”

Beer and wine served. Interrupting encouraged. Hope to see you all there (or via Twitter using hashtag #cmp)!

* Attendees must have RSVP’d on both this Meetup.com group and purchased tickets at Eventbrite.

** Recommended reading:

• Rick Moody (2009). “Some Contemporary Characters”. Electric Literature (aggregated here)
• Ryan Call (2009). “Some Reactions to ‘Some Contemporary Characters’ by Rick Moody”. HTML Giant
• Jennifer Egan (2012). “Black Box”. The New Yorker (at storify.com here)
• @MayorEmanuel account from Sep 2010-February 2011 (aggregated here)
• Macy Halford (2011). “Teju Cole’s Small Fates”. The New Yorker

@codemeetprint

Twitter has announced its first Twitter Fiction Festival, November 28th-December 2nd.

In their words:

“Twitter is a frontier for creative experimentation, and we want to invite authors and creative storytellers around the world to push the bounds of what’s possible with Twitter content. If you’d like to take part in the Twitter Fiction Festival, submit your idea here. Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter — short story in Tweets, a Twitter chat, live-tweeting — or, even better, how you’ll create a new one. How will you work with our real-time global platform, where anyone can contribute to your story at any moment?”

We at Code Meet Print would certainly like to take part. 

What sort or projects, experiments or stories might be worth exploring for the Festival? Ones that might furthest push the edges of narrative, community or dialogue unique to Twitter and its platform and participants?

The deadline for submissions is November 15th. The Code Meet Print deadline for “brainstorms” on this message board will be Friday, November 9th.

Excited to work with you again!

Glenn
@soonisnow

Today is the 20th anniversary of The New Press, the not-for-profit publisher that has smartly bridged the gap between academic and trade founded by Andre Schiffrin, after leading Pantheon Books for three decades, and current Executive Director Diane Wachtell. 

I was an intern at The New Press the summer after my freshman year and to this day recall how fully involved the entire staff was in integrating even us lowly book-peons into all aspects of the press, including editorial meetings, marketing, PR, and yes, reading slush.

The interns worked in the same room as the in-house inventory, and it was impossible not to feel inspired by what lay on the shelves. The New Press commissioned most of its non-fiction selections, highlighted by piercing works from the likes of Studs Terkel and James Loewen. They also publish a selection of quality non-US fiction.

Happy birthday to a rare and important curator of ideas and words (and sounds and sights) that have pushed forward the way we contemplate education, law, social justice, and storytelling across cultures. Here are five works you should know:

Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen

Its title says it all, ranging from the apotheosis of Christopher Columbus to the first Thanksgiving, it’s a scathing critique of the most important history textbooks of the time, selling over 1 million copies to date and winner of the American Book Award.

May It Please the Court: Live Recordings and Transcripts of Landmark Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court Since 1955, ed. Peter Irons and Stephanie Gutton

At a time when we called it “multimedia”, The New Press unveiled the primary text itself: recordings of history-changing arguments on CD, including Miranda v. Arizona and Roe v. Wade.

The People’s History of the United States: The Wall Charts, by Howard Zinn

In an era before “data visualization” was a thing , Zinn and The New Press brought us a vast visual representation of a vastly important book (and not just for being name-checked by Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting).

Other People’s Children, by Lisa Delpit

MacArthur “Genius Grant” Award winner Delpit dissects how deliberately unstructured teaching strategies like “whole language” instead put low-income students at an even greater disadvantage.

The Thought Gang, by Tibor Fischer

A personal favorite of mine from that summer of interning. A raucously hilarious British novel about a starving philosopher wandering around the south of France, robbing banks with a one-armed partner.

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.