"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.

"What about Scandinavia? After all, Monocle is forever claiming Copenhagen or Helsinki is the best place in the world to live. Brûlé looks aghast, revealing the conflict between aesthete and businessman. "The Scandis are a bit too socialist." He swings his hand around the office. "Everything in this room is from Scandinavia, but the maternity leave would kill us." So Copenhagen may be the best place to live in Brûlé's world, but it is no place to run a business." Oh, Tyler. Roughly what I expected, sadly.

"...one of the things I learned in attempting to produce 50 interesting variants on the text is that it is very, very hard. Whatever is done to the text, it is virtually impossible to extinguish Dickens’ intention without extinguishing the whole work (as in the case of the copies which read simply “Fancy fancy fancy fancy…” or “Facts facts facts…” for 300-odd pages). The text stands; it is greater than paper." This is brilliant.

"I’d love to run, edit, and write for a publication bigger than just me and my blog. I don’t have time, so I won’t, at least not any time soon. But if I were to run a publication, I’d have a few rules:" These are all correct. Also: they apply to everything from a blog upwards, frankly.

"Velocity, depth, breadth. These are the dimensions we can add to books, that are the gifts of a digital age, not gimmicks, glossy presentation and media-catching stunts. The text works. It stands and speaks for itself. It is not what we need to change." Yes, yes, yes, this, a hundred times over.

"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.

"EON has a full-time staff of six, headed up by editor Zapatero (known to his grandma as Richie Shoemaker), who told Wired.co.uk that around two-thirds of the content of the magazine is written by EVE players, who are paid in in-game currency for their work. It acquires the reserves of in-game cash to pay its writers by selling ads to in-game organisations, like banks or insurance companies, which pay their ad bills in the game's currency too. The setup means that gamers who play EVE have more ways to make in-game cash than just mining or trading in the game universe. They can also be a journalist, reporting on galactic events." This is completely brilliant/nuts. Also: I love the idea that people want to collect the historiography of the universe.

"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?)

"..for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future."

""The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs" is a twelve-volume set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War." James is brilliant, but I knew that already. This is quite a thing.

"Although the finished site looks nothing like a newspaper I think it has more in common with newspapers’ best features than most news websites do. The sense of browsing quickly through stories and reading the ones that catch your eye, feels similar." Phil is smart. This is good.

"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.

"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.

"With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup. In the case of Vogue today, say, commissioning an editorial product that simply shows every dress designed by Christian Dior that appears in the archive would involve weeks of intern-work, instantly making it unprofitable or too late. A metadata-complete archive in the future would give you that with a single line of code." Hammersley on the value to journalism of sensible datastorage. Data-driven journalism in the sense that it is not *about* data, but in that it is *treated as data* - and from this more stories can flow.

"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.

"It is time you took that game you created and publish it. No more homemade board or cards. You have arrived. Now, publish it!" Ooh. Cafepress/Spreadshirt but for boardgames. Nifty - wonder what the quality's like.

"Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase." Um, as pointed out elsewhere, this is utterly brilliant. Harmonix are smart cookies, and thinks like this remind me why.

"The editor-in-chief of an academic journal has resigned after his publication accepted a hoax article. The Open Information Science Journal failed to spot that the incomprehensible computer-generated paper was a fake. This was despite heavy hints from its authors, who claimed they were from the Centre for Research in Applied Phrenology." Oh dear.

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.

"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.

Pop band from Bristol, made good singles, got a deal, rather than touring recorded an album, album got shelved by label that had wanted them to tour, band broke up, album now sees light of day from SVC, for three quid. Phew!

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!

"With this unique book, programmers, administrators, and others who handle data can learn by example from the best data practitioners in the history of the field. Modeled after O'Reilly's highly-acclaimed book, Beautiful Code, Beautiful Data lets readers look over the shoulders of prominent data designers, managers, and handlers for a glimpse into some of the most interesting projects involving data. In an engaging narrative format, the authors think aloud as they explain their work, highlighting the simple and elegant solutions to problems they encountered along the way." Oh. This could be lovely.

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

"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need." Late to link to this, but as everyone else who has done already would point out: it's great.

"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."

"nanoc is a tool that runs on your local computer and compiles Markdown, Textile, Haml, etc. documents into static web pages, ready for uploading to any web host." Easily build static sites with a teeny bit of templating.

"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.

You'll need to sign up for Issuu to download it, but basically: it's a zine, it's aimed at men, so it's a men's zine, I guess. Some nice spreads, a consistent tone, and a hand-drawn map. Not ironic, just full of things.

"We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 - President Elect Barack Obama." This is super-awesome. Can't wait for mine, no matter how small it is.

"The baseline grid. Oh yes, the baseline grid. Let's be honest this is the sort of thing you know you need to know about. And you do know about, you know, sort of. But. Do you really know about it? Of course you do if you work on a magazine or a newspaper, but when was the last time you used one? I almost re-taught myself how to use a baseline grid. I certainly re-read all about it and it pretty much saved my life." Ben, on the details of The Paper. Good stuff in here.

"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.

Stack lets you subscribe to a selection of independent magazines; you choose how many you want a year, and they send you a selection. A really nice idea, although it'll be interesting to see them broaden their horizons a bit.

"A series looking at different aspects of guardian.co.uk's rebuild and redesign project, which ran from October 2005 to September 2008." Looks like there's going to be some good stuff emerging from this; great to see the Guardian making it so public.

"Paine does have a descendent, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another." Fantastic article

"Tim, or perhaps T.J. (we were at the pudding stage), began talking about the experience of editing Cliffhanger (the edition we were going to print), and about some of the material that had to be changed or cast away – characters’ names, a lesbian sex scene, the ending itself – and we wondered whether, in a born-digital text, these sloughed-off palimpsests acquired an existence of their own, beyond the shadows of an HFS hard drive; in a library run by Veet Voojagig, perhaps." Picador publish both the final version of the book in print - and the urtext as a separate digital product. Fun.

Wonderful pastiches of popular US newstand titles to promote the new season of Dexter. The New Yorker pastiche is particularly superb.

"Bandcamp isn’t Yet Another Place to Put Your Music. We power a site that’s yours. So instead of our logo plastered between banner ads for Sexy Singles Chat, your fans see your design, your music, your name, your URL. You retain all ownership rights, and we just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff." Via Waxy; looks really excellent, and some wonderful stat-gathering tools for bandowners.

"Over the last few years, there has been a big shift in power and success away from independent studios, and towards in-house, publisher-owned studios. This has been driven by several things, sound economic reasons, competitive reasons, and because the strong independent studios had done a good job at creating a slew of new IPs (which publishers were eager to snap up, as always). In my experience relatively few people in the games industry realise this... So, what’s next? What’s going to happen over the next 3-5 years?" Adam on the business of the games industry, and what's facing it next.

"The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress created by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme." Looks great.

"[Diesel Sweeties] changes people's lives because they haven't found their purpose in life, which is to have sex with robots, which is what the comic is about. It's about very unlikable people who are my various foibles put in pixelated cartoon format, and girls who sleep with robots, and the furries who judge them."

"David Rowan’s editorship of the UK edition of Wired raises many questions. The first being “Who is going to be his number two?”" The answer is Hammersley. That could be good.

"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.

"If you can make a PDF, you can now publish a magazine. On behalf of everyone at MagCloud, I can’t wait to see what you make." Derek Powazek drops a big one. Awesome stuff.

"[Dangin] is, more than anything, the consigliere for a generation of photographers uncomfortable with, or uninterested in, the details of digital technology." Great article on the king of retouchers; whatever you think of his art, he's clearly sharp.

"I think we need to change our philosophy of what a magazine is... We need to reinvent ourselves as a luxury item that people want and are willing to pay for... How long can we buy at a premium and sell at a discount? We can’t."

Simon Wistow with a sensible, insightful post - starting from Andy Baio's remarkable discovery of Milliways - on how the web (and bloggers) need to grow up, and how telling smart people "you don't get the web" isn't actually an answer at all. Bravo.

Forty+ years of Sports Illustrated, all under one roof online, and free. Worth it for the photography alone, even if you're not a sportsfan.

Some nice notes on using Webby to build sites. Now, if only I could get the gem working...

"Webby is a fantastic little website management system. It would be called a content management system if it were a bigger kid. But, it’s just a runt with a special knack for transforming text." A nice idea for simpler, single-user sites.

"TimesMachine can take you back to any issue [of the NYT between 1851 and 1922]". Some lovely flourishes in the interface, and some remarkable content, as you might expect.

"The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider. Readers will be able to begin using the service from the end of February." That's an interesting - and savvy - move.

Lots, and lots, and lots of old Pelican book covers. Delightful.

Very nice - reminds me a lot of the work I've done building CMS-style sites with Wordpress. It's not hard - just requires some thought and trickery. Great that this is free, anyhow.

Russell buys a tankbook: "Tank is launching a series of books designed to mimic cigarette packs –
the same size, packaged in flip-top cartons with silver foil wrapping and sealed in cellophane."

"Tank is launching a series of books designed to mimic cigarette packs –
the same size, packaged in flip-top cartons with silver foil wrapping and sealed in cellophane." Lovely!

"It's one of the most awesome consumer products ever. It might even be a landmark moment in technology. ... and Amazon is promoting it as a $399 waffle maker." Andy Ihnatko on the Kindle

"Swotter reads books to Twitter, and via Twitter to the world." It just finished reading Ulysses aloud. It is awesome.

Mark Pilgrim looks at Kindle through what's been said about it so far, and what's been said about the act of reading in the past. His comparisons prove depressing, and worthy of at least some consideration.

"Fray is being reborn as a quarterly printed book, and we need your help." A great move from Derek Powazek

"...it sums up the particular strain of globollocks in Monocle that both entices and infuriates, like a coke-fiend friend" - great post from Nick Sweeney on Monocle and cultures of their own creation

"...indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users..." - you don't say?

"FHM was selling 800,000 for a reason, and it wasn’t to those of us who’ve seen all three endings of Deus Ex" Gillen talks about the resurgence of PC Accelerator.

"Prince is a computer program that converts XML and HTML into PDF documents."

Lulu-esque self publishing, but with dedicated software to produce your book. Looks interesting.

Beautiful new series with some lovely covers - the cover for The Man Who Was Thursday makes me want to buy it all over again. It's just perfect.

Not a bad list, really.

Wordpress.com add support for LaTeX into their posts - translates code into inline images with appropriate alt text. Impressive, for the mathematically/scientifically minded at least.

"Newspapers must win online, or face a future of painful contraction." Need to read this at some point.

(From a design perspective, but, to be honest, it impacts on everything).

Havard alumn magazine, online. Rather beautiful.

Nico Macdonald, mainly on the money, back in August.

I know everyone's bookmarking it, but these Penguin covers are really great, really inspiring; some seminal jacket design for many, many years. And, because they're iconic, they degrade, wear, and age wonderfully.

Great post by Jeff - whom I don't always agree with. This is spot on, though; content management is hard, and when the software isn't failing you, you often hack it into things it shouldn't do. Bespoke is the way forward, and tools like Rails and Django a

Lovingly documented via scanned-in hand-drawn notes, the emergence of the first real cross-platform "micro games magazine". Really interesting, especially the constant desire to draw comparison between gaming and pop music.

Jeff Jarvis rambling on as ever - some good quotes in it, though

I have been a print journalist for 42 years and up until, say, three years or so ago I expected to die a print journalist. But there is no point in looking backwards, in being an inky dinosaur, so I have come to accept that the only way forward, for the m