Archive for May, 2008

Nicholas Bennett is the creator and founder of BooksInMyPhone.com - and also husband of my fav cousin. Whenever we’ve visited them in Melbourne, Australia, Nick has always had his nose in a book, magazine or computer. I never really knew what he did - only that it was something clever involving computer code. So when he unveiled BooksInMyPhone.com, a project he had been working on alongside his day job, I was really Wow-ed! Continuing my current investigation into ebooks and the future of reading/ publishing, here is an interview with Nick which we conducted by email.

Can you tell us something about yourself?

A life long bibliophile, I am renowned / infamous for reading while walking. I always get shtick for the time a family fireman friend happened to be driving past with the boys in the fire engine. He started up the sirens to attract my attention so he could give me a ‘hale well met my friend’ wave - I was of course oblivious, engrossed in some book and unable to imagine the passing siren could have anything to do with me. Apart form loving books my day job is creating large complex internet delivered software systems.

How did you come to get the idea for BooksInMyPhone?

Since I was the archetypical 13 year old SciFi reader I’d know that one day you’d be able to carry ‘the library of congress’ (the international unit for ‘large amounts of information’) in a handheld - they just never seemed to arrive.

My wife gifted me a new phone and I noticed the specs mentioned “Java Capable” - it just made me wonder if I could write the reader I wanted. After a few prototypes I realized that it was actually a really good reading experience.

The future had arrived.

There is huge amount of information available on the net, and more and more each year. Initiatives like archive.org, Project Gutenberg, distributed proofreaders project, and Google’s book scanning are digitising mountains of texts. I love that, I love that it’s there. But I’m never going to sit down and read
a book at my computer - I spend too much time there as it is - and I’m never going to lug a laptop wherever I go.

Everything really flowed out of those two sources.

What did it take to build the site for BooksInMyPhone?

There was a LONG list of capabilities we had to get up to speed on: MySQL, PHP, Sun mobile java, Web Hosting, copyright law, international law, html, ccs, ip geo location, sourcing books, choosing books, reviews, licensing, cryptography, browser architecture, phone capability models, over the air provisioning, …

While modern phones are powerful they are often ‘hobbled’ in mysterious ways, even high end phones with file systems and .doc file viewers are not really suitable for reading books - “was I on page 2506 or 2605?” They also tend to waste screen real estate on info junk. I wanted a spare clean experience that made the most of the phone to connect with the author’s voice. I went through many prototypes; playing with different feature sets till I found something I really enjoyed reading with. Once I’d decided to share I cut it down to make it as simple as possible to use: ’start it up, turn the pages, back and forward by chapter’.

Given a reader the next question was ‘which books?’ 100,000 is ‘better’ than 50,000 - but sometimes less is more, we decided to focus on works that had stood the test of time and formed the core of the western literary tradition. Tiny phone screens are very unforgiving, source texts are not guaranteed to read well; tables, quotations, and odd typographic usage can destroy readability; large files can ‘choke’ phones or make the reader feel lost in a Kafkaesque stream of text. We wanted to provider blurbs/reviews to help people find book they did not already have in mind. I think an important part of the site is supporting this ‘content discovery’.

I think the most amazing part of the whole experience was the fantastic range of resources / capabilities available through the Internet. With some starting skills, an awful lot of trial and error and research in the middle of the night (day job! family!) anyone with perseverance can go from a vision while sitting at the kitchen table to providing a service with global reach. It’s really mind blowing…and it’s really just ‘the end of the beginning’.

What are the most popular downloads?

In no particular order: Lena Rivers from our ‘Best Sellers’ collection, Charles Stross’s Accelerando, Hamlet, Cory Doctorow’s works, A Christmas Carol, Peter Watts Blindsight (which I’d highly recommend - diamond hard SciFi with tight plot and characterizations caught up in an explosion of novel ideas), The Importance of Being Ernest, Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary, Ben Hur, Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick.

Our ‘most downloaded authors’ are: Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Cory Doctorow, H.G. Wells, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde.

You focus mainly on out of copyright books. Why?

There are a number of reasons.

One is that there is a huge resource of public domain texts that people don’t really appreciate can be freely used for any purpose. Lawrence Lessig wrote a great book Free Culture that charts the trajectory of copyright law (recent massive expansion of copyright duration) and where it is heading. He discusses the big difference between a free (as in speech) culture and a permission culture (don’t do anything till you have spoken to some lawyer$). One of the reasons to focus on out of copyright works is to promote free culture by making free culture available and compelling and demonstrating the potential of free culture.

Another reason is rooted in law. Current copyright law says that as soon as something is ‘fixed in a tangible medium’ it is protected from unauthorized copying for the life of the author + 50/70/90/… years. That means that unless the work is explicitly licensed for free distribution or the copyright has lapsed you need to negotiate with the rights holder before distributing the work. Negotiation with rights holders can be complex and time consuming, out of copyright works gave us an immediate critical mass of (great/timeless) works.

We have a small but growing collection of Creative Commons licensed works. The Creative Commons set of licences were created by Lawrence Lessig to allow creators to quickly and cheaply control which rights they reserve in a legally binding way. For example we have many ‘Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives’ licensed works - anyone can copy and distribute these works as long as they attribute the author, do not make money from the work, and do not make derivatives of the work (see the Creative Commons site for the full legal ‘code’). These works are a little harder to source as they are scattered around, but once found we know we can share them.

What is the future / scope for current authors who would like to distribute their books via digital means? What issues do they need to consider?

I think we are at the point where ‘distribution’ is solved; right now you can distribute directly to billions ‘from your living room’. The hard parts are making sure you get paid, making sure people find out they want your work, and making sure people will actually read digital works.

There have been a number of hardware approaches to liberating text from the computer, Amazon’s Kindle being only the latest in a long line of reader hardware. I think the phone as reader will eventually win out, your phone will become so powerful you will think it is a laptop, your laptop will become so small you’ll call it a phone - but right now as you read this there are literally billions of mobile phones that people could be using to read your work on - as soon as they stop fetishizing the book/codex form.

I think Tim O’Reily said something like ‘authors don’t need to worry about piracy, they need to worry about obscurity’. With our current technology it’s easy to set something free, but it’s hard to ensure that you *actually get paid* for *every copy*. One approach to this conundrum is to use free as part of the climb out of obscurity, use freely sharable work to drive buzz and allow social networks to spread the word about you. There is a whole spectrum of this approach from Penguin UK’s ‘Taster’ program of first chapters only, through Cory Doctorow’s ‘all my books are creative commons non commercial as well as proper/paper books for money’. It seems like the biggest decision point in digital distribution is where you want to sit in this spectrum.

The only way to ‘*make sure* you will get paid for *every copy*’ is using Digital Right Management, essentially using technical means backed by laws against breaking the protection (DMCA anti-circumvention - pioneered in the US of A and rolling out worldwide) to lock the digital content. This approach has a long history of putting out content under one protection scheme and then cancelling it leaving consumers unable to access content they paid for - this means it has a bad reputation with the consumers who are aware of it. There are also all sorts of strange double standards and grey areas; for example iTunes has some DRM scheme protecting music downloads but they tell you protected works can be written as an audio CD and then ripped DRM free - is that circumvention under DMCA? did they authorise you by telling you? did they not? what’s the DRM for then?…. Some hold that in the long run DRM is bad for both producer and consumer, some that without DRM the economics of content production would collapse.

The most important thing of all is getting mind share, putting that spark in someone’s head that makes them need to read your book. That is a big area and fairly well out of our scope and experience. What we can do is help translate that spark into an action - if someone hears about your work and has internet connectivity on their phone they could literally be reading it within minutes. We also aim to help people go from a book they enjoyed on our site to other books they might enjoy.

Are there any upgrades you are working on?

There is so much one could do, and only limited time and resource - knowing what people value before build out the functionality would really help. I’d really value any inputs and comments on what we currently do and what we could do. I’d encourage everyone to take a look at the site and try reading on their phone. Here are some of he possibilities I have in mind:

• A site makeover is in the final stages. This will give us a new look, improve ‘content discovery’, and open up some space for collaborative / user driven contributions.
• We would like to include collaborative filtering and inputs for tagging and reviews.
• User sharable reading lists might be interesting, see who is reading and has read what and why.
• There are a number of things that we are looking at to extend the current reader:
• nice typography / formatting in the books - plain text is a great start, but sometimes authors use italics etc to good effect.
• ‘Read Aloud’. I think I’d love this, the idea would be to let you seamlessly switch between reading the book and having the book read itself to you from where you left off. Imagine; you can snuggle up in bed reading till you fall asleep, wake up early and have the book continue reading itself to you while you do a morning run, and then pick up where it left off on the train as you go to work. Audio files have a quality voice synthesis won’t match for a long time but can be 80MB (that will bulk up your mobile bill).
• Java on phones has ‘hooks’ to open a web-browser, for example to open wikipedia on some word or phrase from the book. However the support for this is so patchy that we would have to build a simple web-browser within the reader. I have played with a prototype - but I’m not sure how compelling it would be relative to the effort to bring it up to a ‘beta’ standard.
• Distributed tagging - from within the book rate it, tag it, bookmark it, comment on it, have all the inputs posted to the web and incorporated in the ongoing user experience - sort of a twitter + bookglutton = ‘booktwitt’?
• Distributed proofreading - readers could click to ‘mark’ a page that does not format well or has some errors.

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We’re all suckers for kiddies giggling and this is a very cute one that will get you smiling in spite of the rain on this bank holiday Monday.

I wouldn’t like to be there when all of them are bawling their heads off…

For ebooks to succeed, the creators of digital versions of books need to think about books in a new way.

I’ve been checking out the different ebook softwares that you can download to your PC to read ebooks, since my post the other day about ebooks generally. I professed then to be a fan of the MobiPocket reader and after testing out Adobe Digital Editions reader, my views have not changed - Adobe’s reader is miles behind in its concept and that shows in its lack of usability.

MobiPocket seems to have succeeded in thinking about books in a new way in order to offer a multi-faceted experience of reading books on a digital device. It uses reflowable text so you can control not just the font size but also the line spacing, the actual font itself and you can zoom in and out on both text and images. All of these functions are intuitively laid out on the navigation pane and you can also use the mouse to control the page movements - which means you can sit back at a distance with your laptop on a coffee table and use just the mouse on one arm of your armchair to control page turning and accessing the controls.

Adobe has its main strength in creating pdfs of print documents - what you get on screen with a pdf is a copy or replica of the print document. Its Digital Editions readers shows that heritage. You can increase the font size but not to such a great degree as in MobiPocket. And you cannot zoom. At all. You cannot choose the font and you cannot change line spacing. Essentially, you get a glorified replica of a print page. There is no easy way to get a full screen - you have to click a few times through a menu to get there - whereas on MobiPocket, a simple button gets you to full screen mode and you can easily get back to the dashboard by hovering your cursor at the top of the screen.

Unfortunately, there appear to be many more digital books in Adobe format than in MobiPocket format. This is bad news for the reputation of ebooks - if it’s clunky and awkward to read and maneovre round an ebook because of ill-thoughtout software, then people are not going to take to ebooks as readily as if the digital reading experience is a joy. For me, MobiPocket reading is a joy - because of the control I as reader have on the formatting of the text to make it the most ergonomically suitable for my personal comfort and of the ease of usability of the dashboard. Publishers of ebooks need to think in a new way about books - forget the old paper version and focus on how the content of the books can best be delivered to the consumer in a new medium.

We as consumers are becoming increasingly used to controlling our user experience. Think about movies, television and radio. At one time, it was expected that we had to go to the movie theatre at the specific time the movie was being shown, or organise our evenings around a TV show we wanted to watch at a certain time, or tune in to listen to our favourite radio program when the broadcaster decided to put it on. Now, we can choose where and when to watch via DVDs which we can pause, rewind and also personalise in terms of sound and colour etc. We can download podcasts of radio shows to listen to whenever we please.

With ebooks, we can be freed from the constraints of the font size, the layout, weight of paper, and choice of binding selected by the publisher and the reading experience can be transformed into a much more user-centred one, especially if embedded links and other additonal electronic data are included in the digital version of the book. For example, I was reading a physical book (p-book) the other day and it mentioned the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem - there was no accompanying photo and I could not remember what it looked like. Imagine if I had been reading an ebook version which enabled me to go online with a click on the phrase to see some photos and also to find out any other background information. As we all get used to reading blogs and online newspapers etc, that active way of reading - to follow links or go online to search for more information - is going to become an increasingly instinctive and natural response. If publishers want to tap into the digital book market, that is the way to go - rather than trying to replicate the experience of reading a p-book.

Photo: thanks to trishalyn.com

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Continuing my experiment to “go shelfless”, I’ve been checking out ebooks, inspired by one of my readers Nicola, who left a comment about Mobipocket books. I blogged about listening to audiobooks which don’t take up any shelf space and which allow me to multi-task a few weeks ago. So it made sense to check out this other option for non-physical books, especially as my house is already brimming full with books and I’m going to have to move to a mansion if I continue my current rate of book-buying - or at any rate a giant warehouse.

Mobipocket offers ebooks for download which you can read on your PC and also PDA/ mobile phone via their MobiReader software. At first, I wasn’t convinced - yes, I would save shelf space by converting to electronic books but surely, it would be very uncomfortable reading tiny print on my mobile phone or tiring on the eyes reading on a computer screen. Well, I was in for a surprise.

More ergonomic than a paper book

The MobiReader allows you to increase the size of the book font and also zoom in so that the text is huge on the screen. Reading an ebook this way on my desktop or laptop means I can sit back in the chair, my head and neck straight (instead of hunched over a paper book) and turn the pages by clicking the arrow key on the keyboard. The page changes rather than scrolls down so the experience is closer to that of non-computer based reading.

You also don’t have the problem of trying to keep the pages open that you have with a paper book - and worrying about cracking the spine if you try to get the physical book to open at more than a 90 degree angle. I set the font to a huge size on my laptop, place the laptop on the coffee table a little bit at a distance, sit back in my armchair with the wireless keyboard nearby. My hands and arms are free until the moment I need to click the arrow to turn the page.

So no more cramped hands and arms or crook neck and shoulders.

Also, being at the age where I need reading glasses, I am finding some small print in physical books a drag. Being able to increase the font size and zoom has minimized the squinting and headaches that can come with poring over tiny print.

Moving about the ebook

You can also move about the book by using the “go to page XX” function. Embedded chapter links mean you can go to the contents page and click on the chapter you want to be taken straight to that chapter. You can search the book by keyword as well. And there is a cute function where you can add bookmarks which are little page creases in the top right of the virtual page, just as you would turn the corner down in a real book.

Being used to moving about Word and Excel documents using “search” and moving about the internet by clicking on links, I found that it was quite intuitive moving about the ebook using similar techniques.

Active reading

The other great thing I’ve been enjoying is the note taking function. You can select a word or phrase and click “add a note” - a dialogue box will open up for you to type your note (and on my touch screen phone, I can even add the text as a handwritten note using the “draw” function). You can then see all your notes for that book collated together and clicking on a note will take you to the selected word or phrase in the book. I’ve used this function to remind myself of other books and authors referred to in the book I am reading so that I can check them out later.

Alternatively, if I am online at the time and feel like taking a break from reading the book, I can immediately check out Amazon or Mobipocket or other online bookstore for the books and authors mentioned. Or I can google to find out more about a topic mentioned in the book.

If you had an e-dictionary installed, you can also select a word or phrase you did not understand and look up the word. I am thinking about getting a French/ English dictionary to help me out as I read Le Monde and other French magazines.

All this seems quite natural to me as I am now so used to active reading online - when I read blogs or newspapers online, I may follow links or google to find out more about a topic or look up words or information on Wikipedia or I may bookmark an item to return to later.

Software for ebook reading

I like MobiReader but there are also other formats - Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader and eReader are some of them. From what I can tell, MobiReader has more of the active reading options as I’ve described above than the others and can be used on a variety of devices including dedicated ebook readers.

Range of books

There are not as many ebooks out there as physical books at the moment but the range seems to be growing. A number of bookshops in the UK are reportedly going to be pushing ebooks this year. WH Smith already has an ebooks store online. Borders is revamping its website and the new one will apparently include ebooks and also trumpet the dedicated ebook reader the iRex Iliad. Waterstones has a few ebooks and is apparently going to be selling the Sony Reader. Blackwells, the academic bookshop, has a ebook store that focuses mainly on academic books. There are also online stores that sell only ebooks - check out BooksOnBoard, MobiPocket itself and also eBooks.com.

You can also get out of copyright books for free download from a number of specialist online websites like ManyBooks.net and Feedbooks.com.

What ebooks am I reading?

I downloaded “1968: the year that rocked the world” - about the revolutionary year 1968 - from Mobipocket.com for around £5. It seemed appropriate to be reading that on the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 riots in Paris.

From Blackwells, I discovered “The Internet - A Philosophical Inquiry” on special offer for only £1.

From ManyBooks.net, I’ve downloaded for free Walden by Henry David Thoreau, The Prince by Machiavelli, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (in English, though the French version is also available) and The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Limited sharing

The only thing about ebooks that are digitally rights protected is that you can’t share them or give them away as easily as you might with a physical book. You can read them on up to 4 devices (ie PC and other device) so if you want to share them with someone, that other person will have to be given access to your main library/ account to access all your books via their PC/ device which would become one of the four that you are allowed to have. Not being able to share or give away ebooks is not a problem in my book (ha ha) because I don’t like to lend or give away my books unless they are not ones that I’ve enjoyed and are taking up too much shelf space. With ebooks, I can just leave such books in my digital library without their inconveniencing me by taking up too much room - or delete them altogether.

Conclusion

I’ve been quite taken by ebooks, I have to say. My first choice is likely to be audiobooks, still, for the reasons discussed in my blog post about audiobooks but the choice of books available in audio is even more limited than the choice of ebooks. If I must read a book with my eyes, then I like the active reading opportunities for ebooks and also the ergonomic aspects. I will definitely be adding to my eLibrary and may even consider buying a dedicated eReader (another gadget!). Unfortunately, I cannot switch entirely to ebooks yet and there are still some books that I will have to buy in paper form as they have not yet been made available digitally but I am hoping that that will start to change and that publishers will start to release books in multiformats in the near future.

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Following on from the short film made by Ed Saunders in 48 hours over one weekend, here is another film challenge short made by his friend Ben W over that same weekend.

It’s interesting that over that weekend the two films made focused on the theme of how men and women are just soooo different…

What if we were to hook up with old friends in real life the way we do on Facebook? What if we related to our friends in the real world as if we were on Facebook?

This video gives us a taste of what may lie ahead for our friendships…

It’s a curious thing. While I am a great fan of Starbucks in the UK (see my earlier blog post, Three Cheers for Starbucks), I am much more ambivalent about its presence - and the presence of Starbucks clones like Gloria Jean, Coffee Bean or the like - in Malaysia.

Why?

Well, unlike the UK, where coffee was hideously undrinkable before the appearance of the American chain, coffee in Malaysia has always been wonderful - so the Western-style chains seem a poor second in comparison to the original, local brew.

Let me tell you what I love about coffee in Malaysia. You can have it hot or with ice - and I love it with ice: not a few cubes plopped into a glass but a tall glass full of ice with a couple of straws, over which the coffee is poured. As for the coffee itself, it’s thick and flavourful, served black with nothing added or with sugar, or with condensed milk or evaporated milk - or both. It packs a punch - and if you have the sweet version, you’re ready to race around all day in spite of the tropical heat. If Malaysian coffee were a person, it would be Michelle Yeoh. In contrast, the chain store Western variety is refreshing but rather feeble - like Woody Allen.

I also love sipping a kung-fu kicking Malaysian coffee in the old-fashioned local coffee shops, where you can look out into the street through the open arches on all sides, a grimy fan churning the stuffy heat around. On the walls would be tatty Benson & Hedges posters and a Chinese calendar flappy wearily in the slow breeze. Flip flops and old wooden clogs might clack against the tiled floor as the char kuey teow stallholder brings you a steaming plate of noodles on a plastic plate and the drinks boy in a singlet bangs another kopi peng on the formica table top. You’d leave awhile later, stuffed full, with the smell of fried fat and cigarette smoke clinging to your hair and your T-shirt drenched in sweat.

I can see, in contrast, the joys of an air-conditioned, sleek Starbucks where you can sit in your Guess jeans and light linen Elle jacket, checking emails on your laptop, thanks to their WiFi connection. I can see the appeal of low-fat blueberry muffins and a tall latte or frappuccino. I can see all that.

I just hope that there’ll still be room for the old-style coffee shops in the new, modern Malaysia. I hope that all the roads won’t be turned into 3-lane freeways and all the lovely, old houses won’t be pulled down to make way for another skyscraper that might be the tallest, highest, biggest, fanciest in the world. I hope that not all the shops will be in giant-sized malls nor all the restaurants hidden inside office complexes. I hope that when I’m in KL in 10 or 15 or 20 years time, I’ll know that I’m in a unique, multi-cultural Asian city and not a concrete jungle that could be Anycity, USA or Anycity, China. There have been huge changes in Malaysia in the last decade and the country’s prosperity continues upwards. Malaysians enjoy a great lifestyle and have many opportunities to thrive. Having stylish air-conditioned places to where you can sip internationally renowned coffee is one of the signs of that good life. I don’t wish that to peter away. I just hope that the old-fashioned way of having a Malaysian coffee - and all that that signifies in terms of Malaysian tradition, heritage and roots - will still endure.

Photo: thanks to goosmurf from flickr.com (CCL)

I’m not reading books anymore - I’m trying to “go shelfless”. With the technology available these days, it seemed to us likely that you could abandon all shelving with the consequential enlargement of your living space. That’s an attractive idea, especially if, like me, your home is already jam-packed with books, CDS and papers that have taken up all the shelving space available already - what do you do as you buy new items?

One friend is very efficient at monetizing her acquisitions - once she’s finished reading her books, she sells them off again on Ebay. She used to rip the music of CDS and then sell the discs on Ebay too. She also gets rid of old clothes and other items the same way.

I’ve been wondering if one could minimise the clutter at an earlier point ie at the acquisition point - by going virtual or electronic.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about taking virtual notes using Evernote, which has so far been a great way to cut back on the bits of paper and physical notebooks that I would normally use. I “write” notes on my mobile phone-PDA using the letter recognizer function so it feels just like scribbling in a physical notebook or on the back of an envelope and zap it across to my online account.

I’ve recently discovered audiobooks via Audible.co.uk, which is a subsidiary of the US-based company Audible.com. So I’m not reading books but I’m listening to them. With Audible, you pay for each book you download just like you might if you bought a physical book from Amazon. But you can also sign up an account and pay a monthly fee of around £8 - each month you can download one title. The latter option is good value as you can download a book that otherwise costs more at that £8 price. Once you’ve downloaded it, the audiobook is yours forever and you can stream it from the online site or download it as many times as you like. The only limitation is that you can only play it on up to 4 computers/ devices that you register with your account - this is to stop you sending an e-version to all your friends and doing Audible out of business.

I’m really enjoying my first two audiobooks. I can listen to them while gardening or sitting on the bus. It’s so much more time efficient being able to listen to a book and do something else at the same time. And activities that used to be boring and painful to do are now quite pleasurable. Also, lying in the garden staring up at the blue sky while someone reads to me in my ears is just delightful - I don’t have to strain my arms lifting the book to read it as I lie down or crick my neck to get the reading angle right. And the books don’t take up any physical space - although you can burn CD versions of them if you want to.

My only complaint about Audible UK is that they have only 18,000 titles compared to the US company which has 40,000 titles. Many of the UK titles are older titles and / or of the WH Smith variety ie non-intellectual easy reading (though there are a few exceptions). I tend to prefer Waterstones or Blackwells which have more academic selections - or Amazon where you can get the most obscure books so long as they are in print. I was very excited when I first discovered Audible.com, the US site, as it had loads of books I wanted. For example, the US company has Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. My excitement fizzled out when I came to the UK site - where none of these books are available. The UK site has lots on Churchill, how to make a million, chick lit and the latest popular non-fiction, which is fine if your tastes are limited to those topics.

So why don’t I just sign up for the US site? The frustrating thing is that if you try that from the UK, it refuses to allow you to do that and shoots you over to the UK site. Their support team explained to me, “The availability of certain book titles is linked the geographic digital download rights set by the publishers. A title can have different publishers in different countries and the rights are set on a country by country basis. Where possible, we try and secure rights on a world wide basis (for our US, UK, French and German sites) but there are times when this is either not possible or discussions are currently ongoing to secure the rights.” So I have to keep checking back to the UK site in the hope that the UK publishers will at some point issue the UK version of the audiobook.

Still, I have found a few books on the UK site that will keep me going for the next few months - hopefully as time passes more of the kinds of books that interest me will find their way onto the UK site and I won’t have to terminate my experiment with virtual books anytime soon.

Illustration: thanks to Drylcon from Flickr.com (CCL)

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Mark Wu and I have been reading each others blogs for awhile now but we’ve never met. He blogs at OneInchPunch.net and is also very actively involved in the Chinese community here in the UK. When Mark invited me to be featured on his website VisibleChinese.com, I was very honoured. I’m delighted to to return the favour and introduce you to Mark here on Fusion View.

Mark writes:

Unofficially named “Mark Wu” (my Chinese name being my legal identifier), I’ve led a quite straight-forward life. My parents came to the UK when they were teenagers and met and married young. My brother, sister and I were subsequently born into the British Chinese culture which labels a generation of young Chinese people whose parents immigrated to the UK, and where the majority of families were involved in one way or another, in catering. With a talent for drawing, at an early age, I was “destined” for the arts and eventually found myself drawn to digital design.

In the last decade, I’ve spent most of my life focusing on working through my co-founded design company Kibook Interactive Design, which at its peak in the dot-com boom, grew to eight people plus freelancers. Aside from working quite alot, doing the company thing also meant meeting and working directly with a variety of clients and living a life that combined freedom (sort of) and choice with responsibility.

Some of our clients were British Chinese organisations such as Yellow Earth Theatre and The Pearl Foundation and that was great for me personally, to be able to tap into my own culture professionally. Working with them in the last five years or so, meant being involved with what I perceive to be an important time in the UK’s Chinese culture, with its growth and development being quite passive initially but which is now continually increasing in pace, encouraged by the Olympics in China this year.

Promoting Chinese culture in the UK is something I am passionate about and as a result, I am a Trustee of The Pearl Foundation, Interactive Associate of Yellow Earth Theatre and a core member of The British Chinese Project which is an organisation that works to help integrate more British Chinese people into politics.

Visible Chinese

Bringing together my passion for promoting British Chinese culture and design for the web, I also created another website which came about through a simple idea. The website is at VisibleChinese.com and it aims to become an Authoritative Independent Listing of Achievers within the UK’s Chinese Culture. Pretty much like a Who’s Who.

Visible Chinese is a site that is focused on profiling just individuals, as opposed to organisations, putting faces to names, as I insist on a photograph to accompany each profile. Profiles can be flexible in what they say, as long as they are biographical in some way. People can also outline what they do professionally and include links to their websites, so Visible Chinese serves as a great advertisement for their services and a useful tool for networking. I like to think of it as the sum of its parts being greater than the whole. Someone I met recently mentioned how it would be useful to see what people looked like in order to help recognise them at a future networking event.

The site doesn’t take long to maintain, and also doesn’t have the same pressure as a blog requiring constant (perhaps daily) updates, so all in all, the whole concept is a win-win situation for both the people featured, and for myself in gaining the satisfaction of creating something useful.

Not so silent minority

The Chinese community in London seems to be advancing and growing in voice and confidence, from the media labeled “silent minority” it began as. Traditionally, the visible aspects of Chinese culture seemed to consist of takeaways, large suburban supermarkets and the annual Chinese New Year event around the UK’s Chinatowns.

However, in recent years, there are signs that the next generation of young professionals are beginning to influence the community. Young professionals who have grown up in both Chinese and English cultures, and who are not just comfortable, but fluent in both.

As the British Chinese population increases, the diversity of talent also increases and is steadily gaining exposure. Take The Pearl Awards for instance. An annual event which will be in its fifth year in 2008. Each year saw the awards grow in profile and diversity with the fourth awards in 2007 set in the Royal Festival Hall, including HRH The Prince of Wales as one of its distinguished guests.

The British Chinese Project is also a significant initiative, founded by the prominent Chinese Solicitor, Christine Lee and which is supported by the UK Chinese Embassy, representatives from the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and a variety of different organisations and Chinese community groups. It aims to encourage more British Chinese to take an interest in politics, particularly the younger generations, but in itself, also counts a number of young professionals as members, the like of who are increasingly looking to play active roles in the community.

Go Croydon!

In the North-South London debate, I was a classic, born North Londoner who believes everything there is better, alas more expensive, than South London. A few years ago, I moved down to Croydon to my partner’s place and have been there ever since.

Croydon has a kind of stigma attached to it, but one which I think is over the years, being slowly eroded. It might be because of this, but everything in South London does seem to be cheaper than the North. Redevelopment in some areas is happening, and so I think the South is in someways, quite an exciting place to live. What I can’t fault is the convenience of being so close to shopping areas like North End, and the fast rail links into Central London - a bonus since I’ve been able to avoid getting on the claustrophobic tube to work.

Bruce Lee still inspires

I started my first blog One Inch Punch in December 2006 - during a quiet Christmas break, when I felt I really had no excuse not to. I had been working in the web industry for more than eight years and aside from a small portfolio site, had nothing of my own to show for it.

Building a blog was something that I wanted to do for awhile and it was also a good idea for several reasons. These included knowing the ins and outs of the process - which I could easily advise my clients on. “Walking the walk” as they say.

For almost a decade, I had been nurturing an idea for creating a large and complex East-Asian community website. Several visual designs came about, and the idea was refined, changed, amended and refined once more. I had never got beyond that, partly because of the time required and also due to lack of technical know-how required to get the idea made. However, in the last few years, blogging technology has improved massively - enough for me to fine tune my comprehensive ideas down to a simple (and practical!) East-Asian entertainment link site. Hence, OneInchPunch.net was born.

Comprehensive as the ideas were, keeping things simple inspired the name OneInchPunch. I basically wanted to aim for one post update a day, which would consist of a visual and a link. Something short but effective, which literally speaking, is basically what a One Inch Punch is. For those who don’t know, the “One Inch Punch” is a martial arts technique, made world famous by Bruce Lee, which unleashes explosive internal (as opposed to muscular) power² from a very short distance. So the name was not just dynamic-sounding, but also indirectly name checks probably the world’s most famous East-Asian.

Note: This article has also appeared on Dulwich OnView where I am the co-editor.

From the high culture of last week’s Film on Fusion View (Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press), we get down to some slo’-mo’ violence with high speed bullets ripping through a variety of objects…