David Hughes

Notes From Afar

Tag: Books (page 3 of 7)

26 December 2012

Read The Blurb

A little while ago the nice people at Blurb contacted me, and asked if I would like to create a book of my Photo 366 project. I pointed out that my project ground to an early halt with just 126 photos taken, but they were OK with that, and so Photo 126 – The Book was born.

Blurb have three ways to create your book: on the Blurb website, using Blurb’s downloadable BookSmart app, or using Blurb supplied inDesign templates. I opted for the middle ground, and used the BookSmart app.

The App

At best the BookSmart app is OK, on my 5 year old iMac it was a little jerky which may be because, I’m guessing, it isn’t a native app. It doesn’t feel like a native Mac, but something that has been ported from another platform, or from a ‘write once’ type environment.

The app is able to import photos from a number of services or from your local drives; I imported mine from Flickr. The BookSmart app imported the photos without fuss, but I would have liked the photo titles to be imported as well, as many of my Photo 366 images work better with the title.

The BookSmart app did a good job of resizing the photos, but this highlighted another issue I had with Instagram: low resolution images. In the end I went through and manually resized each image, although that more an issue with Instagram’s low resolution images and my innate fussiness than the BookSmart app. And whilst I’m being picky – full screen mode would have been nice.

Ordering

To order the book you move from the app to the Blurb website. This surprised me, but the transition was smooth, and without any issues.

Blurb have a very nice selection of book and paper options; I opted for a square hardback format with higher quality paper.

Throughout the checkout process Blurb highlight the option of having an instant PDF of your book. I though this was a nice idea until I saw the PDF file was an extra £2.49. I’m suspect the BookSmart app uploads a PDF, so to charge for something that has no intrinsic cost of production feels a tad money-grabbing.

There is also the option to create a iPad eBook which is a further £4.99 – see above for my thoughts on that.

The Book

The book itself arrived relatively quickly, and on the whole I’m very pleased with it.

blurb photo 126 book

The only element that I think could be improved is the dust jacket, which is a shame as this is the part of the book on permanent display and the first part of the book you touch. The book itself has no printing or blocking on the spine so the dust jacket can’t really be ditched.

However, the rest of the books is great with really solid covers, high quality paper for the pages and good quality printing. Even with the low resolution Instagram images the photos look great with colours reproduced well. I’d be very interested to see what a book of high resolution images would look like – I’d be happy to use Blurb again.

5 October 2012

On Writing

I’ll preface this essay by stating that I am not, and do not consider myself to be, a writer.

I recently visited the Writing Britain exhibition at the British Library, which “examines how the landscapes of Britain permeate great literary works”. It was a fascinating exhibition with manuscripts and notes from Arthur Conan Doyle, J.G. Ballard, J.K. Rowling, William Wordsworth, John Lennon and many more.

I was struck by how many were handwritten. Now I realise that Wordsworth didn’t have access to a word processor or even a type writer, but all of the contemporary writers did and yet each of them hand wrote their drafts or notes.

There is a whole slew of apps in the various app stores that are described as “distraction free writing environments” and marketed as if having a simple text app will help you write more and in some cases more creatively. I write this as an inveterate app buyer and trier.

What is clear to me is that writers write; they don’t wait for the right moment, they don’t wait for the right app or “distraction free” environment – they just write.

J.K Rowling famously started the first Harry Potter book on a long train journey from London to Manchester, and having seen the first few pages of The Philosopher’s Stone we can see she did so writing on sheets of blank A4 paper with biro. She didn’t need a distraction free environment – anybody who has travelled on a British train will agree they are far from distraction free – she just wrote.

I mentioned earlier that I am an inveterate app buyer and trier. I have probably tried every simple text editor or “distraction free writing environment” in the App Store today, but do you know what I haven’t done with any of them?

Write.

28 April 2012

Arthur C. Clarke Invented The iPad

I’m reading 2001: A Space Odyssey at the moment and was struck by this passage in which Arthur C. Clarke essentially describes the iPad, some 40 years before its invention by Apple.

He would plug his foolscap-sized newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth.

He then continues to describe the ‘newspad’ and its impact on the printed newspaper.

One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen, and he could read it with comfort.

Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word ‘newspaper’, of course, was an anachronistic hang-over into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorb the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

An incredible visionary.

21 November 2011

Typewriters

I love this image that I just came across on The Well Appointed Desk; it combines my love of old technology with some of my favourite authors.

typewriters

There is one striking omission for me; that of my favourite author William Gibson who wrote the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer on an manual typer writer of 1930s vintage. Of this typewriter William Gibson said:

Neuromancer was written on a “clockwork typewriter,” the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane’s office in Chiba City.

This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930’s. It’s a very tough and elegant piece of work. Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green- and-black “crackle” paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant’s ledger.

Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.)

It amuses me that such a prescient story was written on a typewriter so old it could not be repaired when it broke a short time after Neuromancer was published.

It amuses me even more that I wrote this post using an app that in essence recreates a typewriter on shiny new technology.

17 May 2010

Nature By Numbers

Maths and numbers have never been my strong suit, but after I read Fermat’s Last Theorem I started to see them differently; to see an elegance and beauty I hadn’t before appreciated.

Whilst in Minsk last week my new chum Alec shared this fantastic video with me.

Watch this video and tell me that numbers can’t be art:

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