London Design Festival 2011

Angus Phillips, Director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes, spoke last weekend at the London Design Festival. He was on a panel which examined the question, ‘What is to become of books?’ He argued that we have now gone past the discussion about the death of the book – readers are actively reading books on screen. We should now be looking at the possibilities for innovation, either in digital form or in print. He talked of the new terminology in publishing, from pbooks to ebooks, from vanilla ebooks to born digital projects.

The other members of the panel were Aquiles Alencar Brayner, a Digital Curator at the British Library; Teresa Pereira, Regional VP of European Market Development for Blurb, a creative publishing and marketing platform; and Matt Johnston, a photographer, researcher and teacher, and founder of the Photo Book Club.

At the event, digital anthropologists Juliano Spyer and Cosimo Lupo showcased Homer, a book scanner constructed of everyday objects – a digital camera, a recycled box and a piece of glass from Poundland shop – powered by an open source software used by Google Books and a laptop. The scanned material is readable on an iPad or computer as searchable PDF and text.

You can see a video demonstration of Homer here

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 22 Sep 2011 around 8am

Filed Under #Events | #Publishing