Quietweet - A Simpler Twitter Reader
A cute little read-only Twitter client from James that only displays fully-formed tweets: no hashtags, no @-replies.
Tags: reading
The Aleph: Infinite Wonder / Infinite Pity
Just like in the Borges short story, you can now see everything at once …from Project Gutenberg, or from Twitter, or from both.
This may be the only legitimate use case for (truly) infinite scrolling.
Logical breakpoints for your responsive design
Vasilis examines the multitude of factors that could influence an ideal measure.
Prototyping Responsive Typography
Some handy tips for starting off your responsive designs from the type out.
No, I’m not going to download your bullshit app by Tom Morris
I share Tom’s frustration with news apps that should be websites:
I wouldn’t download a BBC app or an NPR app for my computer. Why would I want one on my phone?
Offscreen 4: I got what I paid for by Jeff Porter
A really nice write-up of issue four of Offscreen magazine, wherein I was featured.
Olaf Stapledon
The out-of-copyright books of Olaf Stapledon are available to download from the University of Adelaide. Be sure to grab Starmaker and First And Last Men.
The Subcompact Publishing Reader - Readlists
A nice Readlist based on that excellent article by Craig on digital publishing:
This reader is made up of Craigmod’s essay “Subcompact Publishing” and essays linked to in the footnotes.
Subcompact Publishing — by Craig Mod
Very smart thinking from Craig about digital publishing.
Migrating from Kindle to iBooks - zacwe.st
A step-by-step guide to unDRMing your Kindle books—a prudent course of action given Amazon’s recent unilateral wiping of Kindles.
Beauty and Ugliness in Type design | I love typography, the typography and fonts blog
A fascinating look at what happens when you mash up beauty and ugliness in one typeface.
An e-reader is more like a book than you think | Books | The Observer
James muses on the physicality of ebooks in this week’s Observer.
We could make history — I.M.H.O. — Medium
I quite the look of Medium, but Dave Winer absolutely nails it with this feature request:
Let me enter the URL of something I write in my own space, and have it appear here as a first class citizen. Indistinguishable to readers from something written here.
I think it might get a tattoo of this:
There’s art in each individual system, but there’s a much greater art in the union of all the systems we create.
The Internet of Things - Readlists
Those articles about the “Internet of Things” I linked to? Here they are in handy Readlist form.
Summer Reading… and Programming
This is rather marvellous: a book review from Robin Sloan that requires you to type commands into a JavaScript console.
The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero
Frank has published his book online in HTML. Very lovely it is too.
A List Apart: Articles: ALA Summer Reading Issue
How about this for a trip down memory lane—a compendium of articles from over a decade of A List Apart, also available as a Readlist epub. It’s quite amazing just how good this free resource is.
The only thing to fault is that, due to some kind of clerical error, one of my articles has somehow found its way onto this list.
If this were Twitter, you’d be at-replying me with the hashtag “humblebrag”, wouldn’t you?
The Manual
I’ve written a piece for issue three of The Manual. Despite that, it’s well worth getting your hands on a copy.
Fluid Type | Trent Walton
Trent shares his ideas on handling line lengths in fluid, responsive layouts.
Welcome Clearleft • MATTER
I’m really pleased to be working with Bobbie on Matter.
Monday 31 May 1669 (Pepys’ Diary)
Nine years and five months after he began publishing every entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary, Phil Gyford posts the last entry.
The Publication Standards Project
Like the Web Standards Project but for ePub. I approve of this message.
Readlists
This looks like a really handy service from Readability: gather together a number of related articles from ‘round the web and then you can export them to a reading device of your choice. It’s like Huffduffer for text.
russell davies: SXSW, the new aesthetic and writing
Russell was the final panelist to speak at the New Aesthetic South by Southwest tour-de-force, taking a look at how our relationship to text is being changed.
Albatros - The bookmark following any journey
Well, this looks clever: a self-updating bookmark (that’s an actual bookmark for books, not browsers).
MATTER by Matter — Kickstarter
Bobbie’s new journalism project is up and running on Kickstarter. Get in there!
A Christmas Carol read by Patrick Stewart on Huffduffer
Perfect seasonal entertainment. Perfect.
inessential.com: The Readable Future
Brent Simmons writes about the desire of regular web users—not just the geeks—to have a comfortable reading experience. Publishers ignore this at their peril.
Sly Mongoose: A Responsive Digital Comic Proof-of-Concept
A responsively designed comic. Yeah, you heard me right. Responsive. Comic!
Newsstand Is Promising, Yay! But Enough with Issue-Based Publishing (Global Moxie)
Josh nails it: publishers need to stop thinking in terms of issues:
Publishers and designers have to start thinking about content at a more atomic level, not in aggregated issues. That’s how we already understand news as consumers, and we have to start thinking that way as publishers, too. This is why Flipboard, Instapaper, and other aggregators are so interesting: they give you one container for the whole universe of content, unbound to any one publisher.
Jeremy Keith (adactio)
I’ve been using Tumblr to store interesting quotations (and cat videos). Findings looks like it could be a good alternative for the quotations (though less good for cat videos). The Kindle integration looks interesting.
The New Value of Text | booktwo.org
A rallying cry from James: since when did we decide that text couldn’t stand by itself without extra layers of “interactive” shininess?
Test page for -webkit-font-smoothing | Christoph Zillgens
This handy matrix shows the effect of different -webkit-font-smoothing setting on various text combinations (serif/san-serif light/dark, etc.).
beta.boston.com - Building the new BostonGlobe.com
An overview of the strategy behind the fantastic Boston Globe website.
The shape of our future book — Satellite — Craig Mod
Craig has written down his dConstruct talk, the one that completely polarised opinion. Personally, I loved it.
davidnewton.ca | The Current State of Hyphenation on the Web
A valiant attempt to polyfill support for hyphenation in browsers other than the latest Safari and Firefox.
Hyphenation arrives in Firefox and Safari | Fontdeck Blog
Finally. Hyphenation on the web.
Pretty much the only forms of Western literature that don’t use hyphenation are children’s books and websites. Until now.
Web Typography for the Lonely
A collection of experiments in typography using canvas, SVG, JavaScript and whatever else it takes.
Contrast Rebellion - to hell with low-contrast fonts!
A cute website that’s a call-to-arms against low-contrast text on the web.
The Technium: What Books Will Become
Kevin Kelly asks “What is a book?” and provides some thought-provoking answers. There’s some inspiring crystal-ball gazing in here.
FFFFALLBACK - A simple tool for bulletproof web typography.
A useful bookmarklet that suggests font stacks to match up with the web fonts on whatever page you happen to be viewing.
A List Apart: Articles: Orbital Content
A great piece about the changing nature of content ownership and distribution. And now I share it with you, validating its central premise.
Read ePub ebooks online : Bookworm ePub reader
A browser-based ePub reader. ‘Cause it’s (X)HTML all the way down, baby.
YouTube - TOC 2011: James Bridle, “The Condition of Music”
James’s talk from Tools Of Change. Great stuff!
Publishing Experiences | booktwo.org
I wish I could’ve attended James’s talk at Tools of Change. It sounds like it was great.
Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis | Magazine
Could it be that the current penchant for quick, real-time bursts of content could actually be beneficial for more thoughtful, long-form content?
Welcome to Open Library! (Open Library)
One web page for every book. I love this project.
Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook | booktwo.org
James Bridle propsed Open Bookmarks during a presentation at Tools of Change in Frankfurt today: "Open Bookmarks is not a thing, it’s a proposal, a flag in the ground. We need to agree on a way of sharing and storing annotations and bookmarks, reading attention data and everything around the book: that aura."
Big Questions Online
A site that aims to ask and explore the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality, with a focus on science, religion, markets and morals.
Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus? | Culture | Religion Dispatches
A fascinating look at hypertext in illuminated manuscripts.
Books in the Age of the iPad
A detailed look at traditional and digital publishing, considered from the content out.
Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA) » Analog IMDB
A medium-zoom view of shifts in publishing.
Revised Font Stack | A Way Back
A thoroughly researched and well-written look at font stacks, with some practical suggestions and advice.
Happy Cog Studios: A Book Apart
Coming soon to a bookshelf near you.
JsMag - the magazine for JavaScript developers
There is a magazine for JavaScript. I did not know that.
Bookkake — Dirty Books
Best. Appropriate domain name. Ever.
Read Regular / Introduction
A forthcoming typeface designed specifically to help people with dyslexia read and write more effectively.
Final Eyes: Jen Schuetz, Proofreader & Quality Assurance. San Francisco, CA.
Georgeous typography.
Web Typography Readability Test | by the User Experience team at Viget Labs
Jackson is gathering data to test on-screen readability. Sign up and join in.
Hamish Hamilton: Five Dials
A beautiful PDF literary magazine, designed to be printed out and read away from the computer. I'd still love to see an HTML version.
Eucalyptus: The Library, to go – on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
This looks like a nice book reading app.
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com
A good piece from Steven Johnson on the future of e-books but alas, it completely ignores DRM which is a show-stopper to the bright future he imagines.
8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs • Blog Archive • AisleOne
A quick round-up of typographic best practices applied to the web.
Proofreading the Public Domain — Chocolate and Vodka
Help keep your culture error-free by proof-reading small pieces of literature from Project Gutenberg.
arc90 lab : experiments : Readability
An excellent bookmarklet designed to help you read more easily on the web (by hiding all that filthy, filthy advertising).
Meow Reader
Cats. Reading. Once again, it's all about the cumulative effect.
Instapaper
A nice simple little app for saving URLs to read later. This kind of simplicity is remarkably hard to achieve.
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark]
A superb skewering of Kindle and just about any other attempt to make book distribution digital that involves ludicrously restrictive terms of service (or worse, DRM).
A List Apart: Articles: Reviving Anorexic Web Writing
I love this article by Amber Simmons. The truth shines through.
HTML Mastery - Semantics, Standards and Styling by Paul Haine
Paul's book will be out in a few weeks. Looks like it'll be a good one.
The Anatomy of Web Fonts [Design Principles]
Andy Hume has written a superb article about typography on the Web.
The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News
Suck it up, ya fixed width losers: your favourite escape clause has just been deflated. "Twenty college-age students read news articles displayed in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line (cpl) from a computer monitor. Results showed that passages formatte