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I’ve only ever written fan fiction twice in my life, and both times it’s been for Sid Meier games.
Nurturing a civilization from a band of illiterate settlers to an empire that’s trading goods and blows across the world tends to make you feel rather attached to your people, and it’s hard not to be personally [...]

When Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, Europe experienced a ‘Year Without a Summer’.
At the time, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (aged 18), and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron in Switzerland. With outdoor activities being unappealing due to the poor weather, they spent a lot of time indoors. It was during this [...]

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
- Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the [...]

How do you get boys to read? One way is to write entertaining and dramatic books, preferably including some violence. This is what Charlie Higson did for his Young Bond series of books, and judging by the fact that they have sold close to a million copies, it’s a pretty good strategy.
Of course, in this [...]

A lot of people are criticising Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem, for containing vast quantities of invented words. Instead of mobile phones, he has jeejahs; for video, he has speely; for church, he has ark; and so on.
I had been warned about these beforehand, and yet I still became irritated during the first couple of [...]

After becoming irritated about putting in a lot of work to prepare talks for conferences, and then for all that work to promptly vanish into the ether once my hour is up, I resolved to do something about it. I’ve bought a reasonably good microphone and have started recording the talks that I give to [...]

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, Director of the University Library at Harvard, writes about Google’s efforts to digitise the world’s books and create a new universal library. For the most part, the article is really very well-written and enlightening.
However, when comes around to criticising Google Book Search [...]

I love all the stories in We Tell Stories, but I do have favourites. Back when we were planning the six week schedule for the stories, we decided to structure it like an album – start with a bang, and end with a bang.
The first story was The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming. It was [...]

Today we launched the first short story at We Tell Stories, called The 21 Steps. It’s a thriller written by the acclaimed spy writer Charles Cumming, and it’s set within Google Maps. I’m genuinely pleased by the way in which the design of the experience meshed with Charlie’s excellent story, and so I’d really recommend [...]

Naomi Alderman, Perplex City lead writer, author of Disobedience, etc, wrote an article in the Sunday Times about the future of books. I’ve talked to Naomi often about eBooks and was quoted in the article:
Imagine, for example, a novel designed to take advantage of the features of the new must-have geek hipster accessory: the [...]