The countdown has again ended. Exactly twelve months ago today, if:book Australia gathered together nine authors, ten editors and a mighty support team on two continents. Their goal was to write, edit, and publish a complete book from scratch in just twenty-four hours.

You know how it went down.

Featuring work from Nick Earls, Steven Amsterdam, and Krissy Kneen and others, the 24-Hour Book proved a great success, but the project generated much more than just 142 pages of finished text. Every edit, annotation and interaction with the online audience was time-stamped, captured and stored in an online database.

This is where Willow Patterns comes in. This project opens the book’s complete database, creating a web site that will let you browse through every version of every story. It’s fascinating stuff. Already I’ve spent hours trawling through page after page, scrolling through the numbers, inferring what happened when, watching word counts rise and, sometimes, fall. The data tells its own stories about how our writers worked, about their style, about the choices the editors made and the consequences of those choices.

This is Willow Patterns.

Those of you who know your way around databases and coding can download the raw data and create your own applications, visualisations and animations. We have already created a simple graph on the site that chronicles the book’s total word count. We’re also presenting the complete data as a one-off multi-volume printed work: the book behind the book, if you like. Later this year, the project will hear from artists, poets, and others responding and remixing the book to create new works in both digital and physical forms.

Want to get involved? Let us know.

All books—all stories—are made from data. Usually we see only a fraction of the data that goes into the finished product. The idea behind Willow Patterns is to lift the veil, explore the book’s hidden machinations before exploding it into myriad works and responses that will inspire visitors to step outside of ‘the book’ and consider a future where anyone can engage with stories on their own terms.

Check it out.

Memory Makes Us is a new project from if:book Australia that explores the role of memory in writing and reading and highlights the frequently transient nature of books, whether on paper or screen.

In the first stage of Memory Makes Us, we need your help. We’re looking for long-term memories: the moments, thoughts, objects and feelings that stay with you. They might be significant, funny, strange or simply mundane: if it’s yours and you’re willing to share, then we want to see it.

What we’re looking for:

• Short texts (about a paragraph long)
• Photos or images
• Videos (something you’ve captured or just talk to the camera)

We’re putting together an online repository of memories which will contain many of the submissions to this site. Take a look. We’re posting new work to the repository manually, so please be aware your work won’t appear there instantly. Also please note that the work you submit must be your own. If you use any copyrighted material (images or songs in particular), we won’t be able to use it for the project.

Submit your memory here.

You can post your memories to the if:book web site from now until early July.

On 9th July, celebrated author Kate Pullinger will write a new work live and in public at the State Library of Queensland. Your collected memories will form Kate’s source material.

On the day, you will able to read her work online as it develops or you can drop in to the library if you’re in town. We will post more details about this even as the time draws nearer.

More details about Memory Makes Us.

An episode of CBC radio show Ideas with Paul Kennedy called ‘Opening the Book’ chats with if:book friends and associates Kylie Mirmohamadi, Hugh McGuire, and Bob Stein alongside Sue Martin and James Bridle. A few random quotables hastily jotted down while listening:

What is an ebook? Well, we don’t know yet. We don’t know how to talk about the future of the book without constantly referring to past models of the book. – Kylie Mirmohamadi

I’d rather redefine what a book is than try to come up with another word for this strange experimental pond that we’re working in. – Bob Stein

The media of the future will flow, it will always be in process. – Bob Stein

The social part [of book annotation] is secondary to the desire we have as a reader to be marking up, underlining, dogearing…that’s the impulse, our own desire to interact with that information in a deeper and more active way. – Hugh McGuire

The future is not necessarily being designed in there space where I come from. – Bob Stein.

Follow this link to listen to the show.

The Riverbend Poetry Series is set to start off the 2013 series with a bang, featuring graveyard poet Zenobia Frost,  poet Anthony Lawrence and some extra special launches – Vanessa Page launching her latest collectionConfessional Box and the Choose Your Own Poetry Adventure amplified e-book launch. Come along and let poetry light up the night!

When: Tuesday 19th February 2013, 6pm for a 6:30pm start

Where: Riverbend Books, 193 Oxford St, Bulimba

Cost: $10

Bookings made through Riverbend Books on 07 3899 8555 or you can head to their web site for a ticket.

This event always sells out fast, so book early to avoid disappointment!

We’ve been hard at work on an ‘enhanced’ ebook for the iPad, based on last year’s Choose Your Own project for the Queensland Poetry Festival.

In the original project, three local poets wrote a series of pieces based around specific locations within Brisbane’s home of everything loud and late, Fortitude Valley. Each of the three adventures opened at the Judith Wright Centre on Brunswick Street and, from there, readers had to choose the next location and walk there to read (or listen) to the next poem.

The poets – Chris Lynch, Carmen Leigh Keates, and Julie Beveridge – not only created beautiful, evocative, and sometimes hilarious poems, they also played with the notion of choice and prompted quite a bit of what looked like aimless wandering through the Valley streets.

To adapt this locative project for the small screen, we brought in photographer Cindy Keong to the project to capture the essence of the locations for each piece. We also brought the humble hyperlink to the book. Readers can either move sequentially through the book or brave the links to jump between each location minus the heat and legwork (unless you really want to, in which case we have maps).

Titled The City We Build, the book will soon be available free from Apple’s iBookstore, from the Queensland Poetry Festival‘s web site and here at if:book. We’ll post more details of the project   soon (including screenshots), but until then, here are a few images we took while recording the poets’ performances.

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