Written long before he started down the road to the Presidency, Dreams From My Father is a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking the big questions about identity and belonging.

‘This may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.’
Joe Klein, Time

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama discusses the importance of empathy in politics, his hopes for a different America with different policies, and how the ideals of democracy can be renewed.

‘Offers readers on this side of the Atlantic a window not just into the mind of one of America’s most exciting politicians but into the political landscape of the post-Bush era.’ David Lammy, Guardian

As with Bunny Munro, both these apps feature the highest quality of design and typesetting, including control of type size and font, night mode, tilt scroll and many other features.

Both apps are available in the App Store now.

A pecha kucha has to be really fast – your 21 prepared slides run automatically in 20 second increments for a total of 7 minutes – and great fun. The event was impeccably organised by Jon Slack and Doug Wallace under the aegis of the Society of Young Publishers. They recently repeated the format for a third time and I recommend you to go to the fourth.

The brief was open, and for some reason I decided I wanted to talk about failure. The logic being that I thought that given that I was speaking to a room mainly composed of young publishers or students trying to enter the industry, I would share my extensive professional experience of disappointment and shattered dreams. Not in a bid to break their spirits, you understand, but to encourage them to try and be recklessly ambitious and hopelessly idealistic at the beginning of their careers – especially if someone else is underwriting those failures. It’s a twist on the old “silver lining” story but hopefully enough to be inspiring.

The pecha kucha format is unforgiving to hyperbole and imminent failure (technical or emotional) haunts the speaker. Terrifyingly, I was first up as well which didn’t help the nerves.

Anyway, the video has just been put online, which is below. My notes from the talk are also available if you can’t see what’s on screen.

Sorry about the horrific thumbnail photo.

Also available is Jamie Byng’s talk, my old boss at Canongate, who was next up on stage. We didn’t know what the other was talking about so when I gave a slide about being his “gimp”, that was meant in the nicest possible way. Here’s his talk:

For more details on the event, here’s a post I wrote at the time.

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave is the first Enhanced Editions title, and contains everything you’d expect from a top-notch ebook experience: tilt scrolling, customisable fonts and text sizes, full-text search, bookmarking, and clean, clear navigation.

But we’ve also added Enhanced Editions goodness – as well as the complete text of the novel, the app comes with the full audiobook, read by Nick Cave – synced with the text, so you can switch from audio to text without losing your place. There’s also an exclusive soundtrack and videos of Nick reading from the book. There’s even an in-app news feed, keeping you up to date with news and reviews, as well as invitations to exclusive events.

As well as comissioning another film (above) from our good friends at Asylum – who made This Is Where We Live – we’ve also launched a new site at enhanced-editions.com.

Here we’re highlighting all the great titles coming in the next few months – including books by Barack Obama and David Simon, creator of The Wire – and talking about some of the new features and design decisions on the blog.

For example, want to know more about syncing the audiobook, serif vs sans-serif fonts, icon design, or our position on epub and DRM? It’s all on the blog. Go take a look.

25th Estate, the film (above) created for 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary, has already had over 250,000 views, and been blogged about by Kanye West.

Whilst higher accolades are hard to come by, we do have some great news of increased recognition from the film world.

The film, created with our dear friends at Asylum Films, have been accepted into the following festivals:

• Running this week at the South Bank BFI uber-hip ONEDOTZERO asked us specifically to take part in their CRAFTWORK 09 section

16th BRADFORD ANIMATION FESTIVAL.

• Asylum’s Jordan says, “Its like the Annecy of Britain, big deal in animation, this is the website . We did rather well at Annecy
• Anim’est 2009. We are in competition for Best Advertising
• Selected for the Prix Arts in Linz, Austria where we are screening as part of the Inner / outer Worlds section.
• This joins our many festivals already including SHORTS, SOHO, Portable, Portobello….

And, in case you missed it, here is another film we made with Asylum to promote Enhanced Editions‘ launch of Nick Cave’s new novel The Death of Bunny Munro as an iPhone app.