Whilst it’s still in somewhat “stealthy” mode, Apt has just launched the website for Enhanced Editions, and there is a mailing list over at the site to which you can subscribe for updates. There is also a Twitter account, @enhancededition with a pesky character limit - of which we have not yet heard the last.

Enhanced Editions has been in planning and development for about a year, inspired in part by a blog post I wrote about Stanza last summer. It’s been an amazing process, and I can’t wait to share the results with you - which will happen later this summer.

We will be looking for beta testers in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, sign up at www.enhanced-editions.com if you want to stay updated.

The guys from Asylum Films are just back from Annecy, the home of the world’s foremost animation festival. The 25th Estate film they made for us was part of the official selection, narrowly missing out in the Advertising Films Section to the BBC’s flying penguins iPlayer ad.

The film’s already won the Imagine Magazine Award for “Innovation in Animation” at FMX 09 in Germany, and the award for Best Animated Commercial at Stoke Your Fires, as well as screening at festivals and conferences in Belgium, Norway, America, Australia and round the UK.

Its next outing is as part of the official selection for the Soho Shorts festival, and it’s showing at the ICA on July 23rd and 26th, if you fancy seeing it on a big screen, alongside a whole load of other fascinating short films.

Of course, you can watch it here, now - along with 248,000 other people (and counting)…

Seeing as the Bookseer is about books, and data, and openness, I thought I would share some of the early stats with those of you who are interested in such things. This is all based on the first few days’ traffic up to June 13th. (Whilst launched before then, we announced in on June 9th.) As well as being fun, I think that the data is a mild demonstration of The Long Tail in action.

Visitors

• We’ve had 19,716 page views, across 4,403 page titles, with 15,181 unique page views.
• Visits are 7,123 with uniques at 6,602. Which suggests about 10% of people asked the Book Seer for advice on more than one title. (Or, if you felt generous, 90% of people got the answer they were looking for. Personally, I’m not quite that optimistic - if that were true, then we really should have set up an affiliate account on the referrals to Amazon… although I think that violates the non-commercial terms of service on the API.)

Pages

• The home page was the most popular, but only bounced 30.5% of visits. Which seeing as much of the referred traffic was from StumbleUpon, I think is pretty good - they are hard people to entertain. Having said that I find it really hard to see what StumbleUpon has said about a site or even to find a referring link.
• There are only two pages on the site- the home page, and the results page. The results page has the name of the book written into the URL (and the title) so we can tell from the logs what books have been looked at the most. If that URL had included the ISBN or something else abstract - we wouldn’t know anything. Nice work James. As a result we can tell which titles have been the most popular requests of the seer.

Books

And so the next bit is the fun bit. We have 4,406 different page titles, and 3 of those were the home page (we collected data when the site was codenamed “My Next Book”). All the other 4,403 are questions for the seer.

Here’s the top 20 - and it provides a fun overview of people’s reading habits. Note that some - not all - results are skewed by the fact that bloggers linking to the bookseer linked directly to a results page. So Stumbleupon appears to have linked directly to the Dave Eggers, What is the What page, a link which resulted in 166 of the 269 page views for that title. Still, What is the What remains a popular book among people who come to consult the Bookseer - or, looked at another way, one that people in aggregate find particularly hard to follow up to.

Top 20

Note that the links in the list below are ones I have made on the title only. Requests for an author only (e.g. Dave Eggers, without “What is the What”) are met with a demand for better information.

1. The Book Seer | What Is The What- 269 [This is slightly unfair as it is one of the pages linked to by StumbleUpon)
2. The Book Seer | Twilight - 116
3. The Book Seer | Harry Potter 74 [Note - Librarything has a lot of problems with this request]
4. The Book Seer | 1984
5. The Book Seer | The Road 55
6. The Book Seer | Neuromancer 52
7. The Book Seer | Atlas Shrugged 30
8. The Book Seer | Pride And Prejudice 27
9. The Book Seer | The Bible 26 [some great left-field recommendations for that]
10. The Book Seer | Outliers 24
11. The Book Seer | Enders Game 23
12. The Book Seer | On The Road 23 [Note the difficulty Amazon has compared to Librarything when no author is entered]
13. The Book Seer | The Catcher In The Rye 22
14. The Book Seer | ウェブ進化論 22 [No idea, sorry, but from the recommendations, looks pretty cool]
15. The Book Seer | Infinite Jest 21
16. The Book Seer | The Secret History19
17. The Book Seer | The Stand 19
18. The Book Seer | American Gods
19. The Book Seer | The Book Thief 18
20. The Book Seer | Catcher In The Rye 17

Whilst the top 20 is interesting, what I love is that the full list of titles is so broad. The vast majority of books only get one search on them; the bottom of the list is Q E D.

Titles 4000-4015 in the Bookseer list

Observations

• I think this is pretty cool, although I don’t know why. Taking aside Neuromancer - James’ test title - is it a really interesting zeitgeist of what people are reading? Or their favourite books? Or the books they find hardest to followup? Or the first book that comes to mind? Twilight, Harry Potter - OK, these may demonstrate a paucity of imagination as much as they show a teenage visitor set. But Infinite Jest?, What is The What? Atlas Shrugged? The Road? Whilst in the news, these aren’t exactly bestsellers. When Russell* linked to Rogue Male, I think the favourites is a good guess.
• Oops. We should probably strip out “The”, “A” and other prefixes to avoid duplicates such as [The] Catcher In The Rye.
• The Bookseer works much more accurately if you put in an author as well as a title, although James does a lot of clever things in the background (stuff learned from projects such as Bkkeepr for a start) to make up the difference.
• LibraryThing handles “title only” requests much better than Amazon. Amazon gets confused by “The Bible”, or rather, the number of titles in its database that include “The Bible”.
• LibraryThing gets confused quite often. Sorry Tim - do get in touch if we can find better ways to do this, or to query Unsuggester items (although part of me thinks the beauty here is in the simplicity).

And finally apologies to anyone using Internet Explorer 6 (and to my horror, this includes about 3.5% of visits and several large UK publishers) - you may have issues. Not sure what that says - we tried really hard to support you.

Visit the Bookseer

* [Russell - I'm with you. I recently re-read Rogue Male and loved it. I also gave my copy to David Simon, fan boy-style, because I read that he is apparently making a film based on Man Hunt, the Fritz Lang movie based on RM. He hadn't heard of the book, and wasn't very impressed by my gift.]

Seamus McGarvey is an Oscar-nominated cinematographer, who has worked on an incredible range of feature films, promos, and commercials. He’s very talented, very lovely - and we’ve just launched his website.

Based in Edinburgh, but born in Armagh, Seamus’s background was in stills photography before going to film school - and some of his personal stils work will feature on the site in coming weeks. Soon after graduating, he moved into working with film, and began a collaboration with artist Sam Taylor Wood, which continues to this day, resulting in a number of awards, including a Turner Prize nomination. Seamus and Sam have just wrapped on Nowhere Boy, a feature film (Sam’s first) about John Lennon’s childhood.

As well as working with Sam, and other artists including Derek Jarman, Seamus has shot over 100 promos for artists including PJ Harvey, Dusty Springfield, The Shaman (Yay!), U2, Terry Hall, Leftfield, Orbital, UB40, The Pogues, The Rolling Stones, Elton John and the famous Torn video for Natalie Imbruglia.

In recent years his features work has seen him become one of the most sought-after DOPs in the business. His Oscar Nomination was for Atonement, directed by Jo Wright, with whom Seamus also just completed The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr and Jamie Foxx. (Check out Seamus’ awesome promo for Elton John’s “I Want Love”, directed by Sam Taylor Wood and starring a single-take, just back-from-the-brink Downey Jr). In recent years he has completed No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency with the late Antony Minghella, World Trade Centre with Oliver Stone, The Hours, High Fidelity, and also The War Zone, produced by another Apt client, Portobello Pictures.

Seamus is an old Edinburgh friend of Apt, and we teamed up with our Glasgow friends Marque to put together this simple but elegant site to show off his work. In coming weeks each of the film clips will begin to be enhanced with a voiceover from Seamus talking about the project, the shots, and anecdotes from the shoot.

For keen cinematographers and DOPs, there is an extensive Q&A with Seamus in the “About” section.

in 1998, Seamus joined the British Society of Cinematographers and was awarded the Royal Photographic Society’s prestigious Lumiere medal for contributions to the art of cinematography in 2004.

Go check out Seamus McGarvey’s website.

The Book Seer is another little project we’ve just released onto the web. It’s very simple, and hopefully quite nice. Tell it what you’ve just read and it’ll suggest some stuff to read next.

It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from Amazon and LibraryThing - at the moment. I’d like to pull stuff from more places, but it’s not easy.

For example, I like supporting local libraries and bookshops. But there’s basically no way to get at this data. I’m really glad that The Book Partnership exists, but it’s not exactly a beacon of open data best practice, and its Local Bookshops service is slow, cludgey, and impossible to link to in useful, meaningful ways. Likewise, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s Find A Library service. There’s better data out there for libraries, but it’s mostly monopolised and ring-fenced by the Online Computer Library Centre (for more on this, see my post at Booktwo: OCLC and the Great Library Scandal).

And even many other online reading apps don’t have great ways of getting this kind of useful information out (by which I mean connections-between-books, not just the books themselves). The LibraryThing part is done by horrible old screen-scraping (sorry, Tim), and I couldn’t even make that work with GoodReads or Shelfari or Bookmooch or Bookarmy or Bookrabbit (RIP) or … well, you get the idea.

Book data is hard, but it shouldn’t be. It’s also valuable, and that’s why Amazon ranks higher than most publishers for their own books, and why monopolies like the OCLC exist and why things like OpenLibrary are A Good Thing (and I need to have a proper play with their API). Data should be free. Representations of that data can then be used by all, and the most successfull will Rise. That’s the idea, anyway: things like this should be easier to build.

Enough from me. Go, ye, to the Book Seer, and be Enlightened.

P.S. I did use one other API - the lovely bit.ly for short URLs. I used the same PHP wrapper I wrote for Quietube, and if you like it, you can use it too: PHP Wrapper for Bit.ly API.

P.P.S. The Book Seer is in fact the late Mr Charles Lucy, distinguished artist and most estimable gentleman, courtesy of the London Illustrated News, 1873, and Wikimedia Commons.