Hackpacker

As a stunning visual spectacular, Tokyo's Digital Art Museum  has become the must-Instagram experience for visitors to the city. Its full name -  Building Digital Art Museum Epsom teamLab Borderless - suggests just how big the collaboration must have been to get this 100,000sqm exhibition space happening. It took the Mori Building Group and Epsom to make it work and nothing about it feels like this was a cheap exercise. The collaborative art group teamLab are known for works in Singapore and London but with this permanent space they paint across a big canvas. Rendering butterflies, flowers and charging rhinos onto walls, floors, mirrors and a series of cutomised surfaces, the canvas is truly vast and visitors are warned in advance that this is about discovery - non-sequential, likely to get lost and maddening to visitors wanting linear narrative. This means you can jump in anywhere and experience the exhibition any way you want. The Borderless part of the title is about the s

It's easy for writers to find themselves in ruts. They get known for a particular genre, hit their style or fluke their way into a readership and lose the need to experiment. If there was a verb for this phenomenon it could be: to Grisham. The n00bz: New Adventures in Literature wants to disrupt the writerly rut, the tendency to Grisham, by pushing out of their comfort zone. The challenge was to take-on an experiment with another part of publishing or culture. So we have fictioner and critic James Bradley attempting a comic based on his superhero short story, if:book Australia manager Simon Groth tapping away at retro typewriter and Benjamin Law confessing he has no journalist cred until he can learn old fashioned shorthand.  But not just writers are experimenting with former bookseller Greg Field picking up after his bookstore closes and finding a new life online. His Star Wars analogy of modern publishing makes his opinion clear in casting Darth Bezos but the Force i

Over the last couple of months I've been part of the Hardcopy Professional Development program for writers offered by the ACT Writers Centre. The format broke into two long weekends - editorial and Intro2Industry. The latter wrapped up on Sunday after three intense and well-programmed days that brought agents, experts and literary shaman to the ACT. Okay so there were no actual shaman but the list of svengalis was impressive. Probably the best part was the range: from traditional dead tree publishers to the digital experimentation of IF: Book Australia . Over the entire program opinions varied (fiction books, apparently, must be at least  70,000 words , 60,000 words , okay 50k but that's really as low as publishers will go - unless it's a digital book) but there were a lot of great insights. So the only way to summarise a busy program is with a listicle right? Here's the top five things I got out of the program: 1) The Book is a zombie that refuses to die So t

There's been a lot of death knells sounded for the bookshop. And a few of the big chains have been in strife - Borders, Angus and Robertson were the big news. But an interesting rumination on the future of bookshops from the Association of University Presses got me thinking about how they could thrive. Rather than being defensive about online bookshops stealing business, the article suggests stealing clicks and mortar's ideas like showrooming. Bookshops are becoming the place where buyers encounter books but sneak home to buy them cheaply (or increasingly do it in store on their phones). Last Christmas in the US Amazon paid shoppers to report prices on their mobiles by promising discounts or cash then undercut physical bookstores on. There's no avoiding clicks and mortar in the physical world. So the article suggests bookshops are evolving into a "book place" offering book rental, secondhand options or membership models. It might even be possible to get a qu