The Refinement Club

We now have a new date for this Mass-Refinement! Wednesday, August 31st!

We have been invited to arrange a Mass-Refinement (formerly known as Pitch Night) at Katachi Magazine.

The topic is ebooks. Katachi Magazine is in the process of releasing the first issue of their iPad magazine, but they’re already planning to start an ebook platform. We want to invite everyone who is interested, who love to read and/or write, work within publishing or design etc. to join us. We want you to come and think broad, and to think about how we can expand and enrich the reading experience.

How can we bring the best from two worlds together, the analogue and the digital?

How can we keep the art of the book when we leave paper behind?

What is wrong with ebooks today, and how can we fix it?

The issue of ebooks can be closely related to the debate of the future of libraries, which has gotten some attention in Norway lately in regard to the new library that will be built in the Opera area. And of course the recently released ebook platform “Bokskya” which haven’t received all that much praise.

We have talked about ebooks at The Refinement Club several times and we’ve got a couple of posts that we think are relevant:

• My Bookshelf
• Hans Gerhard Meiers: Diglitt
• The News Game is about news, but it’s basically about how to get people to read.

People talk about the future of the book and there are some nice concepts and ideas floating around. Take a look and think about how it could become better, and how we can utilize some of these thoughts in the pursuit of keeping the art of the book.

• In this video IDEO envisions the future of the book
• Who reads books? Unfortantly, not that many it seems
• Why Tyler Cowen’s new book will be on Kindles, not bookstore shelves
• How has the technology of reading evolved from papyrus to the iPad?
• Seth Godin’s The Domino Project
• Is Mobile Affecting When We Read?
• Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book
• TEDBooks
• Unbound - Books are now in your hand

So there’s some input.

We would love to meet you all for a new Mass-Refinement with sausages, beer and idea sharing, and talk about how we can enhance the reading experience through ebooks, and about how we can evolve the artform of books and make even more people publish books and read books!

Welcome to The Refinement Club’s Mass-Refinement 04 at Katachi Magazine - sign up here!

Ps. if you’re not on Facebook you can send us a mail to: post@refinementclub.com to sign up!