From The Literary Platform: The Literary Platform is hosting an international competition inviting creatives to produce an animation that illustrates a rare and prophetic audio recording of Douglas Adams talking in 1993 about the Evolution of the Book. In 1993 Douglas Adams, the world-renowned author of The Hitchhikers Guide of the Galaxy, recorded a short piece of audio for his US publisher of the time – Bob Stein of Voyager Expanded Books. Who would know how prophetic his words would sound nearly twenty years later, and how accurate his sense of the evolution of the book was. In this short recording, kindly donated to...

A Canadian developer is creating a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy app for the iPad. Rather than an e-book version of the prose novels, however, this app will purport to be “the” Guide, giving multimedia presentations on the Babel Fish and so forth. It could turn out differently than I expect, but I have a strong feeling this will only end up being a novelty. Meanwhile, the actual true-to-life function of the Guide has been available for quite some time in the form of websites such as Everything2, h2g2 (which was actually modeled after the Guide’s true intent, and...

Due to budget cuts, the BBC has announced plans to “dispose of” the H2G2 website—a community-based Internet encyclopedia, created in 1999 (two years before Wikipedia!) by Douglas Adams and based on the idea of an electronic encyclopedia about “life, the universe, and everything” as depicted in Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels. The Beeb originally bought it in 2001 after Adams’s company failed in the dot-com crash, and in 2005 produced a mobile version for smartphones and PDAs. BBC Online Social Media Executive Nick Reynolds hastens to explain that the BBC does not want to close H2G2, but...

The Guardian has an interview with Penguin chief executive John Makinson, who also runs a small independent bookstore with his brother. Makinson is a newly converted iPad reader, carrying an iPad loaded with a number of books on a trip to India. He has a number of things to say about the iPad, and about e-books in general. "It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us," [Makinson] says. "Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there...