Um yeah… for some reason I’ve been led down memory lane and re-discovering just how crazy some of my past projects have been… for example the Bookimobile…
So, Booki was the predecessor to Booktype, a software I founded and brought to Sourcefabric in Berlin to further develop and market. It was an online book production software built on the learnings of a similar software I cut and paste together for FLOSS Manuals. The Bookimobile…well, was a complete book production suite bundled into a VW T4 van. I set this up when I lived in Berlin.
There are some crazy stories related to this. First, the Bookimobile is based on Brewster Khales/ Archive.orgs Bookmobile… except it was called the Bookimobile after the booki software. Second, I have to borrow 2 grand (euro) from my buddy Micz cause I didn’t have the readies …the crazy part of this was that it took me about 2 years to pay back Micz. He never asked for the money and I was as poor as a church mouse. When I was offered a job at PLOS, I finally had some $ and the next time I went back to Berlin, Micz and I went out and got hideously drunk, on margaritas of course (my fav poison). I had to fly out early, so I think we literally drank until I had to leave for the airport. What happened in the early hours before that and neither of us clearly remembered before we saw some evidence (blurry photos at a cash machine in Neukoln) is that I withdrew 2000 euro from a cash machine and stuffed it all into Micz’s pockets. He woke up fully clothed the next morning with his lovely partner Laura standing over him. He was still drunk and hung over and started pulling hundreds and hundreds of Euro out of his pockets wondering what on earth happened the night before (as did Laura). We later found some photos of Micz holding up all this money near the cash machine, money flowing out of his hands and a look of glee on his face.
Last mad story is that my partner at the time (Laleh) and I drove around France and Spain visiting festivals with the Bookimobile and printing out books for people. And what do you know…this video I found today of an interview of me while showing off the Bookimobile at the first mozfest in Barcelona…
