| Author | Message | ||
     Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.19.204 |
Imagine a book that never ends, topped up weekly. The author trains up his son to keep writing it after his death. Aw, bluey - anybody can finish it. Imagine your favourite book. You like a character in it who only appears briefly. You can buy chapters about this character doing their own thing. You can follow their whole life in a biography that is also available, told in ongoing, teensy tiny detail. You can buy a book about his mum, written by a different author. Wikibooks. You can alter an existing book, make it as good or bad as you like. Book mix. You can cut two books (or more) into one, make them overlap, pretty much as a dj might mix some music. Dickens meets Holmes? Rewrite an old favourite, buy alternat books written by somebody famous, only tweaked to bring out a different flavour, the same way two actors can read the same book but bring out different things. I really love books, paper books, but some of these ideas appeal to me quite a bit. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.156.32.78 |
Great stuff. I did this with many millions of authors in the last twenty years: http://dflcollaborations.wordpress.com/ Just that the outcomes should be crystallised at various stages as smelly, handleable books for bookshelves? | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.19.204 |
Des - yes, I'm for that. I really would like on-demand books. I'm increasingly envisioning an ongoing book that you can buy segments of, maybe, like you say, printed into book form. Recently, with my shrinking attention span, I've taken to dipping into books instead of reading them whole. the twist is I am finding the experience just as rewarding as reading the whole thing in sequence. Maybe ebooks will be a happier thing if it embraces these new forms. It's a frontier, and can be viewed as such, maybe even treated as such, and anything can happen in it. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Tony, you've got some fantastic ideas - I wish I had your imagination! You reminded me of something we did at school, many moons ago. The teacher got each one of us in the class to write a chapter of a book - ie. one student to one chapter each week. And all of us in the class were the characters in the story. I was actually quite upset when the class bully did something horrible to my best friend in their chapter, so when it came to my turn I had my friend doing something really heroic instead.  Imagine those of us on the RCMB are the characters in a story and this board is the "book" ... | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.30.195 |
This kind of game goes back to the Victorian parlour and long before. We used to do things like this as oral activities in the student fantasy society I belonged to in the mid-80s. More recently, John Sessions has made a career of it. The internet just provides a new space for this kind of thing, somewhere in between oral and printed formats. In the same way, the internet has provided a cosy warren for fanfic in its many forms, but it's the same kind of stuff that was being privately circulated in the 70s and before. From bundles of photocopied, closely typed missives to password-protected blogs and even open-access sites, the human impulse to customise and personalise the classics remains unstoppable. In a rarely visited prehistoric cave in southern France, the famous images of mammoths and early hunters have been copied onto tiny bone stencils and reproduced within small cave images, engaging in sexual acts that were old news even then. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.155.203.93 |
*Frontier not open - already there*  |