Here’s another piece by Cory Doctorow on the publishing industry and Google. It’s familiar stuff to those already aquainted with his writings on copyright, but he finishes the essay with a point about the social aspects of books:
This pincer movement is gradually squeezing books out of the lives of much of the traditional audience for books: people don’t need books to meet each other anymore, and books aren’t the best way to kill time anymore.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the number of retail outlets for books has also dwindled away. Mall and main-street bookstores have all but vanished; drug-stores and grocery stores have eliminated or downsized their book sections. What that means is that the only time you come across a book these days is when you go looking for one: when you specifically plan a trip to a big-box bookseller or a distant specialty store. That’s fine: people who are already interested in buying books can go to a giant Borders or login to Amazon and get more selection than every before.
This raises a question: how or why would e-books have this same social aspect (aside from bookclubs, which so far haven’t really glommed onto ebooks)? Blogs and wikis can serve for intermediary discourse between author and audience (and Thoutreader has also tried to interleave ebook text with public commentaries). But let’s be honest. Usually a work receives renewed public attention only after it is first adapted into a movie or some silly Flash cartoon.
Perhaps we should ignore the social questions and simply focus on the clandestine just-in-time entertainment possibilities that ebooks can offer. Whenever I pick up a public domain work, I sometimes wonder, “Am I the only person on the planet who has even heard of this work?” Reading long-forgotten classics turns attention away from today and towards a world that will never again be. Everyone has reasons for reading, but for me, it provides a way to discover new modes of living and compare the human predicament in different time periods. Now that living authors are venturing into virtual gaming worlds , it is only a matter of time before classic authors are recreated into game characters and their imaginary worlds are finally realized by fans many centuries later.
Robert Nagle (aka idiotprogrammer) writes fiction under various pseudonyms and lives in Houston, Texas.
Thanks for your reflections, Robert. Great essay. I myself hope that books will be available in many forms, but that text will not suffer. It’s a matter in part of changing the educational system, so that books once again count, not just games, and that is much of what TeleRead is about. We should encourage students to develop the sustained concentration needed to enjoy books. One way is to allow them easy access to books on topics of interest to them, including, yes, relevant classics–present in an interesting context, perhaps blending history with literature.
Needless to say, online books can help address the availability issue. I remember going to a local drugstore and reading $1-$2 paperback editions of such writers as Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow. We need to bring back the Good Old Days on the computer screen; it’s too late, alas, for the paperback rack.
You wrote: it is only a matter of time before classic authors are recreated into game characters and their imaginary worlds are finally realized by fans many centuries later.
It may be not quite what you were thinking of, but you will probably enjoy a look at Marcus Rowland’s collection of roleplaying games based on the “scientific romances”, the predecessors of science fiction that were published in the late 19th and early 20th century.
He has really dug deep into some wonderfully obscure stuff and re-purposed it as ebooks and games for a social entertainment experience.
see http://www.forgottenfutures.com/
Very good essay, pretty much the Grand Unified Theory of Future Publishing, except that it is actually readable and understandable by those who do not possess two PHDs in Physics.
Frank: what a great connnection. RPG’s (especially the pencil and paper kind) can recapture some of the magic of the original narrative. I used to play D& D for a while, and I shamelessly ripped off books I’d been reading (and D&D creator Gary Gygax was doing the same thing as well).
The trick of course is translating the evocative settings and characters into worthwhile gameplay. BTW, when I watched the last Harry Potter film (great by the way), I couldn’t help thinking the director made it in anticipation of the videogame spinoffs. I really can’t say whether this “intentional multipurposing” actually adds value to the movie or detracts from it.