There was an interesting article in yesterday's Morning Links about the 'gamification' of books. I had first heard this term in response to the Reading Life feature on the Kobo platform, which awards you 'badges' for such activities as reading at a certain time in the day, reading a certain number of books, using a dictionary or bookmark feature, and so on. But this article was coming at it from a different aspect: using the 'concept of game mechanics' to 'pull the reader through a book.' Jeremy Greenfield of Digital Book World, the article's author, suggests applying these strategies to children's...

“Showrooming.” While I can’t say I’d heard the specific term before, it’s easy to understand what it’s talking about—the practice of using a physical store as a “showroom” where you can examine something and then go buy it online. This is one of the trends many pro-agency pricing comment submitters noted in their comments to the DoJ, though in the DoJ’s response it was largely referred to as “free-riding.” As I mentioned the other day, a lot of people do “showrooming” in bookstores with their Kindles. However, it’s also long been a popular activity on smartphones for general-purpose...

Now you’re teaching with portals! E-books aren’t the only electronic medium that can be used educationally, and game publisher Valve has just announced an educational initiative to turn its Portal 2 game into a teaching tool. Teachers will be granted a limited educational edition of Steam including a free copy of Portal 2, and administrative access to control level sharing. "We have a limited version of Steam, which is called 'Steam for Schools.' And what we're doing is asking for teachers, after school programs, organizations – anywhere where there's a student relationship, which includes homeschooling...

A court in the UK has issued an order compelling UK ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, the BBC reports. Previously, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) music lobby group had asked the ISPs to do so voluntarily, but they had declined to do so without an actual court order. Critics of the move warn that it could represent the start of a slippery slope toward censoring sites promoting other causes or behaviors. ISP Virgin Media told the BBC that content providers need to offer a carrot as well as a stick: "As a...

Might one of the as-yet-untapped benefits of e-books be the ability to revise? After the ending of Mass Effect 3 sent fans into an uproar, BioWare and Electronic Arts have announced that a free downloadable content pack will be released this summer including additional cinematic sequences that will “give fans seeking further clarity to the ending of Mass Effect 3 deeper insights into how their personal journey concludes.” Make no mistake, fans were extremely upset at the ending of the game. Instead of the expected multitude of different endings depending on the choices characters had made, there were...

Here’s another story of a developer railing against used video games. Although it may not seem to have relevance to e-books at first, I think this story demonstrates the way the gaming industry and the publishing industry are struggling with some similar issues in the digital age. In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Silicon Knights head Denis Dyack states that used games are clobbering the game industry, cutting off the “tail” of sales that used to support game studios well after games’ original release. Without that “tail”, Dyack says, game companies can expect to receive almost all their sales...

Last week, Mass Effect 3 came out. And it’s been eating into my doing-other-stuff time ever since. But Mass Effect 3 isn’t just interesting as a video game, and as the conclusion to a trilogy of stories I’ve been following for years. I find it interesting in its overall implications for electronic media and storytelling—including electronic literature. Mass Effect 3 was built from the ground up to interact with other media. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any other game that has gone quite so far into linking itself across multiple platforms. Apart from...

That The Oatmeal strip I mentioned a few days ago has stirred up some controversy. A post on TechDirt links to both a rebuttal from Andy Ihnatko decrying the culture of entitlement that leads to people thinking they have a right to download content just because they can’t buy it, and a post by Instapaper’s Marco Ament that takes a more pragmatic stance. Ament uses the example of a public restroom where people kept throwing wadded up paper towels on the floor by the door because they wanted to use them to avoid touching the restroom door handle and...

Not specifically e-book-related, but the news has just come out that Wizards of the Coast will be publishing a 5th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG. Since taking ownership of  the property in 1997, Wizards of the Coast has produced two and a half new editions of the game, experimented with open-style licensing, and subsequently moved away from it. It inspired the creation of a cloned game system, Pathfinder, when fans got upset that the 3rd/3.5th edition mechanics were being totally thrown over in favor of more MMO-like play in 4th edition. Seeing a new edition come out...

How are digital media changing our buying habits? They are changing them, there’s no question, but we often don’t think about how. But something that’s happened over the last few days has led me to think about it. Of all electronic forms of media, I think that computer games (and other software, true, but I’m focusing on games here) are one of the most closely related to e-books, though perhaps they’re a little closer to digital music. As with books and music, they used to come solely on physical media that we buy not for the physical medium...

Even as Gabe Newell of Valve continues to lecture that piracy is brought on by companies offering poor service rather than an unwillingness to pay for games, some game companies seem to have a hard time learning the lesson. Zachary Knight at Techdirt reports that last week, Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Stanislas Mettra seemed to imply that a PC version of the game I Am Alive would not be coming out because there were too many pirates and not enough customers on the PC platform. “If only 50,000 people buy the game then it’s not worth it,” he...

Our sister blog GamerTell points out a set of game-related e-book deals for the holiday season. Games Workshop e-book publisher Black Library (whom we’ve covered here before) is offering a number of e-book and audiobook bundles for fans who haven’t bought in yet. Some of them are a little pricey. For example: Christmas Space Marine eBundle: Space Marines are always fun. This collection takes the best novels and novellas highlighting specific famous Space Marine battle. In total, you get seven novels and four novellas for $75.89. Though when you look at the individual books in the bundle, it doesn’t appear that you’re...