The long awaited Copia e-reading platform finally launched, and the big surprise is that the previously announced devices have disappeared. Copia's innovation is that it smushes together a bookstore, reading environments that live across devices, and a social network. As such, it's interesting to look at. Another recent arrival is the App for Mongoliad, the ambitious collaboration between Neal Stephenson, Greg Baer "and friends". It's a serial work built on a custom platform (including both website and apps) that supports multimedia and user-generated content, and it aspires to be a community inside a fictional world containing multiple narratives rather than a novel. It's undeniable that books...

Publishing Perspectives is running an article by Michael Bhaskar looking at Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear’s “collaborative transmedia” project, The Mongoliad (which we previously mentioned here). Like Elizabeth Bear (no relation to Greg)’s Shadow Unit, The Mongoliad is a website to which chapters are posted by the primary authors but in which readers can assay some participation and collaboration. The Mongoliad tells a 12th-century alternate history story involving a Mongolian invasion of Europe, with new chapters posted weekly. The chapters involve not just text, but pictures, videos, animations, and other supplemental material. It is supported by a $10 yearly...

From Boing Boing. I hate serials so I won't jump in, but I'll probably buy the thing when it's finished. The Mongoliad is live! This is the collaborative, participatory shared-world project from Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and pals. It's an epic fantasy novel about the Mongol conquest, told in installment form, with lots of supplementary material (video, stills, short fiction, etc), and a strong audience participation component in the form of a Wikipedia-style concordance, fanfic, etc. You can read the free samples without registration, but you need an account to edit the "Pedia." For $5.99 you get a six-month subscription to...