Neal Stephenson Unveils His Digital Novel Platform 157
pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Neal Stephenson's company Subutai has released the first installment of Stephenson's new novel, Mongoliad, about the Mongol invasion of Europe, using what it calls the PULP platform for creating digital novels. The core of the experience is still a text novel, but authors can add additional material like background articles, images, music, and video and there are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers. Stephenson says the material is an extension of what many science fiction and fantasy novels already offer. 'I can remember reading Dune for the first time, and I started by reading the glossary,' Stephenson says. 'Any book that had that kind of extra stuff in it was always hugely fascinating to me.' Jeremy Bornstein says Subutai is experimenting with a new model for publishing books and says the traditional model of paying for content may not hold up when the content can 'be canned and sent around to your friends for free,' but that people will hopefully still pay for content if 'the experience is so much more rich, so much more involving.'"
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Funny)
If only we had a way of taking everyone's 60 lb 5 foot high towers and making them "on the go". "On the go" computing! Has a nice ring to it. One day soon (doesn't it always seem like the cool stuff is 5-10 years out) I think we'll have computers in smaller formats, ones dedicated for things such as this. I'm envisioning something in the form factor of a legal pad or something, or a large book if you need a keyboard. Oh well - at least I can get paged now and respond from the nearest convenient pay phone instead of always hovering around a phone for important calls. What'll they think of next!
Wow, he's only 5 years behind webcomics (Score:3, Funny)
In 2015, maybe he'll figure out that you give the bits away free - heck, you encourage fans to share them - and make your money from tangibles: posters, shirts and plushies.
If you're an author whose work isn't easily translatable to posters, shirts and plushies, well, sucks to be you, but railing about it isn't going to put the genie back in the bottle. Either add some sparkly emo vampires, or get a day job lined up. That's the way it's going to go down.
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not to say he's long winded or anything (Score:4, Funny)
You've never seen them together at a party. I think Neal "killed" his alter ego Jordan because it was getting too hard to maintain the two personas.
Re:Interesting idea, but we're redefining novel (Score:4, Funny)
we may stop calling them novels.
As soon as the novelty wears off...