The Future of Publishing?
A recent post discussed the dilemma book publishers and authors are facing as they transition from print to digital publishing. The ease of digital book publishing is creating a high volume of books and driving down prices. Publishers and authors are forced to be more creative in how they produce and market books.
While it may not signify the solution for the industry, several publishers are experimenting with innovative projects to engage users and revitalize the industry. The world’s first Twitter-sourced novel, for example, which was created in Finland last summer, has now recently been published as an ebook in several other languages. The novel, titled “From Reality to Another”, was authored by 500 individuals over a period of 16 weeks using Twitter messages. A lead author set the scene for each chapter by writing the first paragraph, then anyone could contribute to the story.
The book was published in Finnish as a paperback last Fall and quickly sold out the first print. The translation was also crowdsourced, enlisting a group of more than 12,000 professional translators around the world to create the global ebook, which features four alternative endings, allowing the reader to participate in building the final story.
The project follows in the footsteps of a 2007 Wikibook project by Penguin Publishing UK. The resulting book was never published book but the project generated plenty of attention.
A Guardian UK article points out that this type of writing is simply an extension of the history of storytelling. “Human experience is a series of never-ending, overlapping stories bumping into one another in expected and unexpected ways. Storytellers are (and have always been) simply curators of information who finesse the elements of a yarn into a beginning, middle and end.” As an author quoted in the article points out, “the kind of multi-way conversation that the web makes possible is what we’ve always wanted to do. The technology finally enables it.”
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