

The Future of the Book is Unfinished - gluejar
http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-future-of-book-is-unfinished-john.html

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jsundman
My book "Biodigital" & I are main topics of this post. I'm around for a bit if
anybody has questions.

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pirateking
Haven't read the book yet (as I just heard of it from the post), but sounds
interesting. I am also currently working on a piece of fiction with some
similar themes, and was wondering if you could share some thoughts on how you
manage references to real world entities and technologies in the story? What
sort of balance did you find between history, science, and fiction?

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jsundman
I guess I would say that the story is the important thing, not the themes or
real-world references or whatever. It's a novel, so above all, the story has
to be compelling and the characters have to be believable and at least
somewhat interesting.

With regard to real-world people, places and things, I was just aiming for
verisimilitude, to make the setting (and the science and computer science)
believable to people who knew the territory.

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JoshTriplett
I've seen two major developments beyond the traditional published-once book.
This article talks about one of them: "Unfinished", whether for fictional
works with multiple editions or edited versions (as in this article), or for
non-fiction references continuously updated to cover the latest version of the
topic they document. However, this article still assumes a punctuated series
of versions in essentially complete form, intended to be thought of as a
complete book, even though the author may release a new version in the future.

There's a step beyond that sense of "unfinished": the future of the book is
_in progress_ , actively being written and edited. There's something
particularly fun about reading the first few chapters of a book whose ending
is _not yet written_ , providing feedback, having a conversation with the
author, and seeing that feedback reflected in the next update. See a typo, or
a plot hole? Post a comment with a bug report. Having that experience with
software was what hooked me on Open Source; however, that experience is not by
any means limited to software, and it's quite a thrill for books (fiction or
non-fiction) as well.

Having that feedback and update channel pervasively available really changes
your outlook on prose, as it does with software. I've long since stopped
putting up with software for which I can't file a bug report and ideally write
a patch. Imagine a world where a significant fraction of books work the same
way.

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spiritplumber
So, a lot like indie games?

