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Neal Stephenson Unveils His Digital Novel Platform
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.'"
The price point is too high, the author's last few works have not been up to his previous standard, and leisure reading at my computer is simply not possible.
The question is, will this new platform allow the author to add an ending to a novel?
As an author, Stephenson rides the reader hard and puts them away wet, so to speak. It'd be nice if he'd address that first.
Why they arways tear down my warr?
I hate freaking Mongorians!
Most eBook/eZine/eManga software is severely lacking in ease of use and functionality, and I am unable to find anything on when they are going to release this system to the public. Anyone know when the general public will be able to try our hands at creating media rich novels?
HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Does anyone seriously think the answer to the 'content can be had for free, so people have it for free' problem is ... more content? Really?
So he's publishing PULP fiction?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Or perhaps we aren't. I'm still not sure how I feel about this. It is one thing to have a book with appendices and glossaries and indexes and illustrations. But this thing seems to be something else entirely and I don't know if I am really interested in this. I like open ended stories as much as the next wannabe post-modernist, but a novel that you subscribe to? Where you are interacting with other readers in a social media-esque way? Where the thing never really ends?
Still trying to decide how I feel. I suppose the thing is, while I like things that are unfinished, sprawling and messy (which is why I've never really given a damn about Stephenson's inability to write a coherent ending), I'm still attached to the notion of the messiness being constrained between the covers of a book, that I can close with a happy sigh and say, "Damn, that was good." That might be weirdly old fashioned. Stephenson may be getting at something here and, 100 years from now, this is what "novels" will look like. But I suspect that if that is the case, we may stop calling them novels.
words, words, words, lemur, words, words words
Stephenson's new novel, Mongoliad, about the Mongol invasion of Europe
Mongoliad
Book 1 - General Subutai Gets Dressed For Battle
Book 2 - General Subutai Has Breakfast
Book 3 is still being planned, but will probably involve Subutai mounting his horse and riding out of camp.
If I'm reading a book, it's because I WANT to be alone with the book and my imagination. The only communication I'm interested in is with the author's words.
We don't need, and we don't want, yet another "social platform."
File size is going to be an issue on media-rich ebooks and other similar apps for some time to come. A single issue of Wired for iPad is 500MB. That means an 8GB iPad can only handle about 15 issues assuming that's all you put on the thing (not to mention having those files duplicated on your iTunes machine as well). That's a lot of data for such a diminutive magazine rack and this seems like a step-up from that.
If Stephenson's intention is to head toward a self-inspired "Young Ladies Illustrated Primer" type experience he's going to run up against the file size issue pretty quickly.
Also the art direction and interface elements on the Mongoliad site are embarrassingly bad. It looks like a bad Diablo tutorial site. I hope it doesn't reflect the look and feel of the actual book experience.
I should also say that I'm terribly curious about the final result but I'm not going to hold my breath for anything revolutionary.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
Be not!
-or-
It turns out Kublai really was a god!
(Sorry, the -iad ending to the title puts me in mind of rather more recent fiction than the [I assume] intended allusion)
He will be surprised to discover that the primary users of his technology will use it for a word-by-word critique of his novel. It's easier to tear down than it is to build.
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."
The flaw is that the 'extra' content that makes 'the experience so much more rich, so much more involving' can also be 'cannned and sent around to your friends for free'. In principle this is no different from the 'shareware' model for software and games that flourished in the early 90s. Give folks a little bit of the experience and hope they pay for the full monty. Ok, fine, but unless the nature of the extra stuff is sufficiently different from the original, it suffers from the same weaknesses. People can share a glossary and such stuff just as easily. Incrementally withholding content of essentially the same nature doesn't qualify as a long term sustainable model. The extra stuff needs to be something different and much better. This might be economically infeasible, but having a small troupe of actors under contract to the author/publisher stop by your house for a fee and engage in a personalized enactment of a crucial part of the story might work as entertainment worth paying for. If the author is clever enough, this could be customized to each reader/group so it couldn't be recorded and distributed in kind as mentioned above. So okay, that wouldn't work, probably, but with a little imagination, someone could come up with something that would.
IMHO, this kind of content delivery where the experience is solely controlled and managed by the 'rights holders' is not sufficient any longer. That ship has sailed and easy duplication plus the internet has blown that model out of the water. They should be thinking more along the lines of licensed creation of user created content where they exert less control but help make the 'fanfic' experience 'so much more rich, so much more involving'. Instead of Foxing fan driven efforts, what if content providers licensed copyrighted materials and such to interested fans for a reasonable fee? instead of being limited to putting together a crappy, budget limited fan film on your own dime and living in fear of the lawyers, what if you could buy "authentic" set pieces and props to make your fan driven effort that much more real? What if you could legitimately charge for viewings of your film/play to recoup the costs plus a franchise-like kickback to the original 'rights holder'? And so on.
It seems to me that engaging the fans (or more precisely, non-professional creators) and helping them enjoy your ideas as much as possible, including helping them with stuff that they find costly or uninteresting (like recreating 'authentic props') might be a better approach than just controlling everything as much as possible and counting on the model of "getting enough asses in the seats" at the local theater or sofa.
I don't know. Maybe this wouldn't work, but from what i can see, there is plenty of energy out there for riffing on existing stuff (when people lack the imagination or time/energy to create from scratch) that remains untapped. Maybe it's time to explore that a bit more. Set loose the lawyers on me for my lovingly crafted Tom Bombadil addition to the LOTR films and I will hate you forever. Give me help and a discount from WETA for props and I may love you all the more and keep doing it longer.
Just sayin.
So it's a serialized novel, like Dicken's Great Expectations or Stephen King's Green Mile, where you get readers to subscribe for a year, and then get more money from them when you publish the finalized ebook or hardcopy. I'm sure this format could work and make money, but the fact that the NYT's ran this article, with a link to the website, which doesn't yet have a "Subscribe" option yet marks a sorely missed opportunity.
I'll be interested in seeing how this turns out. As many commenters have noted, it's nothing new, and reading for long stretches on a desktop, laptop, iPad, or cell phone is uncomfortable. I tried to write a novel using MediaWiki and allowing user contributions, but the online format drove people away. Illustrations might make it more appealing, but user contributions could quickly make it go the way of Oort-Cloud, lots of people posting mediocre content and nobody reading any of it.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Science fiction sales must be really plummeting, since all the authors want to leave the genre as soon as possible. They write a few scifi novels and then switch to fantasy, or, in Stephenson's case, historical fiction. People read those too, of course, but it's an entirely different audience. We techies are not interested in the past; we are interested in the future. We might want to examine history for forgotten ideas that might be helpful in the future, but we certainly don't want to live there! No horse-driven carriages please, enough with the stupid wishing-makes-it-so bullshit, and primitive communities that have never seen a bath. There are no noble savages out there and primitivism in real life results in poverty, disease, starvation, and general misery. Only technology can let people move out of their cold and drafty caves, stop spending their nights shivering around a fire (assuming they have the technology of building one), and finally acquire enough time to do something other than foraging for food. Something, like, perhaps, rational thinking - an activity that leads to more technology and a more comfortable life. And it is an activity you can't get to if you persist in believing in magic spells or that studying history (or the Bible) will yield answers to every possible problem.
I thought Apple's ePub let you do this too. Not to slight Stephenson's work, the concept seems well established. So, there is probably a market for it, but it does not need to replace books or movies or even PowerPoint to succeed.
"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"
It's a game platform. Ok, how much is the subscription?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"I can remember reading Dune for the first time, and I started by reading the glossary," Stephenson say. "Any book that had that kind of extra stuff in it was always hugely fascinating to me."
I remember reading The Hobbit, then the Ring trilogy, and then the Silmarillion. With the History of Middle-Earth, Tolkien pretty much succeeded in writing more about the books than the books themselves, his son's contributions included.
The Dune series is deserving of being made into movies too, but it's not necessary to remake the original again. Just move on to Dune Messiah. The SciFi flop can be ignored. Maybe Brian's works too, though we would never get that far.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"I can remember reading Dune for the first time, and I started by reading the glossary," Stephenson say. "Any book that had that kind of extra stuff in it was always hugely fascinating to me."
So fascinating, in fact, that he decided to write glossaries and call them novels. "Glossaries aren't tied up with complications like plots, and I can make clever Lucas-esque puns with characters names! Get it? Low-key? Loki? Ahh, I kill me."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
We're asked to pay to much in order to support privileged people as they pretend they are talented. Perhaps if publishers invested in talent instead of their friends, family and the well-connected we'd have authors worth reading. Sadly, the publishing industry, like all big business, is simply too corrupt to be able to function effectively.
Greed is evil.
nobody even cared
Didn't he take down a vibrant wiki that had been hosted describing the universe of one of his earlier projects, to make way for a sterile marketing page for one of his newer ones? Or am I thinking of someone else?
I am trolling
I'm still living in the 1990's. No smart phone, no e-reader, bell bottoms and an afro. But when I buy an e-reader the things I'd like to see are: - Pictures of Bob "The Evil Villain" Smith and Mary "the hottie" Jones, President Bill Gates and so on. This would help me keep characters straight in my mind. - Maps...when Bob jets off to Purgeastan to kill Mary in his $1billon Killstar jet, I'd like to see where this country is located and maybe some details of the cities he visited. - Maybe a picture of the Killstar jet would be nice. I'd be willing to pay for stuff like this that may add to the enjoyment of the work of fiction. Until then, my local library will be my Amazon.Com fiction source.
"I am Subotai! Thief and archer! I am Hyrkanian . . . the great order of Kerlait!"
"So what are you doing here?"
"Dinner for wolves."
[both laugh]
It's a neat idea, although this particular implementation might not be ideal. I tend to start digging around for more information on the web regarding novels I've gotten particularly interested in. This might include background information, interpretations or artwork. However, I can't say I'd ever pay for this and I'm not interested in a social component at all. I'm wouldn't be compelled to follow someone and read their thoughts on novels I haven't read simply because I enjoyed what they had to say about this one.
I suppose a community like this would allow for users to add to the expanded universe. While it's interesting it's something I've never gotten into. I'd rather go to the source, the original creator. I find too much inconsistency, too many elements disruptive to canon and it tends to be too much to absorb. And I think writing, for a lot of people, is a personal thing. I've got my own vision of how things are, what should or shouldn't happen. If I were to add to a universe I've created I'd want it to come from me. I suppose the point at which I decided I was done with that universe then it would no longer be a problem.
For years I've had the idea of releasing novels, comics, etc in episodic form and allowing readers to guide the story. Basically at certain points they could vote on a few possible outcomes. It might make for an engaging experience, but it wont work if the author has a particular story they want to tell or an idea they want to convey.
Of course, a big problem is that too many people seem to think everything they find on the internet should be free. This stuff takes a lot of time and effort, not to mention the expense of having this stuff available online somewhere. There are creative ways to entice people. But if all the effort went into writing the book, why should I be expected to generate income from something like t-shirts or signed artwork? It would be a travesty is writers were forced into writing Harry Potter or Twilight style novels in order to be able to be able to make money. The sci-fi section of bookstores already seems to be shrinking, slowly absorbed by manga and bad mystery 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 ads.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
X-Book Live anyone?
The social sphere has been the key to ensuring gaming has kept/out pace(d) other media, and with the rate other sites are integrating social media, entangling books with the rest of the digital web sounds like the next step for the medium.
The sole convinence of eBooks is that fact that my cellular device is capable of recalling them in mere seconds and can be easily stowed, which make reading in the elevator/doing vague leasure activity/driving at high speeds a lot more convinent. Actually doing something else with these bits of code sounds fine by me.
I'm with AkiraRoberts - I think Stephenson writes beautifully and the writing by its very nature is pleasurable to read. It doesn't matter to me what he writes about; I'll read it.
That said, I also saw the Anathem music video and also thought it was crap.
Still, I'm super excited about Mongoliad.
My perspective as a content creator is probably biased, but I'm happy to subscribe to this content and I believe it is probably the future of media...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I'll probably catch a Troll Rating for this, but, so be it: An intervention is needed. I have been a very big fan of Neal's work. I use the past tense because his last four books have been a disappointment (I gave up on Anathem after 100 pages), where they all suffer from the same thing: The apparent lack of an editor willing to stand up to the author, and take him out to the woodshed as needed.
Now that Neal is going to push the publishing envelope by going into the realm of something cutting edge (HyperText is going to be _huge_), he can sidestep the pesky editor link in the publishing chain all together.
Ugh. And Double-Ugh.
Why would I want to read anything by an author who uses the ungrammatical form "much more rich"? The superlative of rich is richer, not more rich.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
There are two kinds of people in the world: people who have read The Silmarillion, and people who started reading it, got bored, and did something else. Neal Stephenson is firmly in the former camp, he is a self-professed geek who loves to "geek out." I have a friend who does not consider himself to have finished a Final Fantasy game until he has killed every monster, collected everything that can be collected, maxed out every character, and unlocked every achievement. (Or whatever they do in FF, it's been a long time since I played any of them.) Most people prefer to read the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and then stop reading Tolkien, and once they've saved the world from Sephiroth/Sin/somebody bad, then they put down their game controller. There is a market for this kind of obscene dedication to supplemental materials, obscure lore, and extras; Trekkies do learn Klingon, after all. But this kind of dedication is unpredictable, and fan communities will grow organically if they grow at all, without shepherding. I do not think that this sort of product has the market that Neal Stephenson thinks it has.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I gave up on him at the point in "Quicksilver" when he rambled on at length about Parisian horse trading markets.
You mean the super important plot point about the trade of very unique-looking Arabian horses for a certain extraordinary slave girl by a French nobleman? You gave up at that point? Your loss.
You can't take the sky from me...
So he's resurrected Digital and starting running Netware on Alpha boxes???
HOLY CRAP THAT IS SOOOO L33T!
It's a certainly a bit of a stretch to claim that publishing a novel in serial installments is a new idea.
("But this is on... THE INTERNET!")
BUT I'm a huge Stephenson fan, so I'm looking forward to reading this whether I end up subscribing or buying the book after the fact.
Didn't Tad Williams already do the book subscription thing with Shadowmarch? I remember that, and didn't find it terribly successful. That said, I think if there's any author out there who can come up with an 'enhanced book' and execute it well, Neal Stephenson is the guy. The FAQ explicitly states that you get to keep all the content you already bought (DRM free, I should add!) so I plunked my $10 down, to support the experiment, and we'll see how it goes.
From the FTA:
"Subutai is self funded."
Need I say more?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Let's just call this what it really is:
A glorified fan fiction site.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables