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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.
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.
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
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.
Your point is insightful and all, his really work did stop abruptly rather than end properly, but to be fair: he's been getting better, making progress. Heck, Anathem even had a epilogue! I think somehow the thousands and thousands of complaints wore him down.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
I'm afraid that ePub is not something Apple came up with. Otherwise, yes I am hoping that it becomes the more universal way books are published when they are electronic. That way you really are buying the book rather than the book for a particular device.
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.
And what's with the 'we'? Are techies now some sort of homogeneous hive mind that are all interested or not in the exact same thing?
The question is, will this new platform allow the author to add an ending to a novel?
No, the real question (other than, "have you actually read any of his recent stuff?") is: will this lame arm-chair-lit-crit-groupthink meme itself ever find an ending?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
At this point, I don't actually care any more. I gave up on him at the point in "Quicksilver" when he rambled on at length about Parisian horse trading markets. I found it long, tedious, and far too reminiscent of the scene in the movie "Wonder Boys", in which the student, Hannah, critiques the professor's unending work-in-progress book:
"And even though you're book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it's... it's at times... it's... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. And... I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't make any choices. At all."
I seem to remember Stephenson covering both horse genealogy *and* character dentistry at some point.
I'm guessing you're unacquainted with Alastair Reynolds, then, or pretty much any other author who writes "hard" science fiction.
And the thing is, really, most "science fiction" authors aren't really writing science fiction. William Gibson, for instance, wrote the original Neuromancer manuscripts on a typewriter - he's about as technical as any other English major, and it really shows even in Neuromancer. Neil Stephenson, despite having written a couple of pretty good sciencey fiction novels, isn't really into it - he's much more of a nerd who does a bunch of research into something and then writes a story about it, as can be seen even in Snow Crash (ancient Sumeria), Cryptonomicon (the history of cryptography), Anathem (the history of logic and philosophy) and Diamond Age (the fundamentals of computation). Of course he's going to go off and write something else - he's not really interested in writing about science fiction, he seems to be far more interested in doing historical research and writing a story about it. It was basically a coincidence that he became known as a science fiction writer.
If you look at the actual hard SF authors, on the other hand, they've been quietly pumping novels out since the genre was invented. Greg Egan's been consistently publishing hard SF, as have Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear and Charles Stross. Heck, Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon novels and Iain M. Banks's books (when he publishes like that) probably count too, though they're not really so much science fiction as they are fantasy in a sciencey setting.
Look: if you can't find authors who consistently publish good science fiction novels, you're just not looking in the right places.