Self-Printing In A Virtual World
I know I haven’t done much in terms of blogging this past week, but this is something I plan on remedying to. Somehow, this mini-break was a good thing anyway.
In the meantime, I’ve found (completely by chance) a few interesting things in Second Life. I’ve had an account there since the summer of 2004–I like building houses and creating clothes, it helps in furthering my graphic-related abilities–and although I’m a casual player most of the time, there are moments when I like to explore and see what the world has to offer. This is how I stumbled over a system called THiNC, that allows a player to create and distribute their own book in world.
It’s not regular writing, of course. The book itself must be made of textures, which means that one needs to prepare it offline in images before uploading it all, and this can take a lot of time. Albeit very basic, the result is interesting enough–a book that can appear as an item, and which pages can be flipped. Nothing to do with simple text, since the author can give it whatever look and paginating s/he wants.
Another interesting tidbit: last summer, Cory Doctorow allowed his book Someone comes to town, someone leaves town to be distributed in Second Life, under the shape of an animated book and under the Creative Commons license.
Reading this way is special, to say the least, and I’ll still prefer printing a PDF of the book; on the other hand, it’s interesting to see that the online boundaries of writing don’t stop at websites and blogs, but also extend to other means of distribution.