BOOKS: NOW WITH GOOGLEMAPS
Nov. 28th, 2008 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogRemember when I told you that Alex Besher is using bar-coded t-shirts to virally distribute his new e-book? Here’s what’s next in 21st century book publishing: geotagged novels with GoogleMap links.
ITEM: German writer Christoph Benda has released an electronic version of his debut novel, Senghor on the Rocks, in which each page is geotagged and linked to GoogleMaps to illustrate the environment in which the story takes place with satellite images.
Florian Ledermann, a software engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, who worked with Benda on the project, says one motivation for this idea was that the story takes place in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, and seeing as how most people aren’t familiar with either Dakar or Senegal, this was a nifty way to help readers visualize the location.
I suppose purists will complain about writers letting GoogleMaps do the heavy lifting when describing locations. On the other hand, Elmore Leonard has made a good career out of intentionally avoiding detailed descriptions of characters and settings, so what’s the difference, really?
Either way, this opens up some fun possibilities for a richer reading experience – books embedded with maps, Wikipedia links and a streaming soundtrack hosted on Seeqpod or Blip.fm something. The latter would come in handy for my Planet Of The Bulls project, which features rockinrolls as a central plot point. Describing bands playing music is hard work, and almost impossible to get across the same way as it appears in my head. I’d love to stick in a self-loading MP3 stream so you can hear them play as you read.
Progress!
Lost in a good book,
This is dF
ITEM: German writer Christoph Benda has released an electronic version of his debut novel, Senghor on the Rocks, in which each page is geotagged and linked to GoogleMaps to illustrate the environment in which the story takes place with satellite images.
Florian Ledermann, a software engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, who worked with Benda on the project, says one motivation for this idea was that the story takes place in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, and seeing as how most people aren’t familiar with either Dakar or Senegal, this was a nifty way to help readers visualize the location.
I suppose purists will complain about writers letting GoogleMaps do the heavy lifting when describing locations. On the other hand, Elmore Leonard has made a good career out of intentionally avoiding detailed descriptions of characters and settings, so what’s the difference, really?
Either way, this opens up some fun possibilities for a richer reading experience – books embedded with maps, Wikipedia links and a streaming soundtrack hosted on Seeqpod or Blip.fm something. The latter would come in handy for my Planet Of The Bulls project, which features rockinrolls as a central plot point. Describing bands playing music is hard work, and almost impossible to get across the same way as it appears in my head. I’d love to stick in a self-loading MP3 stream so you can hear them play as you read.
Progress!
Lost in a good book,
This is dF
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on 2008-11-28 12:52 pm (UTC)I remember, there was definitely a point where,l when I was reading my first Leonard book, I suddenly got it. It was like a lightbulb went off and I went from "Uh... the dude's barely writing..." to "Fuck, this is brilliant."
I didn't really know who he was; I'd picked up GET SHORTY somewhere and I thought I'd give it a try because I liked the film and I knew my folks had one or two of his other books lying around.
I then went on a Leonard binge, I just had to read more. Some of the books are definitely more memorable than others, but they're all clever and unpredictable and crisp. Not bad for a man who's been putting out a book a year since the 50's.
I want to be like Elmore when I grow up.
--JF