booktwo.org

I recently went exploring in Second Life, and it didn’t take long to find bibliophiles. Over at the Coelacanth Books & News Store in Changmi, I met the proprietor Coelacanth Seurat (pictured, in front of her store, below), who is exploring the possibilities of text in the 3D virtual world. The store stocks Second Life-themed magazines, which are distributed via notecards (the texts of SL), SL-authored books, and a monthly selection of recommended books with links to buy them from Amazon.

Seurat sees her mission thus:

“In RL a bookstore is a place to browse and buy books & magazines. But in SL I think the definition has to be expanded a bit: compensating authors as they desire, but focusing on aggregating SL text-based content and providing a portal to information on books in general. This bookstore is an ongoing “thought experiment,” and I welcome all comments.”

A different approach is taken at the virtual (although unaffiliated) branch of Shakespeare & Company, over in Mill Pond (thanks to owner Micala Lumiere for the link). In homage to the original on Paris’ Left Bank, Grace McDunnough hosts weekly poetry readings on an agreed theme - poets can read aloud, or circulate their works via notecard.

Such an approach is one more easily comprehended by authors and publishers: a virtual meeting space for book groups, discussions and author appearances (I’d be particularly interested in hearing about any SL Book Groups). Just as several bands have made live appearances in SL (the evergreen Duran Duran and U2 among them), so authors have started to give talks too - unsurprisingly, Wired editor Chris Anderson was among the first, discussing his widely-read future commerce tome, The Long Tail.

Books themselves are making an appearance too. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin UK (and known inworld as Jeremy Neumann), was kind enough to give me a couple. The first, a reading copy of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, appears as an object clutched in your avatar’s hand, and is certainly legible, even if the experience is disconcertingly like reading over one’s own shoulder (see below).

Penguin’s own effort, a sampler for Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the book credited with inspiring Second Life itself and so understandably popular with residents, is more successful - although slow to load, it appears full-screen and, on a large enough monitor, much better simulates the actual experience of reading (again, below).

None of these are available outside Second Life however, and the real goal for publishers must be to sell real-world books (and ebooks) through Second Life frontages - something no one has yet figured out how to do. The long-awaited arrival of HTML inworld looks like it will rectify this, however, and there are certainly plenty waiting for the opportunity. In the meantime, there’s plenty of publicity to be gained, something the book industry, at least, rarely wants to miss.

Today´s Guardian carries a prominent article from non-specialist correspondent Stuart Jeffries on the subject of Second Life. (You only live twice), continuing the virtual environment´s increasing visibility as the next online phenomena to move into the popular conciousness, hot on the heels of myspace, YouTube, et al.

This follows the announcement last week from Penguin´s ´Digital Publisher´ Jeremy Ettinghausen of their move into SL, initially offering a ´virtual sampler´of Neal Stephenson´s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, the book credited with inspiring the creation of SL (and incidentally a personal favourite, although you must read his non-cyber debut, the eco-thriller Zodiac, too). Ettinghausen also mentions the upcoming introduction of the Penguin Virtual Bookshelf, “which will allow residents of Second Life to decorate their virtual homes with working samples of real books.”

There appear to be a lot of half-measures in that sentence - the use of books for decorative purposes strikes a chill note in any true bibliophile´s heart (”Will the bindings match my drapes?” as the old bookseller´s horror story goes), as does the phrase “working samples”. It will be interesting to see what form these books take - will they be fully-fledged ebooks, available for complete download, or merely promotional fluff to drive SLers to the nearest bricks-and-mortar bookseller? Nevertheless, it´s refreshing stuff.

As the offline buzz around SL increases, we can expect to see more of this, driven, it can be certain, more by newcomers to the islands than by the early adopters, who by and large are a highly creative community unlikely to be push-overs for the first marketing schemes targeted at them, in what they rightfully consider to be their space. But if Penguin lauch a serious attempt to reach SL residents, they are likely to find many booklovers among the SL demographic.

I’ve yet to visit the virtual Shakespeare & Co., an SL Bookstore on Mill Pond, but would love to hear from those who have, or know of similar ventures within SL. This Shakespere & Co. (as opposed to the legendary offline version) is run by “Grace McDunnough”, aka Rhonda Lowry, Vice President and Executive in Residence at Turner Broadcasting New Products Group, responsible for “new media and entertainment - particularly the influence of advanced computing and virtual worlds as new media and entertainment platforms.” This appears symptomatic of businesses being driven into SL and other online ventures by the personal obsessions of their own employees.

Publishers aside, it will also be interesting to see the literature that arises from such communities as Second Life. Many books have already been written about online communities from the early days to the present - Village Voice writer Julian Dibbell´s My Tiny Life springs to mind - but the possibilities include texts created entirely within and for such worlds. Divorced from such dull constraints as physicality, what would a book look like in a truly expansive Second Life? And what stories would it tell?