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.

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?

The 380,000 books displayed on stands at Frankfurt Book Fair has helped offset fears about the viability of print in the digital age.

Wishful thinking. I’m in Frankfurt this week too, for what is by far the largest and most prestigious gathering of the publishing world, and no one seems to be taking the future seriously. The facilities provided pay ample testament to this, and would shock those used to attending more modern get-togethers. Wi-fi access is conspicuous by its absence, the few computers visible being used largely for slide presentations or demos of proprietary content management systems. More on this soon.

As to public internet access, the few ´Net-c@fe´s provided consist of stand-up booths running starlingly intransigent versions of IE5 which are inadequent for running the most common webmail apps, with any kind of dynamic content blocked by uncomprehending software. In international hall 8.0, home to all the visiting English-speaking publishers, there are ten booths hidden up a flight of stairs next to the toilets. In all, Frankfurt provides perhaps 50 such points for over 200,000 visitors and 7,000 exhibitors.

Welcome to the book world.

There’s been a bit of a creative block in these parts for a while. Half-formed thoughts. Unfinished articles. Sweaty, 5am thinking jags. Please ignore the elephant in the corner. He’s not really there. La la la la la.

The book is going to die. It’s over. Five, ten years. No more books. And we really, really need to start talking about this. We need to put in place structures for coping with this. For ensuring that authors survive, that our stories survive. I’m really not kidding.

All the publishers have absolutely no idea what is about to happen. They’re worried about Google Book Search, for Christ’s sake. Google Book Search is for indexing academic books, for redistributing academic information that’s needlessly locked up in physical locations, and whose freeing up will launch humanity on its next great evolutionary leap. Woohoo. Side effect: no more royalties for authors. No more fat advances. No more lunch money.

Also, in the mid-term, we’re going to see publishers die even before the book does. Hey HarperCollins, what does POD stand for? Random House, can you say Lulu? One of you guys, buy a POD Printer now, please, before it gets embarrassing. Invest in some tech. Start paying attention. Because one day you are going to wake up, Amazon is printing books, and you are out of a job. Oh, look: BookSurge.

We are a couple of years – quite possibly less – away from an eReader that looks like a book. It’s been so long coming we forgot it was about to happen. This whole I’ve-got-the-first-edition thing is really sweet, but do you actually use CDs any more? (Note: if you do, you’re really going to have trouble with the next bit.)

I was talking to someone about this the other day, trying to figure out where all that information now written down in books is going to go, how it will continue to present itself to us. I realised that this isn’t like the move from vinyl to CD, or CD to MP3, although it will initially appear as the latter. It’s the difference between chamber music and the gramophone, between the illuminated manuscript and the paperback. The book as we think of it now has really only been around since the 1930s, since Allen Lane. They’re not as permanent as we’d like to think. Books are about to go back to being written by monks, and the rest of us are going to have to find another way to read. A historical window is about to close.

I don’t know what I’m worried about, really. Well, the dole office. But aside from that. Should anyone apart from publishers be worried about this? You’ll keep getting stories to read. Authors will keep on writing. They won’t get paid much, but hey, they never did. In fact, there’s a chance they’ll get paid more, if they’re smart, but probably not.

We brought this on ourselves, to a large extent. For all our bleating, we’ve been substandard for a while. Cheap paperback editions, with glue that lets all the pages fall out after five years. A total disregard for quality, editorial or otherwise. A craven, backslapping literary culture. Oh well. Bye bye.

Is the format important? Will stories written for a screen rather than a page – even screens that look like pages – differ that much? There’s something bizarre and incredibly nineteenth century in the development of eReaders, a kind of cultural redundancy. We just need to get them to look enough like books in order to kill books, then they’ll look like something else. It’s just a design issue.

It’s 6am. I’m writing this on a computer. Later, I’m going to format it in XHTML and put it out on the internet for people to read. You probably don’t know me, and you probably don’t care. Salman Rushdie is going to really hate this next bit, almost as much as his publishers, but you’re not. Readers will be fine. Take hope in that.

I just want to smooth the transition. Make sure there are enough smart people in the right places so that we don’t lose too much on the way through. There’s enough of them on the web – we should be looking to the W3C, to web standards, to information technologists and engineers, to people who’ve been thinking about this for twenty years. You know, smart people. Not the ones thinking about in at quarter past six on a Monday morning. In bed.

Oh, it’s going to be fun. I’m looking forward to the first really good, genuinely collaborative novel, wiki-style. Chapters written by people on different continents, subplots by experts in their field. Proper editing. I can’t wait to be able to go travelling with five hundred stories on my eReader/iBook/USB SuperDonglePage thing, because I always take Moby Dick and I never read it. The best bit? Readers are going to decide what they’d like to read, not idiots in industry offices, or on lilac sofas. The first MySpace author phenomenon should be about next week. Please, God.

It’s the Frankfurt Book Fair in two weeks time. This should be funny. There’s going to be a man there who publishes books exclusively about angels. Who thinks he actually is an angel, or something. Everybody thinks he’s mad. In ten years time, he’s probably going to be the only one still in business. The angel people will still buy books. No one else will.

We’re going to start thinking about this. A lot. We have no idea what is going to happen, but, just like everybody else, we’d been quietly enjoying this whole internet thing, while pretending to ourselves that it was not going to completely destroy everything we were currently working on. Five years ago, I was studying Computer Science. I got a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, and then went to work in dead tree publishing. I am an idiot. And, looking around, I’m not the only one. But I know what I’m talking about.

Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to see this through. Because we love stories, and we love great writers, and we just need to start separating that concept from your actual, paper books. Good morning. Hello. Wake up now.