Second Life and Publishing - told you so!

I mentioned in an earlier post that this was happening - and many others have of course been more prescient or intuitive or extensive or whatever. So now this article from the Guardian about Penguin publishing (or something) Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash in Second Life. The details can be found in the article, which is definitely worth a read.

I was particularly intrigued by what is most likely going to happen:

"I envisage starting small with something like a poetry or secrets wall where residents can leave notes about their Second Life experiences, and then publishing the best of them, like Paul Auster's True Tales of American Life. The book could even be brought back into the real world. We could open a fiction imprint list in Second Life, something that's really difficult for an independent publisher in real life."

That's Neil Hoskins, publisher at children's literature press Winged Chariot. I envision not so much book publishing within Second Life but as we know book publishing - they mention how a "bookshop" has ebooks to download, but as discussed, there's still not a good reader for it. Instead, I think we'll see something like Hoskins says: something interactive, created from a collective and then put back out there, maybe never in a final form. This doesn't interest me terribly, but I can see it working in this community.

So really, this post is just for the link. Check it out.