Snow Crash Arrives in Second Life From Penguin Publishing
Yesterday I had the chance to be given a sneak peek at Penguin UK’s first steps in Second Life using Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash as the vehicle.
My first reaction was “is this it?”
Knowing the book I was expecting a lot more then just a HUD that would pop up pages of the book I could flip through or listen to some audio.
What I did like from a business perspective is that right there in the HUD I can click on a link to buy the book through a special page set up just for Second Life visitors. That is smart because it’ll let them know if the HUD is driving book sales or not.
After reading their press release I feel a bit better about all this because what they are trying to do is bring themselves and their library into Second Life. They hint at a virtual bookshelf of all their publications which I’m looking forward to seeing and hopefully adding to my office. If they do it right, I hope they make it so that new titles can be auto updated to it so that the bookshelf can grow with new titles.
A special thanks to Jeremy Neumann (in the pictufor giving me the sneak preview. I said to him that I was expecting something more and I loved his answer which was basically “hard to do more when all of Second Life really IS what Snow Crash was.” He is right, but it would be neat to see some custom avatars or even a small build dedicated to the book.
Kudos to yet another business dipping their toes in the virtual waters. From the sounds of it Penguin Publishing will be jumping in full blown.
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed too. Torley posted on my blog that Oz Spade had done an implementation of the Black Sun awhile back. Someone want to build “The Raft” as a free fire zone?
http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2006/09/snow_crash_fina.html
What they really need is a stringer kit. One of the neatest parts, to me, in the book was the CIC and how people were constantly recording and uploading content to the CIC in the hopes of getting paid for it. If you had a stringer kit for SL, like BlogHUD on crack, then you’d have something both branded AND powerful.
Just a thought.
Christopher S. Penn, The Financial Aid Podcast
A Publication of the Student Loan Network
On-demand financial aid internet radio, no iPod required
http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com
Not only do we have a full sim themed on Snow Crash (called Magritte region), with the Black Sun, Cosa Nostra Pizza, Ng Security rat things, Da5id Meiers house, The Mews at Windsor Heights, but we are also building a Stephensonian Institute in one of our new sims (appropriately named Stephenson) which will host the Neal Stephenson Quicksilver wiki.
btw: we are also looking for folks to help improve things and expand our themed offerings. We are planning a Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age sims in a month or so to come online. We will also be building The Raft, with a scale model of the USS Enterprise (likely about 150 meters long, and will be the biggest vessel in SL). Our new sims are all named after libertarians, and expand The Street westward as we build our new continent of Ancapistan.