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Comment by mkramlich | Hacker News Reader

I love Stephenson's novels but this project does not sound appealing. It comes off a bit like a bunch of Internet entrepreneurs got hold of him and said, "Hey, on the web, we have links and embedded images and stuff. It's called 'Hyper-Text' and is the latest craze. Can we use your name? What's your price?"

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Why not? I think the world needs more experiments with forms of book and interactivity. It's a pity that the golden age of interactive fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction) was also its stone age. Maybe it'll become a step in developing the interactive fiction further? As a fan of both books and computers I welcome any development of the medium.

My point was that nothing about it sounded new. Most of it sounded mostly old. And from what little I've seen of the execution of their idea so far, it looked downright amateur and old skool. There are already lots of places online where people can independently publish, find and pay for media content, including having user profiles, badges and social networking elements. It's been/being done to death already.

Come on, in no sense was the Infocom era the "golden age" of interactive fiction. In both quantity and quality of work, the "golden age" is from the mid-nineties through right now.

I think it's easy to misunderstand your point, but after I re-read your post I agree - Stephenson is about as tech-savvy a fiction author you're liable to find, but the fact that this project looks so poorly done makes you question how much he was actually involved.

Yeah, I like sitting down with one of his books and immersing myself in it, not reading it on a computer. I really like his stuff, so I suppose I'll give this a go when I get a kindle later this year, but I'm skeptical.

I understand the immersion you are talking about. I think Kindle and the e-readers basically is the extension of the book form; a book delivered on another substrate.

On the other hand, interactivity makes possible the kind of immersion unachievable by non-interactive book. When you pick the knife - it is not the same as when you read that the character picks the knife.

Could you sit down with one of his books and read it on an iPad or kindle?

I'm not sure, I've never had a kindle (and don't do Apple products). I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy a real book more though. I'm getting the kindle because it would make importing English language books here in Italy a lot faster and cheaper.

I was a late reader of his work, read them all on the Kindle. wouldn't be able to do so on th Ipad though.

> Wouldn't be able to do so on th Ipad though.

Why's that?

I can't deal with the glare for the length of a book read, just doesn't feel as comfortable.

Snow Crash was originally going to be a graphic novel, and Stephenson once said that he 'spent more time on the project hacking code than writing prose.' (loosely paraphrased as I'm on my iPhone and can't find a citation at the moment)

Stephenson is pretty tech savvy. I can't picture flim-flam merchants dazzling him with the concept of hyper text.

More to the point, The Diamond Age basically describes an intelligent hypertext book.

Even more to the point: Cryptonimicon is about how the freaking internet works. (Ok not really, but it is a major sub plot)

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