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The Guardian reports that Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, plans to release his new novel, a historical drama set in London during the 1840s, in installments via an app in a tradition that dates back to Charles Dickens. Each of Belgravia's 11 chapters will be delivered on a weekly basis, and will come with multimedia extras including music, character portraits, family trees and an audio book version. "To marry the traditions of the Victorian novel to modern technology, allowing the reader, or listener, an involvement with the characters and the background of the story and the world in which it takes place, that would not have been possible until now, and yet to preserve within that the strongest traditions of storytelling, seems to me a marvellous goal and a real adventure," says Fellows.
While set in the 1840s, "Belgravia" opens more than two decades earlier, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo, and explores the divisions between the upper echelons of society and newly wealthy families. Publisher Jamie Raab says the format appealed to her precisely because of Fellowes's television background and his ability to keep audiences engaged in a story over months and even years. "I've always been intrigued by the idea of publishing a novel in short episodic bites. He gets how to keep the story paced so that you're caught up in the current episode, then you're left with a cliffhanger."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @07:20PM
Pay me rent, pay me rent!
(Score: 2) by SubiculumHammer on Friday January 08 2016, @08:01PM
+1 insightful
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @07:22PM
So now books, like movies and music, are going to come with largely useless extras like audio commentary, deleted scenes and concept art. Like they have much in the first place. "Here's a copy of the early manuscript for chapter 3." We don't need yet another proprietary e-book format wrapped in an app executable with DRM. Nothing to see here folks, just another artificial scarcity marketing ploy to make the easily-satisfied keep crying for more.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday January 08 2016, @07:49PM
What happened to imagination?
Why watch someone else's concept of a book? The idea of reading was the recreation of the writer's world in your mind.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @09:27PM
Captured, sold, dismembered, sold again, processed into raw minerals, sold a third time, and injected into the heads of Disney writers.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @07:47PM
He was on this article until Ethanol has posted have actually had no idea they had migrated to a satellite, spaceship, or whatever. We have tons of money into banks, lent money to shift blame to editors like you. That is, you're saving some gas, but releasing unburnt methane to the security concerns, they've taken away indefinitely?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @07:55PM
I disagree with this being a bad idea. Some people will enjoy the format and the extra content that gives them more of the world to explore, and some will buy the finished product after the "event" so they can read at their own leisure.
For a long time I've thought that digital books should have extra media capabilities (and some have tried), and the success will totally depend on the price points and whether people are willing to pay for such. There was a teacher that built a first person game based on some old novel, I think a Dicken's piece, and it had quite some success getting students engaged with the material. I think it could be great fun to read some novel, then be able to hop into a world and have it played out around you where you. Could be...
(Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Friday January 08 2016, @10:11PM
I completely agree. If properly executed, it could be a very rich and engaging experience. As previously mentioned, some have tried, but no one has quite hit upon the right formula to blend things together to create a true multi-media experience. It's entirely possible that this formula doesn't exist, but I applaud the effort.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 09 2016, @01:06AM
Will it? Let's break this down a bit here.
First off, books are a very hard thing to replace with something electronic. It's ultimately portable. It's hard to ignore the fact that the only thing you need to read a book is a light source. You can take a book and read it for days straight and it's batteries won't go dead. Anyone can pick up the book and start reading, even without permission from the author or owner of the book. You can sell a book when you're finished with it. You can give a book away when you're finished with it. You can buy a book after someone else has finished reading it. Anyone who has space could potentially sell previously read books. You won't have any trouble with the format of the book being incompatible with your eyeballs (unless your blind but fret not, they have books for the blind too.) Speaking of eyes, reading a book doesn't strain your eyes as much as reading on a back-lit display. Books don't have "viewing angle problems." Books don't have annoying notifications about missed sales at Nordstrom Rack or disgustingly cute pictures of a friend's dog. You don't have to go buy a new copy of a book every year. The book you bought as a kid will still work just as well for your son or daughter when they decide to read it. In other words, that book is a physical, non-electronic entity that will continue to function as long as it holds up and there are beings to read it.
Since moving to an electronic device means you lose the ultimate portability, a big chunk of the convenience is gone. And since it's electronic, publishers insist on including DRM, which removes all of the freedom to sell/gift/transfer/whatever the book. Oops. Also bear in mind that with all of the mobile devices out there, you're bound to run into compatibility problems. Imagine the horror when you can't read the latest claptrap from an author because this book he uses a format "incompatible" with your device because it's not the right brand and thus doesn't have a licensing agreement with the publisher to have the privilege of listing their crud on your device. Oops. And are you going to pay $14.95 for that e-book-in-an-app, then come to find that your device can't render the extra content? Did you ask for a refund within 15 minutes of the purchase? Oops. Batteries dead? Got a charger? Oops. And what happens when the service driving the DRM shuts down? Can't read your books at all anymore. Oops.
Stick with books or a more open e-format like EPUB.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Saturday January 09 2016, @01:47AM
Amazon already does this with self-published books: revenue per page read (not downloaded). There's some econometric work being done to understand the influence of those new practices on the profit or sellers like Amazon (how many pages on average before people commit, based on how many books available etc.) to determine optimal subscription rates and offerings. There isn't much to say about the quality of what will come out though or whether this will starve or help writers (hint: for one successful writer who will make a killing this way, 1,000 will never see a penny. Not that it would be any different in the paper publishing business). Anyway I was discussing this with a buddy of mine the other day and the major risk is to have books which will seek constant cliffhangers which may work well when you read the work as it is being written but are not very coherent or nice to read when you read the whole book from A to Z. A bit like some manga and the prepublication business they can go through I guess...
As fas the extra content goes, it could be interesting although so far I have not been impressed by anything offered (a few CC pics, some wikipedia paraphrasing...).
(Score: 2) by deimios on Saturday January 09 2016, @06:48AM
Inspiration should come from the interactive narrative medium (the web, visual novels). I for one would love having wiki-like links in some novels. Who was XYZ again? Click on his name and find out what we know about him up until this point in the novel.
Or just put in addition content in the form of several what-if scenarios or maybe even alternate endings. There is canon and there are the hypothetical scenarios.
Traditional print media needs to get it's head out of the gutter if they want to compete in the modern marketplace. The format is just a small consideration, the content is king and they still produce antiquated content.