Book Publishing

An addition to the printing press UI then
Publish book:
( ) Personal Distribution (15 g)
( ) Global Distribution (Requires Royal Publishing House approval) (1500 g)

 

I would like that very much. And also like it if there were several Royal Publishing Houses to choose from. Perhaps some that dealt in Fiction, others in Non-Fiction.

 

Or regional publishers, so your book would appear in different "markets"

 

Or simply sell your book to an NPC, which will then place it in the random seeding queue. There will likely be other avenues, such as giving your book to certain NPCs (librarians), to have it placed in a local scene.

 

The problem with that is unless Port makes those NPC's so that books sold to them are input into an approval queue, that would remove any kind of approval control.

 

At this point, let's hope the key functionality of book publishing allows anyone with a printing press to print books and sell them. These books can be collected and stocked as PC's see fit.

Not worried about loot drops, they're not the most desirable items anyway, but I am worried that one group will have an advantage or monopoly on publishing. Based on what's taken place this is not an irrational concern. Currently a player-run group will get to decide on a particular book being part of the items in the world with Episode 1.

Let's hope the game is not like this, that its free and open for all to participate, not a select group of "scholars" designated pre-release.

 

In Ultima Online I used to leave a copy of a book I wrote on the corpses of some of those I killed. I don't remember the exact text since it was heavily roleplayed but it let the player know that I quite enjoyed the challenge they presented, and that I would enjoy the one loot item I took as reward in exchange for the book. It further let the player know which areas I patrolled and if they wished to avoid the same fate again they only need say the right words if they saw me bearing down on them and I would halt my attack, accept their payment(50g, nothing crazy) and be on my way.

Players you kill don't tend to look upon you kindly but they appreciated this quite a bit, I found my book locked down in a few places over my time played. The weirdest place my book turned up was on the shelf behind a Yew NPC in locked down format. Apparently books dropped on the ground in Yew would sometimes wind up part of the game for a little while and would respawn elsewhere. It's fun things like this that give a game depth, I'm all for repeating book related things in SotA!

My contribution: How about a "my story" player book? The book could be viewed and edited from your paperdoll and would carry a game generated title of "Book of Player Name" and be a collectible. Perhaps it could only appear on your corpse? I dunno, but I do remember that player named roses in UO became a HUGE collector's item, it let players carry on the memory of friends who had perhaps left the game already, or passed away, etc.

Everyone should have the tale of their deeds published in a book for all time, imo!

 

I couldn't disagree with this more. It should be possible for any players to establish themselves as publishers, sell books for profit, and sink or swim based on the quality of the titles that they distribute.
Publishers should compete for authors, who should sink or swim based on the popularity of their work.
Booksellers should compete for readers, and source the product that they sell from publishers. They should sink or swim based on their selection of product and the prices that they charge.
There is even a role for critics, although whether they appear in-game or on the forums is worthy of debate - in any case they should succeed or fail based on their established credibility.
There is room for a living, breathing literary ecosystem here - don't destroy it with monopolies!

 

I agree, but I was speaking in the context of the status quo. Implementing a system like you describe would be extremely challenging and costly if the ability for players to become publishers actually integrates with loot tables. And player characters would have to have ways to drive that industry, with book shops and the like. It would be a cool system, but there are a lot of pieces to it.

Of course we should recognize that we are talking about loot tables here. FireLotus already explained that players will be able to print books at a cost per copy using printing presses, so it will already be possible to run PC book shops. And that's a good thing.

 

In my opinion hand crafting each individual book is not really a viable basis for an in-game publishing industry. The whole point of a printing press is to enable the creation of multiple copies.
I have no definite opinion on books as part of the loot system, as I know too little about it.
However, if it came to a choice between having books as loot and having a thriving player-based literary ecosystem, I know which one I would prefer. Ultimately however it is down to Portalarium.

 

As a side note found this in the Standup Corner.
Search the post for book.

 

Now that's interesting...

 

Ah! But imagine this.. you hand craft the book you use for your manuscript.. now let's say that among your publishing options is to copy the book materials.. So if you say.. made a book with a limp binding but mummy paper (fiber based paper that used mummy wrappings).. then you published say.. 100 copies using the same material.. you would get 100 books with identical binding and paper. The cost per copy would be based on the materials used. You might also have the option of choosing a standard book binding and material to save costs.

Now imagine you wanted to do something more exotic for a special edition manuscript copy.. like a custom spell book with dragon leather cover and spidersilk paper.. (fiber paper with spider silk mix).. The materials would be too rare and expensive to publish but wouldn't that be an awesome book to have?

Naturally I agree that hand crafting every single book for the publishing process is unreasonable.. but the option to automate the process via publishing could work. (Also in the doc I mentioned earlier. )

 

not to be a stickler, but I get moderated when I post stuff from Dev + Spoon, just want to let you know.

 

Good point...

 

Except that's not from Dev+ it's from the Founders Developer Blog. Still restricted access but not nearly so much as Dev+