So there are, like, video games that play with the fact that you're looking at a screen, or messing with a controller. There are movies or TV that do similar things. Not enough books play with the physical medium they're in (e.g. House of Leaves). It would be cool to have more books not just user paper and ink as an incidental delivery mechanism for ideas, but as a part of the art.
@benhamill though Poe played with messages in his text
@lindseyb Messages like... encoded or...?
@benhamill encoded yes
@benhamill look this up it's legit interesting
@lindseyb Cool. I'll have a look. Thanks!
This is actually something I've strongly considered doing for my work, because Sydney Falk is an author but my legal name is completely different, and someday I imagine I might want to prove to someone (without revealing, say, financial documentation) that yes, I AM Sydney Falk.
(I mean, financially, theoretically, I could pull documentation from Amazon and they could confirm it in some way. Theoretically.)
@sydneyfalk @lindseyb Hah! That's a cool idea. "The first letter in every sentence for the first few pages is a character in my public key. Encrypt something and I'll decrypt it, proving I wrote it." :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:
@lindseyb For sure. Might be a way to combat the aggressive rise of ereaders for printers, though. IDK.
@benhamill it's also arguably an accessibility issue, like I as much as I love House of Leaves it would be difficult to read with dyslexia and even still without many people struggled to process the text
@lindseyb This is a good call. Bummer.
@benhamill there's the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson.
@evilchili I've read Illuminatus! ... what's up in the cat books?
@benhamill RAW messing with the E-W-G "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics as a narrative device. at some point characters become aware they are characters in the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy. :)
@evilchili I see. That's neat. Though something that would work equally well on an eReader or whatever.
@benhamill have a look at kids books... some of them are absolute genius.
@Syrus Good call. The Book With No Pictures is a simple and solid example.
@Syrus Invalid link?
@benhamill hmm weird... the book is 'Ollie's Christmas Reindeer' it has different materials, cut outs that preview the next scene... e.g. you'll be in a room/scene with a window cutout... next page/scene you're outside and can see into the room
this should find the link... https://www.google.ie/search?client=opera&q=site%3Asimonandschuster.com+Ollie%27s+Christmas+Reindeer&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
@Syrus That's cool.
@benhamill yas mama
@benhamill The Cloud Atlas has a ☁️ printed on each page at a slightly different position, a simple but nice decoration; also a story would end mid-sentence and another story starts on the next page
@wzhd I have that one in my To Read stack. That's cool.
@benhamill There's "Tree of Codes" made by Jonathan Safran Foer. He cut away parts of an existing book, "The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz, to create a new story.
@Ashdroid Well. That's rad as fuck. I assume there's just the right one copy, though.
@benhamill 30,000 copies according to the publisher! They're hard to find and kind of expensive now, but when the book first came out it was $20 on Amazon.
http://visual-editions.com/tree-of-codes-by-jonathan-safran-foer
@Ashdroid Wow! That's aggressively reasonable.
@Ashdroid Wow, though. $165 on Amazon right now. Yeesh. That's a heck of a return on $20!
@benhamill @b_cavello if you can read #French or #German I warmly recommend Marc-Antoine #Mathieu. Always dreamt of translating his #graphic #novels into English. Not easy... Hope you can track down a copy without running into #spoilers!
@benhamill I suspect this has a lot to do with production costs associated with such books?