📕 Forum Book 📕

[Melooon]

BOOK

I'm setting this up as a placeholder and reminder about a discussion I had recently with someone who expressed an interest in the idea of printing the entire forum as a book.

I presume there would not be many copies of said book, and some questions would have to be answered such as how do you represent a YouTube video in a book? And how do you capture the aesthetic of the forum in book form? Can a book have 1300 authors? Should each member have their own profile page in a book?

It's an interesting discussion though and I thought people might be interested in providing some input to it! Also if you are reading this post in a book, Hi book reader! 

[Icey!]

That's an interesting idea, and how would this exactly work? Like do we take forum posts and put them in the order of a story?

[DiffydaDude]

What if it was like, a big manuscript, like one of those medieval books with parchment and written by scribes? I think that would be really cool.

[wygolvillage]

That's an interesting idea, and how would this exactly work? Like do we take forum posts and put them in the order of a story?

I really like this idea omg... Like a collage of recontextualization to create one whole narrative. I'd love to read that!

[fancypengy]

That is very interesting. Maybe have each board be a chapter? That would be a /long/ book though would it not? Especially if you're including the replies to each topic?

[Melooon]

Those are important questions!  Do you sort chronologically? e.g. having all older posts at the start; do you split by board as chapters and then sort chronologically? Or perhaps you sort based on the number of views a thread received?
Do views even matter in a book? What if we sorted it by something less metric, like say the colour of posts, all the blue text first and then you sort like a rainbow! Is there a narrative? 

[Zombiethederg]

Theres another part to this discussion I think were missing: how would we print these posts? Would we print screenshots of each post? Format them in a special manner to assist in being read like a book? Theres even some posts I think that'd be hard to implement, such as the "spiiiin" thread. Theres alot of questions to be answered there!

[Melooon]

I added some extra questions about this on my blog recently 

But how do you turn a website into a book? Would I publish a screenshot of each page? Should every author of every forum post and gif get their own authors page? Should the book include a CD containing all of the appropriate sound effects? Should it be a pop-up book or a holographic book to try and preserve some aspect of the animations? Or perhaps I should publish the code itself, with no interpretation for human enjoyment. Or perhaps just the words, with no context or colour.

@Zombiethederg I think there's a really important divide between deciding to publish the code that would create these pages as a book, verses publishing some sort of rendered version of it; and what that means for a potential reader.