📕 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.

[Aarix]

Fascinating...

In my eyes, the biggest issue would be the fact that the forum is an extant, constantly-expanding thing--something inherently hard to capture on paper... after printing, new posts would not be able to be included :( perhaps if the "book" were in fact a lever arch/ringbinder folder, where new sheets could be added periodically to their appropriate sections... tending to/updating the folder could become a hobby in itself... though the aesthetics of a highschool homework folder leave a bit to be desired when opposed to an actual, proper, book :V

If aesthetics are more important than the hardcopy-factor, then perhaps an annual volume? The problem there is that each new volume would render the last obsolescent :( and smaller yearly volumes as supplements of the first with no redundant pages wouldn't quite work either, since each post should, in theory, rely on the context of those which came before it under each topic--you'd end up with a real spaghetti of an index :V

Neither of my ideas are perfect, but since I'm a bit of a completionist, I'd choose the folder version. Though when/if there comes a time where activity in these forums must cease, the definitive book edition might make a great and hefty tome :3

There's also, as the OP mentions, the matter of certain things untranslatable to print format--what would become of gifs and animations? Hyperlinks too, would be rendered inert. With these in mind, could even the "definitive" edition of The Book be declared truly complete? Should gifs and videos be rendered as QR codes--links to online sources? What about CSS animations... something's always going to be lost.

Hello, future reader...

[wolfkitty42]

flip book style animated ozwomp on every page corner