Great to see that Penguin is going to experiment with Stephen Fry’s latest book.
Penguin UK launches one of its most ambitious projects ever this week in which it effectively aims to crowd source the future of the book. On Thursday it will release a chunk of free, cross media content from Stephen Fry’s new volume of memoirsMore Fool Me – as well as material from the earlier Fry Chronicles – and will actively invite creative disobedience, digital play, tech mash-ups and all kinds of online mayhem on a global scale.
Far from being protective of the content – so often the norm in this walled garden world in which we live – Penguin is telling the world ‘do what you will. Take this metadata, this audio, this text. Mess with it. Go play. Invent. Create. Surprise yourselves. Surprise us.’
With so many conversations within the industry about the future of the book being inconclusive, Hull’s thinking was: “Let’s see what people out there come up with. Let’s open source the content and see where it takes us.”
Anything and everything is welcomed. The publisher hopes for an amazing, disruptive reading experience. Audio mash-ups on Spotify, experiments with conductive ink, games, NFC (near field communication) applications, 3-D printing, splicing, dicing, video…Penguin is hoping for a global cacophony of ideas and is open to anything.