Graphic Adventures, the Book

[Benny]

Some bloke has made a book about graphic adventures. Unfortunately its one of those books where the content is from wikipedia.

 

Since its from wikipedia though, its under a GNU Free Documentation License so the full book is downloadable for free here.

[Gabez]

At first I thought this would be terrible, but the person actually did a very good job with the layout, and there are new interviews in there with the developers (well, David Fox at least). ANd it is edited as well which is good and all Wikipedia needs really anyway.

 

It also has a section on The Last Express really! Give this man a Booker.

[sinus]

bought

[Snugglecakes]

That's actually really good... almost buying

[TestType]

That's a really nice find. I'm tempted to get this but I'll take a better look at the digital version first to see if I like it. Also I'm cheap so the price is a bit steep for me at the moment, but I added this to my wishlist for a possible future purchase.

[JPhilipp]

Some bloke has made a book about graphic adventures. Unfortunately its one of those books where the content is from wikipedia. the content is from wikipedia.

 

Well, the content is edited -- sometimes much, sometimes less -- and added with original info I found from other sources, plus there's many original interviews, and loads of screenshots. But yeah, as the cover mentions, I'm the editor and compiler of this, not the author.

 

In any case, thanks for mentioning the book

 

Also I'm cheap so the price is a bit steep for me at the moment

 

Yeah, unfortunately $29 was almost the cheapest for this page count that I could make it, if I also wanted to have it on Amazon... self-publishing service Lulu (where I could have theoretically made it cheaper) has this policy since some time to not compete with Amazon for prices, so I can't have a lower price there than at Amazon... and Amazon adds markup of their own to the whole thing.

 

Well, this is a fan project of someone who loves graphic adventures, I hope some of you enjoy this, and I would enjoy to hear feedback if you read this!

[Laserschwert]

Hey JPhilipp, I was wondering, aren't there any copyright problem when publishing a book consiting of other people's texts and screenshots from games? Don't get me wrong, I don't want to point fingers here... I'm asking because there was a similar idea on these forums regarding Mojo's "Secret History"-articles (which aren't online right now) about all the LucasArts adventures games. Actually, if it's that easy publishing a book like that, maybe we should just go for it while packing it with each and every piece of artwork that we can find...

[s-island]

Well, there's fair use for images when used in certain circumstances but there's a limit to how far you can stretch that.

[JPhilipp]

Hey JPhilipp, I was wondering, aren't there any copyright problem when publishing a book consiting of other people's texts and screenshots from games?

 

It's a very good question actually. It's like this: Wikipedia uses a GNU Free Documentation copyright ("copyleft") license, which explicitly allows editing and republishing of texts (they switched to a similar Creative Commons license in the meantime, either would have worked). In fact, not even Wikimedia "owns" the texts -- every one of the authors who ever made contributions to Wikipedia (including perhaps you, including me) made these contributions with the understanding that this license is in use, and they are the collective copyright holders, allowing republishing by others, perhaps even hoping for it. Authors made this the legal or moral basis for giving their work free (some perhaps knowingly, some perhaps unknowingly without reading the license) -- giving, so that the whole world may re-use that work.

 

What does this mean for the book? Well, for one thing, it means that the book Graphic Adventures itself is also GNU licensed (the license is printed in full in the book), in the book credits I'm referencing the URLs of all original Wikipedia articles in the state they were during writing (so that you can see the full list of authors there), and the book is additionally available as a free, editable digital version. So you can download it and mash it yourself per the license, if you like. The whole idea is that this freedom allows people to add value to material and improve the information world/ culture on the way. Similarly, I hope I added at least some value for fans with this book. Admittedly, it was the book I wanted to read anyway but which I didn't yet find on Amazon at the time (I had already finished "Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts", which I loved and I was craving for more info), so that's why I started it...

 

As for the images used in the book, I'm operating under fair use laws; I'm using cover box artwork and back cover art, as well as screenshots, all of which belong to the original publishers but are just "excerpts" which don't commercially hurt the originator (I'm additionally mentioning and thanking all the cool websites who scanned the work or made the screenshots, though as far as I know one does not acquire any copyright of a work by scanning it or making a screenshot of it, so they too operated under fair use by publishing these screens), and I'm then putting it in the historical context of the game articles. For other photos, like some drawings or photos people provided to me, people who I made interviews with allowed me to publish the images.

[sinus]

Actually, if it's that easy publishing a book like that, maybe we should just go for it while packing it with each and every piece of artwork that we can find...

 

Don't make me drool, don't ...

 

 

too late

[Haggis]

I really, really, really want a Secret History book.

 

Also, Philipp, nice job with the book. Another thing to put on my ginormous Amazon wish list. (By the way, Google Blogoscoped just became even more awesome now I know you're actually an adventure game fan!)