Rothgar Blogs about User Written Books

One of the upcoming features for GU52 is a new system that will allow players to write and distribute their own books in the world of Norrath. These books look and act just like the current books in the game. You can hold them in your inventory or place them in your house or guild hall for other players to read.
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The only questions that comes to mind for me about this rather great feature are these 2.
1: What are the penalties of plagiarism(someone copies Harry Potter into the game)?
2: Who retains copyright of original works placed by players into the game? Sony, the player, joint(Sony and the player) or Creative commons open licenses?

Kiara wrote:

Oh, more than plagerism and copyright concerns come to mind when I read the description.
Am I right when reading the description to this and understanding that it is unmoderated and effectively instant? So, I could put ANYTHING in that book I decide to sell on the broker?

ArivenGemini wrote:

qfe

My questions are:
1. Will they count towards a players item total when placed in homes?
2. Can we choose our own book covers from current ingame graphics or will they be the standard brown cover?
3. What is the exact number of letters that can be entered in per book?
4. Will we be able to change the font used?
5. Which crafter or crafters will be able to make these empty books?

I think this is a very nice idea and look forward to some fun. I am curious how people will be able to find these books on the broker though. Also once a book is done, can it be changed? And if you cahnge the master copy of the book does it change all the copies of the book?

ArivenGemini wrote:

Book text is run through the profanity filter the same as chat text if you have the filter enabled. For highly inappropriate text or copywritten material, a book can be reported and CS will take a look at it. If a player continues to cause problems with books, his ability to create/edit can be taken away similar to biography and naming priviledges.

Will there be a way to tell the difference between player-written books and books that... not sure how to word this, that are real lore of the game? I collect 'canon' books... I don't really want to add fan-fictions to my collection...

And what is to stop people from writing 'bad' things and putting them in game? Plagiarism included. And yes, will they count against item limit ? (Please say no!)
But I'm adoring this from a roleplayer standpoint!

Transen wrote:

2. You will not be able to change what the book looks like but I beleive we will have several options available with different appearances.
3. There is not an exact character limit. The text is stored compressed and the limit is based on the size of the compressed text. This was done to give you the maximum amount of space possible. If we had put a limit on the uncompressed size, we would have had to pick the smallest number possible in order to account for inefficient compression.
4. Not at the moment. We considered more formatting options such as text justification and font sizes/colors. But we would have basically needed to build an entire word processor into the game and create our own markup language for storing that information. It would add a lot of time to the feature so for now you can only format the text by inserting spaces. Maybe in the future we will consider other formatting options.
Domino would need to answer your other questions.

Krunck@Everfrost wrote:

We will probably need to make some modifications so that broker searches would include the title of the book or perhaps the author. I'll add this to my to-do list.
A book can be changed by the author at any time if its in his possession. Book text is not linked though. Making a copy makes an entire independant copy of the book. We talked about linking book text together, but this would have made it very difficult for players to transfer between worlds and take books with them.

I believe that copying existing works into the game is actually legal under fair-use laws provided you do not sell them for real world money. Just as there are no laws to prevent me from writing the first page of Harry Potter on a napkin and posting it on my refrigerator, there are no laws against doing such in game.
And SoE would be crazy if they thought they owned the copyright. A website that hosts fanfics doesn't lay claim to the works posted there.

This is an incredible new feature though, and I'm really looking forward to it!

This is very exciting. I can not wait to see these implemented and play with them myself. What a very cool idea.

Rothgar wrote:

Ok, so furry amputee **** is prolly not going to be a big issue in the long run.
What about gold spam? Or other website advertising? I mean I can see a fan site putting articles in and linking back to their site for the rest.. thats good.. but what about advertising for non-related or gold selling sites?
I can see some fun things I could do with these, including making it easier to get some tutorials in game for guildies who haven't mastered forums yet.. but still, I worry about anything thats unmoderated and in game rapidly..

Ok we get books... great I really like the idea..... but one thing it'd be nice to get an answer on (because I can't find any official answer from SoE about this anywhere) why they never implemented musical instruments to "play" music on in the game.

Kairah@Guk wrote:

The names of the user-written books do not change. So if the T6 user-written book is called "a leather-bound tome", they will all have that same name. The author and title is visible in the tooltip of the item, but the name of the item remains the same. So when you hover over the icon, the tooltip will look something like this:
A Leather-Bound Tome
Title: Death of a Dragon
Author: Rothgar
It should be pretty easy to tell the difference between a normal book and user-written book.

Rothgar wrote:

1. No.
2. There are currently 16 different appearance/colour combinations available, all different from any currently existing in-game lore tome.
5. The current plan is for sages level 50+ to be able to quest for recipes to make these books.

Edit: ignore .. Rothgar answered while I was typing apparently.

Rothgar wrote:

Thanks

Very interesting addition to the game! I can see there being all sorts of great uses for the books -- greeting books in houses/guild halls, personalized gifts, books with quests/stories to facilitate RP events.
Its too bad that the books won't be linked, but I can see purchasers potentially miffed if the story they purchased changed at a later date to plat seller spammage or some such . Perhaps there could be an option where book text could be locked/frozen when someone chooses or transfers.