Rothgar Blogs about User Written Books

Different people look at books different ways. Some will resell. Those who like to read though will keep them.
How many times have you went to a zone for aa ect that you havent been to in over a year and not been able to remember how to do it.
If I bought guides, they would end up in the guild hall library so that a 18 months from now, I could look up things like the strats on vp nexona or whatever. Sure I could look them up online but my casual guld does not get on line much at all. If it was available, I could muster a 2 or 3 group raid (lvl 90 being the max cap) in the guild hall, and tell the raid to read the book while we are waiting for the last 2 people to zone in, ect.
Knowledge is the greatest treasure in the world but is easily lost when no one passes it on. How many great cities, buildings and monuments were not created in the middle ages because the secrect of concrete was lost when rome fell?
How much further along now would civilization be if people didnt have to relearn everything lost or destroyed when civilizations fell or conguered others and their information was not passed on. Metal working, mechanical mills and pumps built over 2000 years ago and then how they were made was lost for a long time.
The only knowledge that is truly useless and a waste is what is not passed on to those who might need, can enjoy the story, or can learn from later on.
On the flip side, I can understand people wanting to make money on it. Our familys must eat, lol.
Off my soap box now, lol.

One of the uses I've thought of that I'm really looking forward to is for each of my characters to have their own little persistant notebook without having to use the ingame browser and something like Yahoo Notes. I can note down customer orders, names and addresses of people I'm about to visit to buy from (because I nearly always forget by the time I've made it from the broker to their area), the raws I've calculated that I need for such and such crafting job, etc. Going to be neat!

I personally do not want to see these things become LORE, No-Trade, Attuneable or any of such tagging. Books are a fluid thing. Our guild is thinking of tons of useful mechanisms for them at this point and putting such trivial restrictions on them for reselling is counter productive.
Real books can be sold after you read them. If they couldnt, there would be tons of stores and people out of work. If the material you provide is worthwhile, than it will be kept and treasured, stored on a shelf at the very least. If not, it will find its way into the market again.
Rothgar - in thinking over the permission thing for changing text while a book is in a home or hall. Would it be possible to change that to FRIEND instead of TRUSTEE??
Someone visiting your house would likely have Vistior access, most houses and halls require a relationship to get FRIEND and granting TRUSTEE is pretty much a no no. We are envisioning many ways to use these books but do see need to have multiple authors contributing to the volumes for various topics. Having to open the entire guild hall to TRUSTEE for that many people would be unwise. Thoughts?

Artemiz@The Bazaar wrote:

1) I wouldn't want all books to be that way, I just want 2 versions of the recipe, one that does, one that does not.
2) As stated in previous threads, you don't get to sell your used book in the same marketplace as the author selling new books. The potential marketplace here is very small making even a couple dozen copies sufficient to serve the entire market if they can be re-sold after use.

I would like the option to have a book that can be editable by multiple users.
I would like to see an option that would to allow editing while the book is placed if the user desires it, and with that another option to allow the owner of the book to set what access level people need to have before editing a placed book. I'm imagining these as checkboxes for "Allow Editing By Others" and "Allow Editing While Placed" and a drop down menu for "Access Level: Visitor, Friend, Trustee".
I've been in a guild before where we'd often imagine a ledger placed at the front of the guild tavern or guild hall, and we'd create this on the guild forums. It would be great to be able to actually have this physically represented within the game. I'd also like to be able to put out Vistor-editable comment books for players who visit my homes to leave a short note if they like, to let me know they'd been by to visit and what they liked about the place, etc.

Rothgar wrote:

Excellent. I've got at least one story that just has to be written in Ykeshan/Froglok.
Related concern... How does this work on the PvP server? If someone were to get hold of a book from a different faction, but written in a language they understand, could they read it? Or will the PvP servers only be able to write books in one of the "faction" languages?

Zhadowsee@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel.

Snapdragyn wrote:

That's a very valid concern, IMO.
http://www.gamegrene.com/node/41
Granted, that happened back when EQ was still run by Verant, not SOE, but consider the ramifications when folks are allowed to write and publish fanfiction in the actual game, not on third-party websites. Censorship is censorship, but I also understand that SOE has to put SOME limits. The story you describe should be fine (IMO), but perhaps the one mentioned in that article wouldn't be.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

Jgok's Guide to Making a Million Platinum
Step 1: Write a guide to making plat.
Step 2: Set the broker price at 200 plat.
Step 3: Sell the guide to 5,000 people.
Congratulations, you're a millionaire!

Artemiz@The Bazaar wrote:

There is a small error in your assumption. Multiple players cannot edit a single book and no one can edit a book while its placed in a house. Only the original author can ever edit the text and this must be done while the book is in their inventory. I was simply pointing out that an author of a book would need to have TRUSTEE access in order to modify the text of a book in your house. This is so he could pick the book up, edit it, and put it back down.
I know that some of you want a lot of options to give multiple people the ability to contribute to a book. We have talked about doing something like that in the future but it will most likely exist as a different type of object, and not a book.

Oakum wrote:

Right. So if I found myself in this situation I would have 3 options:
A) Teleport back to my house/guild hall and hover my cursor over dozens of books until I find the right one. (which may be "checked out" in the case of a guild hall). Then run back to the zone I was in.
B) Waste at least one entire bag slot filled with books of zones I might happen to go into someday.
C) Click a button that brings up the wiki.
I just don't see any situation where someone would buy one of these guides but if you enjoy writing them go for it.

Tock@Antonia Bayle wrote:

From earlier in the thread:
Rothgar wrote:

Emphasis mine.

For Multiple Authors, a Bulletin Board would be nice. I remember EQ1 had one such board, I believe it was in Highkeep. OMG how cool would it be to have, in your guild hall, your own bulletin board and treat it as if it were some primitive form of an internet forum? I could see a thread now!
Topic: Training Dummies
Body:
Pinpoint,
Please restcok the box of Training dummies. I have been pounding them all day and there are wood chips and wool all over the floor, yet no more dummies in the box. Also we need a guild hall maid ammenity, because I'm not cleaning up the mess!
Sincerely,
Crabbok

Crabbok@The Bazaar wrote:

LoL, I'll bite.
Sorry, we had a maid from Qeynos but she was hanging out with you a lot and quit mutttering something about dirty diapers and raising a hatchling for 12 to 18 years.
The maid from freeport and her "man" spent all their time in a bedroom being visited by lots of people, quit, and then bought their own guild halls with the proceeds of "whatever" they were doing in there.
With our inabiity to keeps maids "unsatisfied" we are currently stuck with having the dwarf and ogre stableboys do all the sweeping. Since they often track as much "stuff" in from the stable as they remove while sweeping we have decided that certain things like indoor training grounds covered with "protective mulch" are much preferable to indoor stables covered with mount droppings with wooden caltrops sticking out of them (from the chips they missed).
Especially to halflings like yourself who prefer to run around barefooted.
Since you ARE the guild carpenter, please make 1000 dummies to refill the box. You may use the guild crafting table and the harvesting box but dont forget to restock the harvesting box at the completion of each hour in case your glorious leader should want to craft something.
Most Sincerely
Your great and fearless leader.
Oakum Stormchaser.
PS, I know you like the size of the newest members chest but she is an ogre and you are a halfling.
She keeps mumbling about she needs ask the cook for "much bigger slices of bread" or if can she "borrow a big pot" and mumbling about "crab sandwiches or crab soup" when she sees you looking at her from across the room.
She also often talks about how hard it is to raise 2 young ogres as a single parent since she killed their father and fed him to them when she caught him eyeing a high elf but not in a "I'm hungry" sort of way. She complains that has very little time to adventure and slay dragons for gold anymore to buy food without him around to watch them for her so she is always looking for extras to take some of the load off.
I suspect she "might" be involved with the recent rash of pet dissappearances from the hall. However, being a smart Wood Elf, I would rather just buy new pets then go to her house and ask her about them.
In short, I would advise you to forget the size of her chest.
Your most perfect leader.
Oakum.

Bratface wrote:

Ah, thanks for that, Bratface. Missed that one.

would it be possible for the books to recognise item numbers and produce a link to that item, if not if it could be put it would make my life alot easier

Tock@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Glad to help, it's a long thread and things are easy to miss.

Double post

Rothgar, earlier you mentioned that if the book is written in a language that the player does not know, the text will show up as if it was written in that language. (I.E., if the book is written in Death's Whisper, and Player A doesn't speak Death's Whisper, the book will display symbols as if it were in Death's Whisper.)
My question is this: Are the symbols that are going to be used consistant with the symbols that NPCs use? If so, then one could make a "Rosetta Stone" book translating all the characters. Would this be a potential problem?

Kriptini@Everfrost wrote:

If I'm reading this right, you're asking if one could make a book with two languages, both Common (English to us) and some other language. That sounds like it might be a bit too complicated to bother with for such a specialized purpose. All the fonts for the various languages are in the EQ2 program folder, of course. Those can be fun to play with in forum signatures.

If you wanted, you could screenshot anything written or said in another language you don't understand, and translate letter for letter what it actually says using the fonts. I know the notices out by the arena in Maj'Dul say some pretty humorous things.

Regarding people's concerns about their works in-game being copied by other players for profit, wouldn't a simple timestamp at the time of a book's creation allow the original author to prove him/herself conclusively to be the original author, and therefore request (via /petition or whatever) that the plagiarist's copy be removed? If the timestamp were displayed in the tooltip, then the OA could link to his/her original copy in chat context, as well. Just a thought.

RedFault wrote:

just as a note i dont think sony is planning on limiting the plagerism as it would take to many resources, besides unless you can come up with something so amazing that everyone would want it i dont think it will be an issue.

RedFault wrote:

Customer Service will not be getting involved in these types of matters. It's all too subjective. The furthest that CS will probably be going is to remove people's ability to create/edit books if they abuse it.
Now, entertaining the thought of a timestamp, it wouldn't work anyway. If it were stamped when the book was created, someone could just create a bunch of books the day that the feature comes out with nothing but an "x" as the text which would stamp the book with the oldest date possible. Then they could use these books later on and replace the text. If on the other hand we made the timestamp change everytime you edited a book, authors would no longer have a representation of when the work was created because everytime they fixed a spelling error it would reset the date. Showing both wouldn't be any more proof of creation time than showing nothing.