owlmoose | Books and games and Mountweazels, oh my

The Guardian on storytelling in games; nothing new here, really, but it's a thoughtful treatment of the subject with some fun speculation about what games written by famous writers might be like.

5 Reasons I Won't Give Up Books is another take on Steve Jobs's now-infamous declaration that "nobody reads anymore". This may be my favorite article on this topic, because she faces down the idea that paper vs. electronic is a zero-sum game.

In a similar vein: 9 Reasons Why E-books Are Evil. To be taken much less seriously...

Boing Boing links to George Orwell's famous rant on bookselling. It's fun, and a lot of it rings true, but I doubt I will ever lose my love of old books, no matter how long I work with them.

This last one is a bit old -- the article is from 2005 -- but it was new to me: The New Yorker talks about the practice of making up an entry in a reference work to catch out plagiarists. The article refers to such an entry as a "Mountweazel", after Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, the subject of such a fictitious entry in the New Columbia Encyclopedia (sadly, the edition of the Columbia available online no longer contains the biography). I wonder if Cassie Edwards has been caught writing about her yet?