Books, digitized books and digitizing books

BeerBeer · 2016-10-01T13:26:45.000Z

Books are sometimes bulky and heavy, eventually taking up an entire storage box or two. And the game does not have any electronic books. Books could be copied into electronic form, into E-Ink, with a camera. Or perhaps a scanner. Or how about one of those fancy book scanners that Google uses.

The duration of the book scan, and the charges required, could depend on the book’s weight and volume since we don’t really have any other measure, such as word count or page count for each book. (page count would be great though)

I mean, at the very least I think we could have lootable digital versions of books added to complement the existing physical copies. Perhaps they would appear in USB sticks? Maybe we could find external hard drives, and they would sometimes contain multiple books, accessible with an E-Ink?

It would be great if all books could be eventually collected into the E-Ink.

Pthalocy · 2016-10-01T18:10:29.000Z

I like the idea of adding new, simple functionality to existing items (we have enough items as it is lol). Camera to upload books onto other computer devices in the game would be faboo.

BeerBeer · 2016-10-02T11:29:25.000Z

It occurred to me that reading an e-book should probably consume battery power. But how much?

This makes me think that e-books would be a drag to read, potentially a battery-hog, and it’d be simpler to read a paper book just to save the batteries.

But after reading a paper book, it would be more convenient to archive it in digital form, and then just leave the priceless paper book to rot in a puddle somewhere on the sidewalk… KIDDING! Kidding.

And then again, you might find some hard-to-find copy in digital form, and waiting to find a paper version of it just doesn’t seem like an option.

Perhaps only the rare “high-end” books should appear more often in digital form. Hell, maybe even do away with certain paper books altogether.

But if we do that, should we have the ability to print books as well? A printing company building location with machinery for massprinting paper stuff? Or just a printer at a local office, library or a house?

Litppunk · 2016-10-02T22:01:30.000Z

That would be neat. Digitized books wouldn’t be as bad of a battery hog as I think you think it would, unlike say playing a game, or shining a flashlight, if the device is kept in low brightness, it would not use up so much power as to be debilitating. Especially late game where it actually starts to get annoying having all those books to lug around.

BorkBorkGoesTheCode · 2016-10-02T22:53:13.000Z

[quote=“BeerBeer, post:3, topic:12651”]It occurred to me that reading an e-book should probably consume battery power. But how much?

This makes me think that e-books would be a drag to read, potentially a battery-hog, and it’d be simpler to read a paper book just to save the batteries.[/quote]

en.wikipedia.org

E Ink

E Ink (electronic ink) is a paper-like display technology, characterized by high visibility and contrast, a wide viewing angle and low power requirements. The technology has been commercialized by the E Ink Corporation, which was co-founded in 1997 by MIT undergraduates J.D. Albert & Barrett Comiskey, MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson, Jerome Rubin and Russ Wilcox. It is currently available commercially in grayscale and color and is commonly used in mobile devices such as e-readers, and, to...

Pthalocy · 2016-10-03T05:42:56.000Z

I worry that adding in a whole building would be kind of over-complicating the process of ebook>regularbook, unless the setup had multiple other uses to make it worthwhile and interesting. Adding printers as an occasional add-on to computer consoles would be significantly less involved if all you want to do is add a conversion function. It’d be nice that way too, since a computer with printer could effectively have books uploaded to it as digital format, and then printed.

Honestly, distributing books would be more interesting if NPC’s had any use for them. What are books valued at? What is their value relative to e-readers or laptops? Trying to establish if there’s a means to just farm money by converting cheap data into multiple sellable books. Thinkin’ way too far ahead, for now.

Adding printers that can take info from USB’s or e-books and act as a simple one-way media converter would be lovely imo.

Litppunk · 2016-10-03T13:56:53.000Z

[quote=“Pthalocy, post:6, topic:12651”]I worry that adding in a whole building would be kind of over-complicating the process of ebook>regularbook, unless the setup had multiple other uses to make it worthwhile and interesting. Adding printers as an occasional add-on to computer consoles would be significantly less involved if all you want to do is add a conversion function. It’d be nice that way too, since a computer with printer could effectively have books uploaded to it as digital format, and then printed.

Honestly, distributing books would be more interesting if NPC’s had any use for them. What are books valued at? What is their value relative to e-readers or laptops? Trying to establish if there’s a means to just farm money by converting cheap data into multiple sellable books. Thinkin’ way too far ahead, for now.

Adding printers that can take info from USB’s or e-books and act as a simple one-way media converter would be lovely imo.[/quote]

I think communities (factions) should take care that nicely once it becomes a problem. All the agreeable and trade friendly factions, per community should probably want a book for every level of every skill in total. They would probably refuse to trade them back and would protect them vigorously, and would value books based on:

how many new skill levels book teaches this community
how many new recipes book teaches this community.

This could even be shortened to how many viable ___ they actually want, so selling them To Serve Man might net you 0 because they have no interest in eating others… unless maybe your trying to sell to bandits?

Once factions get really shiny, they could even start outputting resources they now know how to make, on top of any randomized recipes + skills their members already have.