When Amazon’s Kindle came out, I started reading about the changing medium of books, and whether they’d still be around in 50 years (or used as large coasters instead.) One particular stream of thought (which I liked) was the idea that books wouldn’t just disappear into cold, lifeless e-books, but that the medium would evolve to integrate visuals and sounds through the Internet. This sounded good to me, since I can’t imagine reading my favorite books on a e-reader versus on yellowed, torn pages.
Well, Paul Coelho is taking huge strides in the direction of fusing books with multiple mediums in his collaboration with MySpace. Together, the team will create his first feature film, titled The Experimental Witch, which will be based on his novel, The Witch of Portobello. The film will use original video and music submitted by MySpace users. Pretty groovy.
The whole bit involves a competition, there’ll be a lot of fanfare in the MySpace community (which I’m not a part of,) blah blah blah – feel free to check out the details at Publisher’s Weekly.
I don’t know how the execution of this project is going to work, and whether this film has the potential to be a hit. Though with NewsCorp behind it, I’m sure they can throw a substantial amount of dolla dolla bills at it, and see what sticks. Either way, along with authors using youtube to market their books, the medium is going in new directions that’ll create a lot of opportunities.
Posted by Ming 
