Friday, November 20, 2009

Literary Mashups?

I was thinking the other day that it would be cool to get some Project Gutenberg texts, typeset them nicely in some free document processor, make a cool cover image and then put them up for sale at one of those digital print-on-demand sites. Or even just have a series of classics printed up for your personal library. There must be people doing stuff like that, right?

And then I was wondering, does anyone take advantage of any of the copylefted or public domain texts out there and actually modify them significantly? Like adding a whole bunch of illustrations, or even changing the plot or removing characters. Instead of trying to ban Huck Finn from school libraries, conservatives should be publishing their own rewrites where Huck does the right thing and turns Jim over to the authorities.

Anyway, keep an eye out for my upcoming masterpiece, 10,000 Leagues Under Ulysses, featuring stills from Lady Frankenstein.

3 comments:

DU said...

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

EOT

tps12 said...

Daaaaah, of course, of course. So much cleverer than my joke title and actually made and actually a bestseller. I'm an idiot.

DU said...

No, I wouldn't say an idiot. P&P&Z seemed like a one-shot joke to me. My mental algorithm was "add zombies". I wasn't really thinking about the fact that you could

a) arbitrary change text besides zombie insertion

b) combine two works

Also, there was a thing recently about an open sourced Python (I think) book that was printed on paper by the publisher but ALSO printed on paper by someone who downloaded it. The publisher was like "hey!" but the author was all "dude!"