Anthony Zuiker, the creator of CSI is launching an interesting new concept – a digi-novel called Level 26 that could set a trend of cross-platform story telling over the next few years. Level 26 is said to be like “CSI on cocaine” by the man himself, it starts off as a novel, featuring whats called “cyber bridges” every 20 odd pages where you have to log into the website with secret codes to activate video content to continue the story.
It will be interesting to see how it unfolds, perhaps it will bring some life back into the publishing world! Click here to watch the full official trailer. If the video is anything to go by, this could be a very popular way to start engaging audiences across multiple platforms.
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September 17th, 2009 at 3:52 am
i think that it is an interesting experiment, but I’m not sure exactly how successful it will be. Bridging the gap between print and online video will not be an easy task. While I do think that Level 26 is a step in the right direction, I’m not convinced that it is the answer.
If I may take the liberty, I wrote a more complete version of my take on this on my blog, here: http://www.techne-eikon.com/media/level-26-dark-origins
Thanks, Marc
September 17th, 2009 at 9:32 am
It’s interesting, but I think there are some barriers to adoption for this type of novel, mainly that not everyone reads their books in front of a computer. For example, if you’re on a bus / plane / train etc reading, you’re unlikely to have the mobile bandwidth or even access to a connection at all. I think the ideas OK, but the videos would have to be really good and add alot of value to warrant the extra effort to get the reader online.
Seeing how they can link this into the connectability of the Kindle device, however, seems a more natural experience IMHO.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:33 am
It’s an interesting step, but I’m with Ellery – in print it’s a bit clunky (when we have digital paper it will work better, but that’s a way off). I disagree about Kindle, though – I think the iPhone and similar is where we’ll see this growing – and not just in the direction of video/text interface, but using bluetooth to hook in with other readers and make the story a different experience the more people read, tapping into the gaming mentality and giving the author a powerful tool for scalability of sales.