h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Quite a while ago now someone invented the printing press, and that was probably the first major change in books. It was also probably the last.

What else has changed?

They've gone digital. Well, so? That's just a different way of distributing them. Whether the text is written on paper or written on an e-reader it's still just the same text that everyone else reads.

They make movies out of them. More of a change than going digital but is it much of a change? It's a slightly different version of the story usually and it's more often than not cut down. It also takes the imagination element away from the reader/viewer. But it's still the same story time and again.

Even in the earlier Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy books the Guide was just a book. It had the novelty of updating itself occasionally, but it was still a book. Same text for everyone.

Why is it like this? Why is a book just a book? It doesn't actually have to be, and I think Douglas Adams hit on it with the last Hitchhikers' book. The Guide Mark 2 was different. It was a book, but it was much more than that. Okay, it was a malevolent entity with evil ulterior motives that no-one quite knew, but at least it wasn't just a static book. It changed according to the user. It always had the same information in it, but the way that it distributed that information altered according to what it believed best suited the user.

Now of course that's not that good for a story book, although others may argue elsewise. But what about other books? What about the Earth Edition of the Hitchhikers' Guide?

The technology is here, and has been for a while, so why make a static book when it can be so much more?

'User 1' logs on, with their Geo tag info automatically bringing up relivent articles/entrys based on their geo data, date of birth, sex/gender, etc.... You do realise your creating coding work for yourself?

So what are you getting twinkles in your eye about, Pastey, an editable variation? One that attempts to provide the text more in the language or vernacular of a particular region?

One thought that did just come to mind is that with each entry called up, links to have a dozen other (perhaps unrelated entried) are appended to the displayed page. To give an example, a common pass-time of my father in past years ... on a stormy day, for instance, was to grab a volume of the family's 1956 Encyclopaedia Brittanica. And flip it open at a random page. Invariably he would find atleast several subjects that were of something he never knew before and yet found interesting.

About 8 years ago i wrote a site that monitored the words people typed in, and then used that to transpose text it showed them. For instance, if the user typed in a formal fashion, the text displayed to them was more formal in terms of words used. If they typed more relaxed, the style they saw was more relaxed. It worked quite well.