So I then think... hey... I have crazy ideas all the time... and some of them could really just be a couple thousand dollars away from actually happening... crazy idea for a game? figure out how much it would cost to pay someone to develop it and BAM! game exists... or whatever. But one of my crazy ideas floated to the surface... that idea I had that one time about printing books for cheap... yeah... that would be perfect... and then, thanks to all the coffee I've been drinking today, I came up with the following:
Kickstarter project idea:
Obtain the Publishing rights for the "Infocom Books" and release them into the public domain... the books are "Planetfall", "Wishbringer", "Enchanter", "Stationfall", "The Zork Chronicals", and "The Lost City of Zork" published by "Avon Books" on behalf of or under licence from "Infocom" who got bought out by "Activision" who are now also Blizzard... so who knows who "acctually" had the rights to them... so that would be the first step. Figuring out who owns the books and then figuring out how much it would cost to get the rights to them... given that they have been out of print for 20 years their response it likely to be... oh... we own that?
Then I was thinking... actually "public domain" might be less awesome then I think because after the rights are obtained there's no way for me to
Kicking in:
$30 would get you e-book copies of the 6 books
$60 would get you e and "crappy" printed anthology edition of the books (kickstarter target would be be enough to get 1000 copies of each book printed in soft cover on bible paper or whatever... about 25,000 dollars)
$120 would get you e and "crappy anthology" and "hard cover, look pretty on the shelf" versions of the books...
$200 would get you all of the above an 1/1000th share in the "company" that holds publication rights of each book for 10 years... including a share in any profits made from the sale of the books
if the project is successful the books would be printed and sold online and at sci-fi/video game conventions/available for people to order in bunches by retailers etc... it would be a croudsourced advertising campaign/word of mouth stuff... and the ebooks would be made available on all of the platforms like amazon and kindle and kobo etc.
After 10 years the licence to print the books would either A: revert back to the publisher or B: be bought out into the "public domain" by the "company" that we established... if enough money had been made by this point in time to do so.
Now, I haven't actually set up said kickstarter campaign because right now I'm not even at the point where I've figured out who actually owns the right to said books in the first place... I'm at the "figuring out if people think this on one of those 'so crazy it just might work' ideas or one of those 'just plain crazy' ideas"... also input/feedback would be appreciated.
testing my ability to post comments
ReplyDeleteGoogle was trying to do this already weren't they?
ReplyDeleteThat seems like the kind of thing that Google would do... They were doing something with trying to get digital distribution rights but I think my idea is significantly different in that I would be seeking the printing rights too.
ReplyDeleteI suggest you acquire a read a couple of these books. The quality of the books is way below the quality of Infocom's text adventures. As BOOKS, they just don't work very well when stacked up against other fantasy and sci-fi. ... So I'm not sure how big the audience would be for them.
ReplyDeleteActually the initial inspiration was that I found the first one at a yard sale... read it and thought it was decent, if a little silly, and then realized I'd never be able to find the rest of them. I imagine that if they are terrible the right for them would be easier to obtain and that there are at least a few people out there who, like me, would get them for the sheer novelty of them then their literary importance.
ReplyDeleteWell, without going into great detail about it, print media has been on the decline for years. Digital books and ereader devices and apps are in pretty huge demand. This is sort of the .com boom for ebooks really.
ReplyDelete