AND THE WORD GOES TO BERGMAN

... Falk Bergman, that is, winning the NWN Book Expo yesterday by a handful of votes, thus earning the right to publish the "official" Second Life edition of Cory Doctorow's new novel. All the entries were admirably ambitious in their own way, but in the end, Falk's more traditional prototype won out. Guess it's hard to escape the appeal of a solid book open in front of you.

Falk is hard at work transposing Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town into Second Life now. Look for it at kiosks and vendors soon, in preparation for Cory's appearance in-world to discuss the book in late July.

UPDATE, 2:10PM PDT: Welcome Boing Boingers and, uh, Crap Hounders. Details of Cory's imminent appearance in Second Life and the other book prototypes it engendered are covered here and here. To get a fuller sense of Second Life as documented by this blog, recent stories are on the left bar, and highlight entries under Archives, including previous Boing Boing faves like an experiment in virtual evolution, an avatar controlled by nine profoundly disabled people, an in-world simulation of schizophrenic hallucinations, a recreation of J. M. Barrie's literary world of Neverland, Second Life's annual tribute to Burning Man, and, of course, Cory's first book club appearance in 2003.