Reading matters

A remark by the redoubtable Miss Tali Rosca (seen there on the pile of cushions) led me to make this thing, which is basically just a rug with some cushions and reading animations (from Dyer Maker, if you're interested) thrown in.

Looks not bad, but, of course, if people are to read on it, it really needs to hand out books.  Fortunately, Tali and I were both prepared (she has a sweet[ish] little picture book, and I have the Necronomicon, in that snap), but I will need to rig the thing with some sort of dispenser... which led me to think about how books are made, in SL.

Lots of stuff is available in notecard format, of course, but notecards are not what you'd call nice-looking, and anyway they appear on your viewer interface and not inworld.... I've seen several kinds of HUD books, mostly working the same way as Tali's book there (panels with touch-to-flip textures), but attaching to your display rather than your hands....  It would seem straightforward, if a little pricey in upload fees, to prepare screenshots of texts in a nice font and format, and drop them into your book prims, but there must be a more elegant solution....

At which point I drift off into thoughts of media-on-a-prim, and accessing some sort of cloud-storage thing for content - I suppose simply sharing stuff via Google Docs or similar would work, wouldn't it?

Anyway.  Once again, a simple straightforward thing gets all sorts of involved and complicated when I start to think it through!  And now I have to look up how to do MOAP properly, and set up an imaginary person (me) on Google Docs, and oh look, isn't that a nice little lot to add on to volume 12 of my to-do list?

:: retires, muttering darkly, and heading in the general direction of the SL wiki ::