Snow Crash comes to the Metaverse

Penguin Books has launched an in-game publishing venture in the online world Second Life, leading with Neal Stephenson's seminal Snow Crash -- naturally, since Snow Crash's Metaverse inspired Second Life!

"It was the obvious entry point," says Penguin's Ettinghausen (avatar name Jeremy Neumann) as he shows me around the virtual sampler of Snow Crash. "We are always looking for new ways to connect with online communities and Second Life is undergoing a huge amount of growth. However, it is still a small community when compared with MySpace or iTunes and we wouldn't want to bring authors in who didn't have a connection with that world yet."

Penguin worked with the London-based virtual world design agency Rivers Run Red to create an in-world version of the book - this offers readers excerpts of the text, an audio clip and a link which clicks through to a dedicated Second Life page on the Penguin website, complete with the opportunity to buy the book at a discount. They are now developing a virtual bookshelf of other Penguin titles for the Second Life resident.

Link (via Futurismic)

Update: Wagner James Au sez, "I wrote about that *Snowcrash* excerpt a couple months ago, with a pic of it in action. Also includes a recollection by a former Linden Lab staffer who met Stephenson, and told him about Second Life as his metaverse made manifest-- but got a rather bland response."