Conversation

Then there's the class of "web serializations"—books which started as a series of blog posts, or online fan fiction chapters, which were later serialized into "real" books. Those often lose something in book form, since they weren't "designed in one piece," lack a coherent whole.
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Why aren't there more? Well, if you *want* to write a web-first book—again, not even a fancy new-media thing, just a book whose text is online—there's no quick consumer-grade solution. Spin up Ghost and write some HTML, I guess. Or elaborately theme a Wordpress?
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I thought about this a lot whilst working as a bookseller and teaching myself webdev. I kept coming up with ideas, only to realise they'd been done in one form or another. Hyperlink CYOA Video cut screens Dynamic backgrounds Etc etc...
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...and the problem with trying to define a "web book" beyond saying "a book readable on the internet" is that you inevitably exclude a bunch of potential techniques by omission. Depends on the story, and the audience.
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Replying to
Beyond the diary format? (Pepys, Frank, Weir etc) Not that I can think of, to be honest. Maybe the xkcd What If? series, but that's a string of articles akin to a diary. Maybe the limitations of the display (and inbuilt distractions) limit our tolerance to snippets?
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Hell, until a hundred years ago the big UK authors like Dickens and Walter Scott tended to be serialised by the chapter before the books came out for the serious fans. Maybe the cheap paperback was temporary, popular aberation in the gap between mass production and mass media?
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