Guild of Writers

... This is just my opinion but wouldn't it stand to make sense that the cover and bindings of all Linking books should look alike, aside from whatever marking the Writer chooses to put on the book. I was wondering this cause I was thinking that when the D'ni were making the books wouldn't they make them all the same, sorta like mass publishing?

... This is just my opinion and was wondering if anyone else thought the same.

... Also as a side note does whatever gets wrote on the covers and bindings of Descriptive or Linking book effect the Age in any way?

Atrion wrote: when the D'ni were making the books wouldn't they make them all the same, sorta like mass publishing?

I don't think so. Making a book was the opposite of mass publishing.
This was more like writing books by hand, before the printing press was invented.

Gathered from the Myst books, and the way Gehn wrote his books in Riven.

Yes I suppose you are right. I was just thinking of it more in modern terms I guess, silly me.

Do you have any comment on the second thing I ask, about markings on the cover n bindings effecting anything in the Book/Age, or is it just anything wrote on the Paper?

Only things written on the paper would effect the Age.

Tweek wrote:Only things written on the paper would effect the Age.

Actually it would depend on whether or not the bindings were created with the same paper and creation process that the paper was created, but I doubt they did. It just wouldn't be efficient way of producing the bindings, plus it would use allot of paper to create just one book binding.
Also the fact that if they did use the same paper it would cause all sort of problems. Just imagine what might happen if someone accidentally spilled some ink on the binding. Since we really don't know everything about the art. There is no telling what may happen. Just touching the binding could cause all sorts of problems.

The way I look at the art is it takes 4 things to create an age.

The paper, the ink, the language of the art, the person writing the age.

In that regard I think tweek is right.

... Another reason I had thought all linking books should/did look alike was because of the fact of all the linking books in the Nexus seem to look alike, though this may have been done more for simplicity in the game making than anything else.
... Also I thought it cause the Descriptive Book seems to be the main book, making each one individually different depending on the writer, but linking books would be used on a larger scale so I thought perhaps they would be less artistic and more general.

... As for your comments on the cover and bindings effecting the age, what you say makes a lot of sense.

well there was a guild of book makers, right or am I just losing it?, so I would assume that the blank books were probably roughly similar but that there would probably be small differences between each. Especially over time as the methods of construction would change. Though I would doubt that there would be major differences between volumes. Just my thoughts though.

I think that it's safe to assume that the D'ni treated the creation of the books with the same artistic attention that they treated writing. Keep in mind that also that the vast majority of books we see are linking books which are created after the fact. So the book cove could have been artistically modeled after the age. I would also imagine, given the D'ni's love of classes, that public books such as those used in the Nexus, were of a more mass-produced stock, keeping the cover design more uniform.

From an OOC view, the coding for the Nexus is is very dynamic. The same animation is used for every book with just the linking image swapped out. To do it otherwise, would make it needlessly complicated. I would imagine that most of the books you see open on pedestals in Uru all have the same model, and since when it's open, you can't see the binding very well, the same texture for the cover.