The Future of Alice Books, Part III of an Infinite Part Series

Several LCSNA members have noticed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland featured in magazine advertisements for something called 100 Classic Books. Gary Brockman describes one ad thus: “Against a background of bookshelves packed with mostly leather-bound volumes, a pair of manicured hands holds open an electronic reader. On the left ‘page’ are the last lines of ‘All in a Golden Afternoon’ (there not being room for an entire stanza) and on the right page the beginning of Chapter 1 of AAIW (there not being room for the entire first sentence). The ad copy reads in part: ‘Own an instant library of 100 of the greatest books ever written, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Hound of the Baskervilles.’”

The list price is $19.99 for Nintendo DS (a latter-day Gameboy), and is exactly what it says it is: 100 classic books that you can read on your Nintendo DS. How comfortable these little hand-held gaming devices are for reading full novels is open for debate. But how excellent would it be to find that the teenager zoned out on his gameboy at a restaurant is not rescuing princesses (‘princi’?) but instead reading Don Quixote? I’ve seen young people huddled around tiny iPod screens to watch full length movies, so the idea of having a hundred classic books in miniature at your disposal for long trips might not be entirely claustrophobic to the right demographic.

From the blurb at Nintendo.com:

The postage stamp-sized game card includes a variety of books for all different ages, including seven separate works by Charles Dickens. There are novels that people can enjoy on the beach, such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; adventure and mystery novels that can be devoured during summer travels, such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle or Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and books that kids can read at home, such as The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

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