Carolyn’s Team Pick:
In 1993, Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, recorded an audio clip about the invention of the book and how eventually books would all be scrunched up into silicone or something, for his then-publisher Voyager Books.
This spring, The Literary Platform hosted a competition to animate that audio. The entry below, by Gavin Edwards, lost to a stop-motion video by Eleanor Stokes, but I think it’s even better than the technical winner.
(A transcript is available at The Literary Platform.)
Voyager Books launched the Expanded Books project in 1991. The project featured books on CDs with a few extra features, including search and the ability to change font size. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was one of the first books released, along with Jurassic Park and The Complete Annotated Alice, which is probably why Adams was asked to record the clip (also he had basically already predicted e-books with the Guide and has the best book-reading voice ever).
…I am really just hoping that by this point in the post people will mostly want to talk about Hitchhiker’s Guide (but not the movie). Go!
