This looks good. Is this good?
I like it very much. Ordering a copy to give it the once over twice.
I’d be super interested in what kind of adventures we can come up with to replace this kind of story that is inherently based in a younger earlier world where the maps either haven’t been made or haven’t been shared, information isn’t global and indexed, etc.
The idea of searching for an unknown via a physical journey into the unknown is a venerated and powerful one, but approximating that grows ever more contrived and esoteric in the digital age. I’m not quite ready to say “that trope is tied to a history that has firmly passed” - I think there may be something else to hang that hat on, and I’ve seen attempts, but I haven’t really found anything that quite hits the spot… yet. (Maybe I just need to journey in search of it? 
)
(A while back I accidentally ended up in a situation where there was an error in the local GPS mapping. For the first time in a decade it was possible for me to not know exactly where I was and have to figure it out instead. It was so unusual and novel that it was really fun, a throwback to another time)
“Mr Kipling? My name’s Jones, Professor Henry Jones. I was wondering if you could give me a line on this little yellow idol, to the north of Kathmandu…”
Maybe something like Gibson’s Pattern Recognition? The mystery macguffin exists on the internet and is publicly visible to the whole world, but its origin and author are obscured.
The main character is still able to go on a geographical journey to solve the mystery, but the dangers are cultural/political/technological/aesthetic rather than environmental.
Well, you could take Charlie Stross’ idea of aliens suddenly screwing up Earth’s geography (as in his Missile Gap, set in the middle of the Cold War). It sounds dumb, but Stross kind of pulled it off.
This artikel (or the Wink artikle) would really benefit from a photo showing the book closed, showing the side/spine of the book, giving one a idea of the “heft” this book actually has.
It’s 800 pages of hardback. I’d say it has a fair amount of heft!
Of course I could just google it I guess…
That looks good! Although I still don’t get why they would not include a nice detail shot of the spine of the book seen from the bottom or top, if your talking about the feel of a book that seems really important to me.
Brings back (bad) memories of this:
That looks reaaaal nice from far away but when you look closer it’s just regular books in a fancy dust jacket packed in a dressed-up cardboard shoebox going for $275.
So it seems in this case it really is a nice hardbound book, how can this be sold for $15? I’d expect this price to be much higher (not that i’m complaining). Is it cynical to imagine they are selling this cheap to hook as much people as possible and then up the price when they release the next installments?
I get your points alright. It looks a steal to be honest, and often with long comics I’ve seen that they are at insane prices on online services (at least initially) it kind of makes me sad and I wonder who is making any money off them…
Particularly as I often order books online, supposedly from the UK, and I get a note saying they have been “dispatched from our UK warehouse” and they arrive 6 weeks later in a Swedish customs checked bag inside a German customs checked bag or something like that.
And then I think “are online booksellers - the big ones - merely complicated tax scams for recovering VAT within the EU?”
Knowing that they kind of are. Which also sucks as there is no VAT on books in Ireland so I know the taxpayer is funding this bullshit economics.
Anyway: this looks a steal!
Totally agree, $15 is a steal.
Too bad that is just when you are in the States. When I order it locally (the Netherlands) it’s €28 (ex shipping) and I’d wager that is roughly equal to what it would come to if I’d order one from amazon.com. I guess I’ll have to visit a brick and mortar store to go and check it out 
€25.64 including shipping on The Book Suppository to Ireland, £20 on Amazon.co.ck plus shipping so roughly €300 or something like that.
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