Edinburgh residents will be well-acquainted with the annual City of Literature One Book - One Edinburgh project, and this year's read is The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - you can expect to see plenty of coverage of this nationwide over the next month or so. What's had slightly less publicity is a collaborative online project (how web 2.0) called The Lost Read, which aims to get more people to enjoy reading and storytelling. The first episode is already online, and the project organisers are soliciting ideas for what happens next, taking storyline suggestions from the public.
We’re big supporters of any projects that get people reading – particularly the younger generation – and we’re hoping that we can help out by giving away some of our (age-appropriate!) books via BookCrossing (another partner in the project) and thus adding to the collective pool of storytelling inspiration.
So here's how The Lost Book story starts: Aileen Adler is under suspicion of theft when a valuable book is stolen. That's pretty much it. The public is invited not only to suggest plotlines, but also to help write the book that's been stolen (a prologue has already been written by the novelist Jasper Fforde).
We think The Lost Book has the potential to become a really exciting project and a great way of reaching out to a generation that’s in danger of choosing life online over literature offline.
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