A little while ago the Unicode Consortium announced [1] that it has approximately 250 emoji to the standard for written computer text. I read this article and promptly forgot about it, since I rarely use emoticons other than smileys. A few days later I was searching for something on the net (I forget what) and I found this article about a complete translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in to emoji. At first I thought it was a joke and clicked on the link just for the heck of it. Then I realized that this is an actual book that you can buy in hardcover for $200 each. Apparently it sells enough to net the ‘author’ (actually creator) about 200-300 dollars each month.
Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji.
Each of the book’s approximately 10,000 sentences has been translated three times by a Amazon Mechanical Turk worker. These results have been voted upon by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence has been selected for inclusion in this book.
Personally I would prefer to read the actual book but then again I have been known to read quite a lot. What scares me is that this is actually making money for this guy and I just hope others are not inspired to create more books like this because if that happens then soon we will have libraries filled just with books that contain only emoji. Not sure I would want to live in a world filled with folks that dumb.
What do you think? Would you read a book in Emoji?
Source: Emoji Dick
– Suramya
[…] (except for the occasional smiley face). However not everyone agrees with me and there have been books published in the past using just Emoji’s and now there is a programming language that is written […]
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