Hulk and Auster mix it up

As a weird tangential story to this week’s tumult surrounding e-books (see this story by Julie Bosman in the New York Times about a couple of e-books priced higher than the hardcover and this long list of comments by irate customers on Amazon’s customer forum as a result), Wednesday brought us the news that Paul Auster’s graphic novel version of City of Glass is being adapted into an e-book for the…Playstation?

Yep. According to a story in the Guardian, Faber is producing the graphic novel version of City of Glass for Sony’s PSP. Here’s more from the story:

On the face of it, one might not expect the stereotypical PlayStation aficionado — young, male and obsessed with gaming — to be the obvious choice to appreciate Auster’s highbrow postmodern novel about a detective fiction writer turned private investigator descending into madness. But City of Glass, which is illustrated by Paul Karasik and David Mazzacchelli, was put at number 45 in The Comic Journal’s “Top 100 Most Important Comics of the Century” feature, and Faber’s head of digital Henry Volans thinks there is mileage in the move.

“People think of PSP gamers as at the more serious, committed end of the gaming market, but it never does to second guess your market,” he said. “We like the idea of bringing in something unexpected. The PlayStation portable is just another device that can be used to read, and our job as publishers is to make our books as widely available as we can.”

In August, Sony announced on their Playstation blog that they would partner with Marvel Entertainment to launch the “Digital Comics Store” for their PSP device, giving gamers the ability to multitask between one anti-social, geek-producing hobby and another. This news came on the heels of rumors (such as this one from cnet) that Sony is going to turn the PSP into an Android phone (or vice versa). Which is meant to address another big problem they’ve been having since games became a top seller in Apple’s app store: sales of the PSP have been tanking.

Okay, okay, enough tech talk, this is a book blog–what’s the point? Well, considering the general inertia that exist nowadays toward all-in-one devices, Marvel’s (and now Faber’s) partnership with Sony hints that the gadget maker is moving toward consolidating its gadgets beyond the rumored PSP/Android phone. One imagines that once Sony eventually gets around to releasing a tablet themselves, they’ll have the infrastructure in place to compete not only with Apple’s iPad (and its universe of iStores), but the other Android tablets that will no doubt be flooding the market. With gaming and comics, they will have created the niche they’ll need to distinguish themselves and sell a lot more gadgets.

So get ready all you comic-loving, literary gamers out there. You’re about to be catered/marketed to. Big time.