20 February, 2026
I've always found it to be a lot of fun when there are books in video games. Finding books that I could actually read in the Elder Scrolls, books and newspapers on merchants in Everquest, or player-written books left in libraries private and public in Ultima Online, have always been things which brought me joy over the years. There's lots of more convenient ways to read a book than in a tiny window inside of a video game, but reading them in that context gives the world more life than it had before. It makes it feel like there's actually people occupying the environment, or at the very least that somebody cared enough about the setting to write something down about it for me to find.
Second Life isn't exactly a video game, but books in Second Life occupy a similar space in my head as books in games do. In Second Life, everything is intentional. If a book is there, somebody put it there for you to read. There have been people taking the time to either write or copy over writing into Second Life ever since it began in 2003, and of course there are plenty doing so to this very day. There are writers groups, libraries, bookstores, museums, exhibitions, etc. Heck, I found a Linden area from the mid-2000's the other day where someone had attempted to keep an in-world log of every single patch note for Second Life since the beginning. Is that a great work of literature? No. Is it neat to find and adds more of that "flavor" to the world like I was talking about before? Very much yes.
Another great example of books which can be found in Second Life are notecard library systems. In these areas, you will walk up to a bookshelf, click on it, and a menu will come up with a list of various books that you can read. When you select one of the books, a notecard pops up on your screen filled with text, and you have the option to copy it to your inventory for later. I've seen a ton of different things served this way, from transcripts of classes and meetings to articles over certain subjects to full text copies of books. The limitation here is that of course notecards have no formatting options for legibility, and also notecards in Second Life are limited to 65536 characters, which is a big number but some books need to be split between multiple notecards to fit.
Now, let's talk about my solution to the notecard limitations! Please note that I haven't done anything special or unique here, and I'm certain that other people are doing the same thing somewhere in Second Life. I've built some book collection HUDs which display the full text of books on your screen by holding a media/browser window pointed towards Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, or various other online resources. In this way, a book can be displayed with infinite text length, specific fonts, images, etc. I've also, in most cases, provided a button where the resolution can be switched from 1024x1024 to 512x512, making the font larger on the screen for those who may have difficulty squinting at the smaller font sizes.
So far, I've created the following book collections:
I'm also working on a little library in-world to house all of these for people to find who don't browse the marketplace for books. Every one of these collections is free, as the books contained within them are public domain or available without copyright, so it would be pretty silly to charge for them. Besides, I want people to read them, to feel that little spark of in-world connection. To feel that somebody put this book here, and now they're reading it and forming a connection to this space. What a neat experience.