Metaverse Books

» see metaversebooks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The last good capture of metaversebooks.com is a storefront image, served at 00:34:13 UTC on 31 December 2013. Eighty minutes later the same machine answered a plain request for robots.txt with HTTP 503, and from that point on it answered everything the same way. There is no farewell post anywhere. The shop was open at half past midnight and shut by two, and the only notice it ever gave was an automated one.

What died was a bookstore that sold real books. Paper ones, shipped by Amazon, ordered through an affiliate tag that read mvb-sl-20. The store itself was a building inside Second Life, standing on a parcel called Market Truths, and browsing meant walking an avatar through the door. The stock was not scripted objects or virtual goods. It was the actual Amazon catalog, surfaced inside a 3D world by one resident working under the name Strachan Ofarrel.

The ambition went well past a storefront. Metaverse Books ran author interviews and booked people who had no particular reason to log into a virtual world: Jasper Fforde came through, so did Bob Garfield and Douglas Rushkoff. The Grand Opening ran as a week-long event from 14 to 20 March 2010, with a published interview schedule attached to it. The shop turned up at the Second Life Community Convention that year and at the education conference the virtual-worlds crowd ran, which is a strange amount of legwork for a one-person operation selling other people's inventory.

In 2010 I was twenty-six and working in Ankara, and Second Life in Turkey was something you read a news segment about rather than something anyone around you had installed. The client was heavy, the sim list was in English, and the whole proposition of standing in a queue as a cartoon to buy a book that Amazon would not even ship here did not survive contact with reality. So this one I know from its own server logs rather than from having been in the room.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the note it left by accident ~

The 503 page was not a default. Somebody had written it: "Metaverse Books Temporarily Offline for Maintenance", with filler text hidden in the markup that read "Gone to Florida for the sun". It was meant to sit there for a weekend. It sat there until 22 May 2014, still promising a return, and by 17 December 2014 the domain had rolled over to a GoDaddy parking page.

That gap is the actual story. A maintenance notice that outlives the business by five months is how most small web things end. Nobody decides to close. Somebody puts up a sign meaning to come back, and then the calendar keeps going without them.

~ the name that outlived it ~

metaversebooks.com has had two unrelated owners and only one of them is dead. The second is VerseBooks, Inc. of Toledo, Ohio, which is a going concern, still renewing certificates, and whose 2023 "sunset" was a redirect to mvbworlds.com rather than a closure. Archives of the virtual-worlds era routinely file the live company and miss the dead shop underneath it.

Everything on this page is about the first tenant: the Second Life bookstore that ran from 2008 to the last hours of 2013. The Ohio company shares the string and nothing else.

~ what it was actually proving ~

Second Life's economy is usually remembered for land speculation and for things you could only own inside it. Metaverse Books was running the opposite experiment, using the world as a storefront for objects that had weight and a shipping address. The margin on an Amazon affiliate link is thin enough that this was never going to be a living, which means the author interviews and the conference appearances were the point and the commission was the excuse.

It worked for about five years on one person's enthusiasm, which is roughly how long that fuel lasts.

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