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[DVNO]

Wow, sort of surprised this is an original suggestion. Tried every combination of Player + Adventurer + Books + Written. This came close but not quite.

The idea is Player Adventurers could be able to create and directly write in books. Players could write reminders, notes, Journals, and warnings for themselves or other adventurers to also read.  Even at a sparse but workable 6246 Character limit, a book could span five pages double spaced, and only cost 6.24 kbits of memory.

 I think a casual look in Community Games can speak up to how useful this feature could be. People love writing journal entries! How cool would it be for passed around saves to contain complete journals? Instead of reading through a whole 556 page forum thread you could learn about the history of a succession game in a much more roleplay oriented way. There have been many suggestions for  books written by NPCs and the RNG. It's not a bad idea, but why just settle for a harbl garbl patched together and possibly nonsensical first hand account of world events when a player can write an (arguably) better one?

Also, as objects the books could scatter to the winds. Say a adventurer dies to the hands of a bandit, as they so usually do. The bandit sells the journal for scratch to a trader. the trader sells it to a soldier who happens to be looking for a good read. Soldier dies at the hands of a goblin in a war. A goblin takes the shiny and travels half across the land raiding. The goblin dies on the other side of the world at the lash of a daemon in a dark fort. Your adventurer re-discovers the book ten playthroughs later, giving you a "Oh yeah, remember the time?" moment as you scratch your head wondering how it ended up in a dark fortress a continent away.

Adventurers could pick up player written books from book sellers in the market square, and learn about cool locations and player created forts in a long running passed around game. You wouldn't have to be 'Told' where to go like a traditional game-y quest; you could have a completely natural adventure finding the events and places that are referenced in the book.

As for Fort mode, well... Yes, it would be useful to leave books for other players around a community fort, but (N)otes already does that job well enough. Fort mode is where Player written books become slight a problem. Unlike notes the books would be objects, and like any object, it can be thrown into a magma dump with a mis-click. You don't have total control over where you place a book like in adventure mode, you would have to rely on dwarf competence (:s). There's !!fun!! and then there's the tedium of rewriting lost books after the dwarves have an improv book burning in the library. Or magma floods the library. Or whatever the simulator throws at your library. Especially if those books have mandatory rules you want succession players to read. The feature being adventure mode exclusive might be a plus.

Toady's dev log partially references this:

Writing

Phrase storage and grammar updates
Have books around that can contain maps/locations/names/traps/purpose/artifacts of older sites
Sometimes you might just have a name and know an artifact is there, and then be able to cross-reference that in the next source you find until you feel you are prepared
Some sites might contain additional tomes/tablets/inscriptions that lead to more information

But again it seems easier for the player to create books and understand what's going on in the sandbox than trying to create a way for the game to guess.

[Matoro]

I love this suggestion. It would make reading more important and interesting. However, I afraid we need first better reading interface for books.

[Tehsapper]

Yes yes yes yes! And also make this possible in fort mode, like, engraving slabs with old stories of epic battles and storing them in library stockpiles.

[Khym Chanur]

Procedurally generated journals of NPC adventurers, for the player to read, would be cool.  And fake adventurer journals created by bandits to lead the player into ambush could exist...

[Xantalos]

I approve of this.

[Werehuman]

 I approve.

[GreatWyrmGold]

However, I afraid we need first better reading interface for books.

This is my major problem. For player-created journals to exist, we should have NPCs' journals. Which means the AI will need to be taught how to write. Which means the AI will need to be taught about literature above a kindergarten level. Which means that there will probably be a lengthy Literature Arc before this gets added. And since the sum total of this is a pretty low reward, it's probably not going to happen for a while.
Sorry.

[Matoro]

However, I afraid we need first better reading interface for books.

This is my major problem. For player-created journals to exist, we should have NPCs' journals. Which means the AI will need to be taught how to write. Which means the AI will need to be taught about literature above a kindergarten level.
Sorry.

Also, AI will need to be taught what actually is worth of remembering. Otherwise journals would be more about ordinary things no one is interested in like shopping and eating or fighting random wildlife.

[Sigulbard]

I think NPC written journals would look something like this:

"The Xth of X, in the year XXX

Today I ate the best meal ever. Today I saw a really nice carving of an elf in a fetal position being laughed at by dwarfs. I don't like how we don't have enough chairs in this place.

The Xth of X, in the year XXX

Today a goblin siege arrived. I saw Urist McMarksdorf struck down before my eyes. I saw Urist McFisherman struck down before my eyes. I am immensely sorrowful from the loss of a great friend..."

and so on.

[Timeless Bob]

Sigulbeard: you are assuming all NPC's would be literate.  Right now, only demons, necromancers, cities (and a sometimes deities) create text to be read in the form of slabs and books.  This argues for a very limited level of literacy and would keep even fortress mode writers writing about things that were important to them: bookkeepers keeping up to date lists of supplies, writings about artifacts (including other books) and things like a new mayor coming into power or a goblin invasion killing half the fort.

Paper-making and book binding should not be a trivial process either. The production of ink/paints, paper/vellum, binding glue, pens/brushes and appropriately sized book covers, not even including all the decorations usually applied to such objects would be an industry and skill set all on its own.  Once all that is available, I imagine that each book itself would be a masterwork artifact with a random number of pages, dedicated to an event in Legends mode. 

Imagine porting the entire list of "The Terrible Battles" from Legends mode into a book, titled "The Terrible Battles".  The memory is already taken by the world gen, the book would just be a call to that portion of the text already stored.  Reading the book would read that portion of Legends mode.  New books produced by adventurers would be stored in the history of Legends mode, allowing them to be "read" from that source.  Suddenly, "Was it the Dwarf?" makes sense as a title, because it references a dwarven individual who at one time "explored the depths of the world and tamed the naked moledogs" before becoming a general and starting "The War of Shining" against a neighboring goblin civilization.

UPDATE:
After thinking about this for awhile, my idea seems more and more doable.  The number of pages would be generated, which would allow for that number multiplied by, say, five to eight consecutive entries in Legends mode per "page".  After this, one of the categories from Legends mode would be chosen "randomly", and the title of the next subset would be the one referenced in the book's title.  Starting with the first entry then reading downward consecutively, we'd have the contents of the book, (or in the case of the maps, the map would appear with a specific portion blinking to show "special interest".  I figure the map version shows the location of one of the Megabeast lairs or other high level beastie, which would unhide it on the quest screen as well as some title saying, "Beware all ye who travel, for XX makes their home here").  For more fun yet, we could add "part 2" to a title that has already been generated and add the number of pages of the first volume to the total before beginning the contents, so books with less pages than the content allows for could just be the first in a series to catalog that particular aspect of the world's history.

Literate adventurers could set up journals as "margin notes" in any of these types of books, either using blank pages from a book that had too many pages and too few entrees to fill them or adding commentary like "1091: Dinnerwandered almost completely deserted, except for the vampires, zombies, kobolds and goblins..." (this one sounds a bit more difficult to implement, though, since it would require an input interface for the player.)

[DVNO]

This is my major problem. For player-created journals to exist, we should have NPCs' journals. Which means the AI will need to be taught how to write. Which means the AI will need to be taught about literature above a kindergarten level. Which means that there will probably be a lengthy Literature Arc before this gets added. And since the sum total of this is a pretty low reward, it's probably not going to happen for a while.
Sorry.

Man, does everything in DF's development have to be done in reverse?

Yeah, you could have a lengthy literature arc and painfully teach the NPCs to read and write first, I guess. Or, just hack together a simple Input/Output String storage interface and leave all that for another day.

Because DF totally doesn't have any outstanding unfinished features or anything .... [Cough] The Economy [/Cough]

[DVNO]

Found this in the DF: Adventurer World thread:

Just finished reading all this:

I like the idea of secret game logs.
- If an adventurer dies they don't post their journal until someone finds their body.
- Crimson knight is awesome.
- If a fortress falls (all dead, not abandoned) then history only posted if adventurer finds it and gets to another town.

Is there anything in fortress mode that we could designate as "the official book of history"?
It would have to be semi-easy to recognize.
A cloth image comes to mind, not sure how often people make those to sell to caravan though.

Finally, lots of mini-forts with a bridge/tunnel for crossing the larger rivers would come in handy.

Just another reason to slip this one in before the release ...

[Timeless Bob]

I'm not sure I understand why PC journals existing have to be predated by NPC journals.  What if the PC's are the ones to invent "keeping journals", just as they are the ones to "invent" traveling across the world confronting creatures of the night (instead of just cowering in fear for multiple centuries as the death toll rises) or traveling to far off locales to kill the "big bads" of the world?  (There's nothing in Legends mode that suggests anyone else does that before the players get involved, ergo, they have "invented" it.)  The only thing that predates adventure journals are books written by bored necromancers, demons in cities and... no, that's about it.  Apparently, before adventurers get into the swing of things, you had to be infernal or undead before you had enough time to learn to write, so letting adventurers begin writing journals shows how the culture of book-writing becomes less highbrow and more pedestrian.

[Cobbler89]

However, I afraid we need first better reading interface for books.

This is my major problem. For player-created journals to exist, we should have NPCs' journals. Which means the AI will need to be taught how to write. Which means the AI will need to be taught about literature above a kindergarten level.
Sorry.

Also, AI will need to be taught what actually is worth of remembering. Otherwise journals would be more about ordinary things no one is interested in like shopping and eating or fighting random wildlife.

Ever read famous real-life people's journals? I don't mean memoirs where people write stuff that's entertaining as fiction but about their own lives, I mean back when people wrote about their own lives and didn't have a concept of entertaining as fiction. If NPCs end up just writing a log of events they've witnessed with basic reactions, it would be realistic if nothing else! (Note that the plus side of all those famous old people journals is you really do get to see what people actually knew, noticed and thought, however, unnotable most of it seems in hindsight -- but it allows people like Michael and Jeff Shaara to get into their heads in a really detailed way, and then they can write stuff about it that's actually interesting. Same goes for Legends Mode in DF actually [I've read a story or two gleaned from reviewing Legends Mode rather than witnessing events while playing], and since engravings already function as part decoration part in-game subset of Legends Mode, it wouldn't be unreasonable if journals' main function was something like that only with more details that wouldn't be cared about outside of chit-chat or saved beyond the destruction of said journals.)

[Timeless Bob]

Ex-actly.  "Real life" journals are often filled with entries like "March 22nd, 1983:  Today I picked up a strange coin with an eagle on the front but a watermelon on the back.  Also, I finally cut my hair".  "March 28th, 1983: This week was SO BO-RING!"  "June 3rd, 1983: So it's been awhile since I wrote anything in here..."

Actually, they look a lot like the old Myspace or Livejournal pages.  Just people recording their lives "privately" for everyone to see and maybe comment on.