Forum:Short Trips prose v. Short Trips audio

If the license for Big Finish to publish prose Short Trips has specifically been withdrawn by the BBC, doesn't that technically make the new audios part of a different series? Isn't there a rationale for using the prefix STA instead of ST to refer to these newer stories, since they are originally written to be performed and are published in a totally different medium? Colin Baker spoke in a recent BF podcast of how he had to reformat his meant-for-print story into something that would work better on audio, which to my mind is enough to make these unlike the prose Short Stories.

I'm also thinking that the reactions of many readers who saw ST: The Deep would be to think, "Oh, 'ST' means it's some old prose story in an anthology I'm unikely to be able to purchase except on the secondary market, so it doesn't mean that much to me." By contrast, if they saw that "The Deep" was a BF audio, they would know that they could hop on the website and download it immediately. It seems to me there is a difference in people's minds between performed and non-performed DW, which isn't particularly served by treating the audio series of Short Trips as a part of an inaccessible-but-by-eBay series of prose anthologies.

[And, yes, I know there's a kind of precedent for using one acronym for two media. NSA is used for both prose and audio, but that's really because even if you gave the audios their own acronym, it would be NSA (for New Series Audiobook), anyway.]  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍ 16:49, December 8, 2010 (UTC)

I agree, the short trips series page would become overcrowded by the vast number of short trips audios that Big Finish will release anyway. But then again they are just audiobooks and not actual audio dramas which isnt that much of a deviation from the original format as they are now just being read out instead. There was also an audiobook release with the original BBC Short Trips which had its own exclusive audio story and that is treated as a prose story on most sites. Revanvolatrelundar 17:23, December 8, 2010 (UTC)

On reflection, I think the only difference we need to make is to the infobox (which i noticed CzechOut has already done for us), as we need to account for narrators and musical score etc. Revanvolatrelundar 17:01, December 8, 2010 (UTC)

I dont think that we should change the categories to audio plays though, they are still short stories, just read out instead of in prose format. Revanvolatrelundar 18:35, December 8, 2010 (UTC)

Although I suspect the question is more for stories-by-Doctor that this question comes up, but I did make a category for Short Trips audio stories back in March, meant for those exclusive to the audio. --Nyktimos 19:28, December 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * Ahh, but there's the rub. They aren't prose stories, any more than Companion Chronicles are.  With very few exceptions (at present, only Colin Baker's The Wings of a Butterfly) were the stories intended for print publication.  They are stories specifically written for a contest run by Big Finish, with the aim of being direct-to-audio.   As Colin Baker explains on the BF podcast about this series, even his story had to be adapted for audio, making it different than the original print version.  These are audios.  Czech Out   ☎ | ✍  01:51, December 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * Category:Short Trips is categorised by the two publishers and as Doctor Who anthologies. As in the case of novel series with separate audiobooks, the stories end up several categories removed under prose. The audio collections would too if we made a subcat for audiobook anthologies in either category:anthologies or Short Trips (which all... four? seem to be associated with even if only two explicitly are). There are also the Tales from the TARDIS collections which repackage these older ones with other audios but we don't have articles for those, yet.


 * If the connection is still too close, would we want to separate categories of prose anthologies and audio anthologies, prose short stories, etc.? --Nyktimos 03:45, December 10, 2010 (UTC)