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If the license for Big Finish to publish prose Short Trips has specifically been withdrawn by the BBC, doesn't that technically make the new audios part of a different series?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)