There’s a growing trend in Hollywood where studios buy the screen rights for books before they are even released (see the recent acquisition of Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse for just one example). I suppose it makes sense that if you have a big name writer (ie. Dan Brown) or a property that will probably be a big hit, you should get on board before anyone else finds out about it (and before the price goes up). But in some cases, it strikes me as a little odd that a studio might option a book before it has even been fully written yet.

This is definitely the case with Mandalay Pictures, who have just picked up the rights to Max Barry’s sci-fi thriller Machine Man, a serianlized novel that is being written and posted online daily, page by page. It’s a pretty interesting experiment in writing, and the premise is kind of cool (a tech engineer is replacing body parts with “titanium upgrades of his own design”). You can read the first 43 pages online here, but you have to pay to read further. Barry previously wrote Jennifer Government, an awesome action-packed satire of corporations in the future, which Steven Soderbergh currently owns the rights to. As a fan of his writing, I’m definitely intrigued, although I am curious as to why they felt this was worth buying before it was even finished. Then again, I guess if they don’t like how it ends, they can always change it afterward! The book will officially be published by Vantage Books in 2011.