Like most here, I'm a huge fan of all things Trek and I have always enjoyed the audiobooks that were available first on tape, many on CD, and some on digital download. My favorites include TNG's Crossover, Q Squared, Imzadi, Reunion, Dark Mirror, Ships of the Line, The Devil's Heart, and Generations, which was better than the film IMO. I like some of the Shatnerverse and some of TOS stories I've bought as well. I'm also a fan of all things Batman and am very happy with the animated adaptations of The Dark Knight Returns and Year One. So I started thinking, wouldn't it be great if Paramount or CBS or whoever is in charge were to commission direct-to-video animated movies of some of Trek's best written word? While I'm at it, how would I (we?) go about getting the stories that are already audiobooks but not yet released as downloads made available in that format? They are already recorded and it would just require converting them to mp3s or similar formats. Is that a big deal?
I agree very much that it would be cool, but I don't know if there's really enough of an audience for it. As much as I love TrekLit, it's probably to much of a nice within a niche to really be viable.
Yeah, Trek novels and comics are only read by 2% of the fanbase. With Batman, comics are the native medium, and a larger percentage of its fanbase read them thus making animated adaptations of the comics more commercially viable.
I guess I'd like to see the first of Enterprise's relaunch novels - "The Good That Men Do", done like that. Plenty of reference material that exists to render in traditional 2-D cells or 3-D computer generated figures. Actors all still around to provide the voices. As an animation, it still wouldn't be considered canon but it would be a heck of a lot better than "These are the Voyages..." and end with the Romulans' first strike against the Coalition. So pointing at what was actually supposed to have happened next, whether further cartoon feature-films would be justified or not. If by some miracle they were, with the major stumbling block of undoing Trip's death dealt with, then they'd perhaps have to be more loosely based on the following books depicting the Romulan War. The other possibility that has always occurred to me, is presenting the first two Shatner books - Ashes of Eden and The Return as lost Star Trek movies set between VI and/after Generations.
If you're going to the trouble of making an animated series, why not have original scripts, instead of books we've already read or heard? I believe both Kail and CurtDanhauser are still doing original TAS stories? http://startrekanimated.com/tas_comic_main.html http://www.danhausertrek.com/AnimatedSeries/Main.html
If they were going to do something based on the books, I'd rather get something we haven't seen on screen. New Frontier, Titan, and Vanguard would be my preferred choices.