Books by SMS

By way of the Crackpot Chronicles and textually.org, Chinese author Qian Fuqiang has written a novel that is designed to be read on your mobile phone. The rights were bought for USD $22.000, and the novel will be distributed as 70 short messages, with 60 characters in each. The name of the novel is "Outside the Fortress Besieged" (which according to mobile9 means "a title that originates from one of China’s best-known novels, describes marriage as a fortress besieged - those who are outside want to get in and those who are inside want to get out." According to the BBC, it comes from a French proverb). In addition, a Taiwanese company has bought the rights to the novel, and will produce a series of small movie snippets that can be downloaded and displayed on mobile phones (by Engadget).

I can't really imagine anyone wanting to read a book on their mobile phones, and hopefully the arrival of electronic paper and real eBooks (like the librie, so far only launched in Japan) is not far away, so I don't think this will become a long lasting genre... who knows though.

Stian