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News Wed Sep 02 2009
Free Lit through CellStories
Hot on the heels of Featherproof's Triple Quick Fiction announcement, comes CellStories, a website that will deliver a new short story every weekday to web-enabled cell phones. According to Reuters, the website was created by Dan Sinker, a journalism teacher at Columbia College, whose motivation was to experiment with digital reading. The stories are not device specific, so they get around the Kindle-posed problem of only being able to read your downloaded literature in one way. Stories will consist of fiction, personal essays, creative non-fiction and narrative journalism and are meant to be a 10-15 minute read. Fellow Columbia faculty member Joe Meno has already promised to contribute his talents to the project. What will this mean for the future of both digital and printed literature? No one's really sure yet, but it does promise to introduce writers to new readers, which may encourage them to purchase published works. That can only be a good thing.