Kids in Denmark may soon be reading Hans Christian Anderson on their cell phones. To celebrate the writer’s bicentennial, a Danish company is releasing an interactive comic book series designed specially for the tiny screen.
(via textually.org)

Faced with declining coverage of books in newspapers and magazines, writers are constantly looking for new ways to promote their work on the web. Literary blogs have done a lot to fill in the gaps left by print, covering lesser-known authors and titles translated from foreign languages, and even revisiting older works. And since many lit bloggers are writers themselves, the blogs serve as a virtual salon where writers and intellectuals come to spar about literature, recommend books, and share their own work. Cory Doctorow offers free, cc-licensed downloads of his novels, attracting readers, generating buzz, and bolstering sales of his books in print. Others are sneakier, deploying anonymous 5-star reviews under their own titles to boost sales on Amazon.
The latest, and probably most expensive, trick is video lit, or book shorts – brief little films (like movie trailers or music videos, but for books) designed to be spread virally through email, blog shout outs, and links, just like the digital tidbits – video clips, images, sites, articles – we stumble upon and circulate daily among friends and family. If people like what they see, they can buy the book (a convenient link to Amazon or Barnes & Noble is provided).
It sounds a bit cock-eyed to advertise books as though they were movies, but proponents of the form say it can get results. There’s a piece in Wired that profiles some of the writers who have experimented with the form, and the little production houses that help them do it. The most frequently cited example is a Flash-animated encapsulation of “Yiddish With Dick and Jane,” a borscht-belt-infused pastiche of the iconic 1950s children’s reading primers. Not too long ago, the 2:45-minute film, produced by a company called Vidlit, was getting passed around incessantly on the web, while at the same time, the physical book flew like hot cakes off the shelves, going on to sell over 150,000 copies. Whether the two are related is hard to say. The book was pretty heavily promoted in stores as a no-brain-required gift item. But Vidlit touts this as a coup of viral advertising.
BookShorts, a Canadian company, produces full live action films for its titles. I watched the book short for Susan Swan’s novel “What Casanova Told Me” and was not terribly impressed. It comes off like a preview for a TV movie adaption of a trashy book. But the Dick and Jane example, silly as it is, suggests how clever design and a quick one-two punch can get you a lot of mileage on the web. If people like the idea (and clearly they did), and if the film possesses a kind of must-see quality (the visual equivalent of a good one-liner, a zinger), then people might feel compelled to shuffle it voluntarily through the web. I could see this perhaps working for a political tract or manifesto, or for a religious text – something that is compulsive and seems to contain the seeds of larger truths or revelations. Imagine if this piece were connected to a book (click “Knife Party,” then again in new window, then watch “What Barry Says” by hitting “click here” at the bottom). Breathtaking visuals and a compelling political premise combine to whet the appetite for further reading.

The Digital Museum of Modern Art, a virtual exhibition space, is featuring “Czolgaj Sie” (“Crawl”), verses by Polish poet Marcin Swietlicki, illustrated by fellow countryman Cezary Ostrowski. The poem is exhibited on the museum’s website, and has also been optimized for reading on a mobile phone.
I’m not crazy about the poem, but it’s an intriguing experiment. Is there a Flash plugin for phones so one can view dynamic text (like this)?
(via textually)

There was a great AP article yesterday on the recent boom in cell phone novels and serials in Japan. The top and bottom images here are pulled from “Bunko Yomihodai,” or “All You Can Read Paperbacks” – a popular microlit site with over 50,000 subscribers, offering 150 titles written or adapted specially for reading on phones.
“In the latest versions, cell-phone novels are downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications. You’re free to browse as though you’re in a bookstore, whether you’re at home, in your office or on a commuter train. A whole library can be tucked away in your cell phone — a gadget you carry around anyway.”
True. Right now, the cell phone is the ultimate indispensable gadget. It’s with us practically all the time. No wonder it’s the first place that electronic books are gaining a foothold.
And the content is varied…
“Surprisingly, people are using cell-phone books to catch up on classics they never finished reading. And people are perusing sex manuals and other books they’re too embarrassed to be caught reading or buying. More common is keeping an electronic dictionary in your phone in case a need arises.”
Microlit hasn’t really taken off here in the States, though there are a few signs that suggest a gradual movement in this direction. There was a bit of buzz about a month ago when Random House acquired a significant minority stake in wireless applications developer VOCEL. And more people seem to be using their phones and PDAs for reading – everything from websurfing, to RSS feeds, to downloaded books (or even raw text files of public domain literature – I tried this on my iPod with this fun hack). But we have yet to see any kind of full-blown lit phenomenon.
The breakthrough work in Japan was a serial called “Deep Love,” the story of a teenage prostitute in Tokyo. It became so popular that it was published as an actual book, and spun off into a TV series, a manga (comics), and a movie. Now the author, named simply Yoshi, is trying his hand at thrillers. From the article:
“Another work by Yoshi, a horror mystery, has a cell-phone Web link that readers click. One pulls up a video clip of a bleeding face; another shows a letter that tells people to go on living.
“Yoshi, a former prep-school instructor who sees his readers as “a community,” reads the dozens of e-mail messages teenage fans send him daily and uses their material for story ideas.
“He also knows immediately when readers are getting bored and changes the plot when access tallies start dipping for his stories.
“‘It’s like playing live music at a club,'” he said. ‘You know right away if the audience isn’t responding, and you can change what you’re doing right then and there.'”
Remember that Dickens often wrote in this way. Perhaps we are witnessing the return of serialized novels.