A Limey publishing firm is betting that you want to read what The New York Times calls “bite-sized stories” on your iPhone.
Ether Books, which will launch at the London Book Fair on Monday, plans to offer a catalog of short stories, essays and poetry via the iPhone and iPod Touch for busy folks who have only a few minutes between tweets, Facebook updates and porn downloads to devote to literature.
Gosh. Will Shakespeare would be so proud: 2B R not 2B. LOL.
Mad Blog Media 
Not sure about popularity, but has been available in Japan for a while. Folks write novellas on their phone, send out chapters as texts.
Hemingway said the best thing he ever wrote was,”Baby Shoes For Sale. Never Worn.” But he didn’t make a dime off of that one.
Funny … we were watching the Discovery Life thing last night (Discovery being, strangely, one of the handful of channels we get over the air, sans cable, no idea how or why), and there was a scene where they were filming monarch butterflies in Mexico, and trying to rig up various contraptions to hoist the cameras aloft into the canopy. One sight of the cross-bow / fish reel / climbing rope get-up they had put together reminded me of the 10,000 word piece in the New Yorker about the search for the world’s tallest tree. And I was thinking, you can’t boil that story down to a couple of tweets. It took all 15 pages to get that story across. And are stories like that lost for all eternity, thanks to our new techno innovations?
Gotta say … this is one area where I’m hoping the iPad actually does some good. Maybe a new gadget will get folks to put down their old gadgets and go back to long form journalism and literature.
And we geezers thought Cliff Notes were bad enough.