Mobile world: mobile fiction: eBooks
E-books have happily gone through the desktop phase. Now their destinations are eReaders, tablets and mobile phones. There is a place in this world for fiction books.
Please read this great guest post about it. His author is a fellow mobile fiction writer – Small Stories.
You can subscribe to Small Stories at Posterous. Please visit also his writing website as well as a collection of pictures made with an iPhone.
Small Stories’ books, all of them, are a fantastic choice for mobile readers. Download them for free from Feedbooks.
It’s true we increasingly live in a mobile world but it seems to be having a more rapid change that I imagined a year or so ago.
Take eBooks for example, everyone is trying to get into or investigate them, changing behaviour, and reading trends. »»»
Mobile fiction – what is it and why is it at all?
Mobile fiction? What the hell is it? Another stupid name “invented” by a DIY author to describe his writing? Probably you’re right. But are you brave enough to give it a try? The fact that The New York Times didn’t write about it, doesn’t mean that it’s completely unimportant.
What is it?
Mobile fiction is fiction literature written with a mobile reader in mind. Mobile reader is the one who reads mo-books. Mobile reader is a tech-nerd with high level of novelty acceptance. He’s driven by technology and doesn’t want to be stopped. Lives quickly, likes to do many things at once, needs to be plugged in.
One can say: yeah, but Dan Brown is also writing for, as you call him “a mobile reader”. His books are also available in electronic format, you can read them on a Kindle, so why all that fuss?
Every author imagines his readers in situations when they’re “swallowing” his books. Such an image is one of writer’s muses. My muse is definitely not spending 12 hours on a sofa under a heavy blanket (as Brown’s muse could do). My reader is reaching for a book while he’s on the go. 20 minutes in an underground, 7 minutes in a queue. I also imagine that my reader is often switching to Twitter, RSS reader, games or application store on his smartphone. He doesn’t distinguish reading a book from any other kind of reading. »»»
Short stories made cellphone friendly
I’m a mobile freak. As you might know from my Twitter updates being read on your shiny cellphone, a couple of weeks ago I started to publish my stories through a mobilized site.
The project is called Mobile Fiction Stories (click for preview here). Every Friday I’m adding a new story, hoping that some day this would become a nice 5-minute-Friday-cellphone-reading habit. You can easily find the stories on Twitter – they’re tagged #mobilefiction. I tweet each one twice a week, so that you don’t need to spend too much time scrolling back your Twitter stream.
The stories come from my book Password Incorrect, which is free to download from Feedbooks. Obviously, ready for download to mobile devices like eReaders and cellphones.
I went mobile with Mofuse. Really cool thing. Mofused blogs show nice and load really fast on most cellphone models with a browser.
If you haven’t tried to read a piece of fiction on your mobile phone, give it a try right now. Just type mobilefiction.mofuse.mobi or choose one of the other easy options. And if you experience any problems with that – well, that’s what my tech-absurd stories are about.
Dobre opowiadania na piątek, czyli #fridayflash
Co to jest #fridayflash? To tag służący do oznaczania na Twitterze wpisów z odnośnikami do nowo publikowanych opowiadań w światowej blogosferze. “Friday” dlatego, że wpisy pojawiają się co piątek, “flash” – bo dotyczą bardzo krótkich opowiadań, do 1000 słów, czyli flash fiction.
Jest to jedno z nowszych zjawisk literackich na Twitterze, ale bardzo szybko się przyjęło i zdążyło okrzepnąć. Nie ma co się dziwić – to bardzo skuteczna forma zbiorowej promocji autorów. W przeciwieństwie do innych trendów literackich (również tych, które opisywałem tutaj) #fridayflash ma już, według mnie, charakter nieprzemijający, a to jest z kolei zachętą, by z piątkowej wycieczki po opowiadaniach stworzyć miły zwyczaj. »»»
An Orbital Flight With a Small Surprise [short story]
My next #fridayflash is about daily pleasures in a very near future…
An Orbital Flight With a Small Surprise
George Pearinsky was disappointed. They stuck him into this thing resembling a caftan, not a flight suit, and he couldn’t even take a photo of himself, but maybe it was better without one anyway, because in this vomit-green inflatable quilted shit, he looked like a huge pear, even though he weighed only 125.5 kilograms.
“And what is this?” He asked the captain pointing with his eyes at the screen, where wrapped in a thick layer of brownish gases, an outline of Earth could be seen. »»»
“Zany collection of tech-absurd short stories”
Please find below a full text of Court Merrigan’s review of my book Password Incorrect. I’m really proud of is as this is a first, and I hope not last, international assessment of the book, which I’m trying to promote to English-speaking readers without any publisher’s help.
Court Merrigan
Originally from Nebraska, Court Merrigan has lived in various places East and West and is currently back in the US with his family. His short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Weber Review, Porcupine, Evergreen Review, The Summerset Review, Dublin Quarterly, The Kyoto Journal, Pindeldyboz, Identity Theory, and Angle, among others. He is currently working on a novel. He blogs at Endless Emendation
Password Incorrect is a truly zany collection of “tech-absurd” short stories by Nick Name, pen name for Polish author Piotr Kowalczyk, which only a networked world could have unleashed. It’s available for free from Feedbooks. »»»
The Third Attempt to Take the Teddy [short story]
Here is my #fridayflash short shory.
The Third Attempt to Take the Teddy
“Justyna, can I take Abrateddy to school?” Kamilka, a superfirst grade student, asked her mom while putting on her shoes with winter soles.
Mom was surprised by this sudden question, her daughter had stopped playing with the Abrateddy teddy bear around the time when she began to crawl. The teddy spent its time doing nothing on the top of the one closet where nobody wanted to clean. The Storczyks were to move to a bigger apartment as soon as dad got his promotion, which might not happen too quickly, because he was a schlemiel and worked in a field were schlemiels had no chance – in the toy industry. »»»
Literatura na Twitterze
Ten wpis poświęcony jest literaturze tworzonej i publikowanej na Twitterze. Jak mam o tym nie napisać, jak wierzę w krótką formę, to raz. Uważam, że każde ograniczenie wyzwala ludzką kreatywność, to dwa. A Twitter ze swoim limitem 140 znaków przyspieszył rozwój twórczości literackiej nowego rodzaju: mikrofikcji, czy już raczej nanofikcji.
Chodzi mi o autentyczne literackie dokonania, których podstawową cechą jest to, że ponieważ mieszczą się w 140 znakach mogą być opublikowane na Twitterze. Pod opisem każdego z działań pojawiają się ostatnie wpisy. Czytajcie co się da już teraz. Wszystko zmienia w dużym tempie. Niektóre projekty prowadzone są przez kilka, kilkanaście dni (jak Poskromienie Złośnicy), a niektórzy twórcy po prostu przestają pisać (jak @twirledview, który tworzył miniopowiadania składające się równo ze 140 znaków).
Będę nie tylko dodawał użytkowników (@), ale również hashtagi (#). Te ostatnie pozwalają szybko wyłowić wpis zawierający odpowiednią treść (w tym przypadku utwór literacki, niejednokrotnie znakomity), a pochodzące od każdego, kto chce dołączyć ze swoimi dokonaniami do tej a nie innej grupy.
Twitteratura w najczystszej postaci do przeczytania poniżej. Zapraszam: »»»
Password Incorrect – mobile flash fiction
This is a press release of my “Password Incorrect”, probably a first e-book designed for mobile reading.
[18.10.2008] – Nick Name’s “Password Incorrect” is a selection of short stories addressed especially for mobile users. The book was designed to be downloaded for free to iPhone, which among its many other features seems to be also a great e-book reader. Opposite to devices specifically designed for e-book reading, which still look inattractive and suffer early stage problems, iPhone with it’s large color screen, smooth interface and milions of users has the real power of rediscovering the pleasure of reading books – so that we could hear a louder „bye, bye” to paper.
The time for the reader’s change of mind is perfect. With Stanza application, which allows to read books in ePub format on iPhone/iPod and Feedbooks’s Online Catalog, a typical gadget-hunting, forward-looking consumer, who perceives reading paper books as an outdated way of spending time – can rediscover book reading – or reinvent it. »»»
Pierwsza zagraniczna recenzja
Krytyk jest dla pisarza stacją benzynową. Pozwala uzupełnić paliwo i jechać dalej. Czasem do przodu, w wymarzonym przez siebie kierunku. Czasem, gdy jest druzgocąca – na wstecznym, po cichu, by wycofać się do garażu (czy raczej szuflady), a pojazd zwany pasją twórczą przykryć starym brezentem.
Nie minęły dwa tygodnie od czasu, gdy w tonie “nie wyszło” pisałem o całkowitym braku reakcji polskich krytyków na ostatnią próbę zainteresowania ich swoją twórczością. Od dwóch tygodni jechałem na wstecznym i w dodatku z górki. Do wczoraj. Właśnie wczoraj ukazała się recenzja Courta Merrigana w serwisie TeleRead: Bring the Ebooks Home. »»»
Recently updated Polish tech-absurdist and mobile fiction writer 3.0 beta. Addicted to ebooks and technology. Guest writer at 
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