Lookout Kindle, Here Comes CellStories.net
By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 9/1/2009 7:24:00 AM
Dan Sinker—founder, editor, Web designer and chief technologist of CellStories.net, a new digital reading venture that offers short narrative content to readers via their cellphones—believes that companies like Amazon and Sony have it all wrong. The future of digital reading, says Sinker, is the cellphone, not dedicated reading devices like the Kindle and the Sony Reader.So Sinker is launching CellStories: A Daily Dose of Awesome. The venture goes live today and offers short narrative content—1,500-1,700 words of fiction or nonfiction solicited from both published authors and the general public—delivered to consumers through a mobile phone Web site at cellstories.net. Users navigate to the site through the Web browser of their Web-enabled cellphones; the site will offer a different story five days a week, and on the weekend, readers can reread the previous week’s offerings.
“The trend these days is to create a big device that can’t be used for anything but reading,” said Sinker, who said the small size, multiple functions and computing power of today’s smartphones make them ideal for contemporary reading, which is typically done on the go. “It’s silly. Dedicated reading devices will turn out to be the laser discs of our time,” said Sinker, who is also an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago. CellStories is a mobile Web site, not a dedicated phone app, and will work with any Web-enabled phone, “not just the iPhone,” said Sinker. The site will offer “primarily fiction, personal narratives and narrative journalism,” he said, emphasizing his background as a print journalist, editor and professor. The stories are short, "10 to 20 minues of reading," but long enough to “grab the reader,” he said. The site also allows the reader to link the story to Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. Although more a digital reading experiment and than a business venture, CellStories is also partnering with five small press publishers to offer more polished storytelling content in addition to user-generated stories. Initial partners include Akashic Books, 2nd Story, Joyland, Barrelhouse and the 2ndHand, a mix of book publishers, online literary journals and performance/writing collectives.
While Sinker said CellStories offers “ways to make modest amounts of money,” the primary focus is to offer, “awesome writing” on cellphones, the device he believes will dominate digital reading in the future. Sinker has an unusual background that includes print publishing, pop culture journalism and technology. He edited and designed the magazine/Web site Punk Planet for 13 years before moving to Akashic Books to run the house's Punk Planet imprint for several years. For Cellstories.net, he designed the site, its display and typefaces, wrote the code and oversees all the technology.
Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple called Sinker “a renegade genius,” and noted that the Punk Planet imprint was Akashic's most profitable unit when Sinker ran it. And while Temple acknowledged that CellStories is experimental, he said the site has the potential to offer promotional and marketing opportunities for the writers on the Akashic list.
Sinker said CellStories will let him do what he’s always done in publishing, “put great stories out into the world.” But he thinks it will do something else: “provide a strong example of a new and interesting technological era. In the past, people had to adapt to computers. Now they’re so small and powerful, computers are a lot more personal. They can adapt to us.”
