online novels

Over the past years we've seen books try to incorporate multimedia into their text. It could be written in a blog format, texting and email messages. There's one series that starts with Cathy's Book by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman that has website and phone call messages for the reading to search. But the following two examples of books are incorporating online and phone reading. I'm not talking about fanfiction here--which I'm not dogging in anyway since I am completely addicted to Harry Potter fanfic--but rather novels being serialized online and then perhaps being published in book format later.

The first came through an email I got from the publisher, Simon & Schuster, yesterday. Loser Queen is a serialized online novel by Jodi Lynn Anderson that gives readers a voice. The story revolves around Cammy, an outsider who is receiving text messages with the most popular teens' embarrassing secrets. Can Cammy use the information to become the Queen Bee? After a part is published online, the readers can vote on the progress of the story and then voila! it may be in the next segment! At the end of the story, Simon & Schuster will be publishing the novel in paperback format. I just think that it's a great way to involve readers in the creative process.

I was working on ordering books and I read a review about a book that was serialized through cell phone texts. Have you heard about www.textnovel.com? Cell phone novels have been around for awhile in Japan, but here in the U.S. it seems to just be coming around. After reading the review (which I decided not to buy), I was curious to look into the website. Here's what the website has to say about what they are:

"Textnovel is a community of authors and readers using the Internet, cellphones, emails and text messaging to experience a new way to create, read and share fiction and other stories."

I think it has a great potential to reading online. I know that I want to read some of the stories that I saw there! I just wanted to share this information about online reading with you all since I know that I do a vast majority of my reading online there must be others like me out there!