November 19, 2004
An SMS Romance in 1008 Chinese Characters
Following the release of Chinese cell phone novel "Out of the Fortress" in September, a mobile literature channel has now launched. The first story is a romance called 'Distance' which will be delivered by SMS, reports Mike Grenville for 160characters.org.
"Headquartered in Shanghai, Linktone Ltd has called the new channel m-Novel”.
The first story is a romantic story titled, “Distance”, written by Xuan Huang, a prominent new-generation novelist from Taiwan.
"Distance" is a winding love story of a young couple that becomes acquainted because of a mis-sent SMS message. As Chinese characters are double-byte, the story only has 70 Chinese characters in each SMS message. The whole story is 1,008 Chinese characters told in 15 chapters with one chapter sent each day.
The company has prepared a series of further stories for the “m-Novel” channel including another serial from Xuan Huang – “Cold Love in Taipei”.
Chief executive officer of Linktone Raymond Yang claimed that “The initial market response has been very encouraging.”
Related Related articles on cell phone novels:
-- India's first SMS novel - Following Japan and China, India has launched it's first SMS novel in English, called Cloak Room
-- Novels delivered to your phone - Nowadays the sight of people passing time on the train by sending e-mail with their mobile phones is an everyday occurrence in Japan
-- China cell phone novel launched on Friday - The first installment of "Out of the Fortress", a story of forbidden love writtenby Chinese author Qian Fuchang, showed up on tens of thousands of mobile telephone screens on Friday, September 12, 2004, according to The New York Times via China Digital News.
-- Rushkoff to write SMS novel - "Unlike the ones I've seen so far, however, I want it to be native to the wireless space. If it's text and text/image messages that will serve as the medium of transmission, then they should be messages from the organic world of the book. An epistolary, if you will, in SMS. (also Copyright for cell phone novel has been sold and Beijing's first SMS novel to be made into film)
-- First bilingual short story book written in SMS-shorthand - Phil Marso, author and Independent Editor of Megacomik publishing, has recently launched the first bilingual SMS title called «Frayeurs SMS» («SMS Frights»), a collection of 6 short stories which appear in French on the left hand side of the book and in English on the right hand pages.
-- Coming to a cellphone near you: A novel - «Outside The Fortress Besieged», the story of an extramarital affair, written by Chinese author Qian Fuchang, is a novel meant to be read in 70-word chapters transmitted by text message.
-- Mobile fiction micropublishing - Japanes author Joshi, who has been sending installments of his best selling novel, «Deep Love», by text messaging has been very successful. News of the novel spread by word of mouth, and within three years the site had received a total of 20 million hits".
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