Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Serialized Dickens (made two ways)

I learned in high school English that Charles Dickens' novels were published in weekly installments and I bemoaned the fact that he was paid by the word. Russ Beattie has brought this idea to the current day. His Mobdex site was originally created to distribute smaller chunks of novels to cell phones and other low-bandwidth mobile devices. More recently he has adapted this for RSS distribution. You can add a feed from a novel to your aggregator and get a new little bit every day. In addition to Dickens, Mobdex has many more authors and titles.

Take a look at the Discovering Dickens project at Stanford University for a different take on serialized Dickens. They are distributing reproductions of Dickens' Hard Times as it was originally published. You can download PDF files or you can actually have paper copies mailed to you. The site also has the PDFs for their past novels (A Tale of Two Cities (2004) and Great Expectations (2003)).

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