The Revolution Will Be Delivered in Bite-Sized Text Messages...

A couple of digital book news items have caught my attention lately. The first one is the article I read about an 86 year old buddhist monk in Japan writing a mobile phone novel and the second is the announcement by Daily Lit that Oxford Press is to begin serializing some of their more popular books for the service.

These announcements to me seem to signal a broader more popular acceptance of new forms of delivery and creation of literature.

Google Does Widgets

Google has announced a new Google Book Search browsable widget (and some other tools) and in the same announcement they have announced partnerships with retailers that already are using the widget live on their sitesa diverse group of retailers like Books-A-Million, Blackwell Bookshop, The Book Depository in the UK, A1Books in India, Librería Norma in Colombia, Van Stockum in the Netherlands, and Livraria Cultura in Brazil. And Google has aspirations to add this functionality to even more booksellers in the coming weeks including Borders.com, Buy.com, and Powell’s Books.