gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I’m a big fan of Marieke (rhymes with “freak”) Hardy.

She’s smart, clever, and intelligent. Here’s a picture of her with her boobs sticking out.

She’s also way bookish, and writerly, and novelish. Here’s a picture of her with an anti-computer.

She’s just written “Australia’s first m-book”, which means one of two things: The Age is still using its usual standards of research, or none of the other m-books written in this country count.

An “m-book”, BTW, is a serialised short story that you squint at on your mobile phone.

In the real world, an m-book is sent via SMS, at 140 characters an ejaculation. In the world of Marieke Hardy’s m-book, it is sent to your web-enabled smartphone 340 words at a time.

For the privilege of being covered by that ejaculate, you pay 55 cents a (working)day for four weeks, totalling eleven dollars australian for a seven thousand word short story (coincidentally [?] the traditional length of a “New Yorker” style short, as pioneered by Dorothy Parker back in the 20s).

It occurs to me that someone with a web-enabled smartphone could probably also just point their browser at a website that was dealing out such ejaculations into an RSS feed, set up to release once a day.

I could do that, and i could do it for free.

I’m not saying that Marieke is a SELL-OUT, cos she’s so deep inside the text industry already that she sold out long ago. No, that’s not what i’m concerned about here. Nor am i concerned about the much-advertised Death of Books™.

No.

What i’m concerned about is nothing, really. I just find it interesting that the business model for the m-book seems to be based on the same business model that allows you to subscribe to bikini-girl wallpapers, as advertised on the back of certain magazines.

You know: scams.

It occurs to me that anyone with an iPhone or any similar smartphone could download a free e-book for, well, free, and read that instead.

So why wouldn’t they?

For the same reason that people pay to have bikini-girl wallpapers sent to their phone? Because they’re technologically inept and don’t know how to transfer freely downloaded bikini-girl wallpapers onto their phones?

…or no-bikini-girls-who’ve-just-been-fucked-by-Zeus-in-the-form-of-a-swan wallpapers, for that matter.

Curious.

Just for fun, i might write a seven thousand word short story and set it up on a WordPress blog to spurt out one 340 word episode a day, for free. Just to see what happens.

Probably nothing.

I’ll make it about something that’s sure to “sell” (sex), and i’ll tie in some new technologies. You know, like the telephone.

Should be a hit.

Yours eptly,
Gullybogan