The Easiest Way To Read Serialized Fiction On An iPhone Or Other Web Connected Mobile Device

(And What Authors Need To Do For Readers To Take Advantage)

I just came across this nifty tip at LifeHacker for making pretty much any website easy to read on a mobile device with a small screen. Basic idea: use Google Reader to automatically resize and display the text of your favorite sites on your iPhone or smartphone.

And then I got to thinking… For those of you who, like me, enjoy the convenience of reading fiction on a mobile device--especially serialized fiction--this little hack makes life a whole lot easier. Why?

Two words: No syncing.

photo by Josh Bancroft

Coincidentally, I was fooling around with a friend's iPhone last night, seeing how the text of my serialized novel, THE VEINGEL, displayed in the phone's Safari web browser. Verdict: pretty damn good, thanks to the iPhone's ability to zoom and scroll around the page using finger gestures on its slick little touch screen.

But as anyone who's had the displeasure of using the Pocket PC version of Internet Explorer can attest, most websites look horrid on a portable device, and even the CSS-driven layout of THE VEINGEL left something to be desired on the PDA I use to read e-books.

Of course, there are plenty of e-book reading formats, like mobipocket's .prc files, and the microsoft reader format, (among others), that make e-books look great on handhelds. But the catch is, you usually have to download the e-book to your computer first, and then sync it to your device before you can read it. That's not so bad for regular e-books, but for serialized fiction, the repeated overhead of this extra step gets to be a real pain in the ass.

If, however, authors create hypertext versions of their installments, then there's no need to sync an iPhone or Treo or Nokia N95 to a desktop in order to download the next chapter. Readers can simply access it in their smart phone's web browser from anywhere they have access to the network. Better yet, they can subscribe to the RSS feed for the book, and read the automatically formatted prose in Google Reader as suggested in the hack above.

Attention Writers

You are creating HTML web page versions of your serialized fiction, right? And you do syndicate your work with an RSS feed, don't you?

Many authors think that posting a PDF or a mobipocket file is good enough, but I disagree. As wireless broadband becomes pervasive, and more readers start taking advantage of their web-connected cell phones to enjoy fiction and other digital entertainment, there's just no need to remain dependent on their computers to access content. Whatever the failings of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, this is something it gets right: wireless access to books--no computer required.

By posting your work in HTML on a web page, and providing an RSS feed for readers to subscribe to, you make your story available on any device with a web browser, and you save your readers the time and hassle of having to check for new installments, because the new installments are automatically delivered to their feed reader in a small-screen-friendly format. 

Hmm… No Kindle required. No computer required. No syncing necessary...

See the potential?