Mobile Entertainment

If they were to re-make the ad for the 21st century, I fear it would lack a little romance. The new version would feature Hartley typing his own name into a search engine and downloading the text instantly to his mobile book reader. No phone calls, no dusty old second hand shops, no dialogue. And probably no awards.

A few weeks back Amazon launched its Kindle e-book reader and, although the device is ugly and has not been that well-received, it sold out on day one. The Kindle costs $399 and holds over 200 titles. New books and magazines can be downloaded to it over the air using Amazon’s Whispernet network, which uses the EV-DO network. Over 80,000 titles are available for around $9.99 and the beginning of a book can be downloaded for free.

It’s not the first attempt to make books electronic. In the UK a start-up called ICUE has struck many deals with publishers to make books available to mobile phones. They can be read in four ways, the strangest being as single words that flash up in quick succession.

ICUE has hardly set the world alight, although it’s early days. And the company is probably looking east to Japan (of course), where mobile novels – called ‘keitai shousetsu’ – are incredibly popular. One of the best selling of these, Moshimo Kimiga, was even written on a phone.

So will books be the next product to be cannibalised by mobile (after alarm clocks, watches, cameras…)? I’m not convinced. Yes, mobile can shrink 200 books to the size of a cigarette packet. But in so doing it introduces DRM to the book business for the first time in 557 years. JR Hartley may well be delighted with his cherished book about Fly Fishing. But God help him if he were to ‘sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party’.