With Rooster, readers pay $5 per month in exchange for a stream of bite-sized chunks of fiction. Each chunk takes just 15 minutes or so to read, and over the course of a month, they add up to two books. The service builds on the success of Plympton’s Daily Lit, which emails you classic literature in five-minute installments.Which is a model that somehow appeals to me. I'm on the cusp when it comes to ebook ownership; I'm far from a digital native, as my groaning bookshelves at home will testify. I haven't got a tablet, and only have a barely functioning smartphone, but I have a Kindle and download stuff when I get the whim. I've read books on my old phone, and found it the perfect way to kill time on the bus or even in a lift.
The system sounds very like the ill-fated BoxFiction, which a few years ago had the idea of presenting tv shows as episodic ebook chapters, paid for on subscription. They had titles such as Silent Witness and you kept up with the story in bite-sized chunks.
I'd be interested, as a writer, in developing a long-form story that publishes as a periodical, and hope that it would harken back to Dickens's era, when crowds would wait eagerly for the next installment. It's an interesting development for the novel, or fiction in general, and I'll be waiting to see how it takes off.
What do you make of it? Let me know in the comments or on the twitters.
image: Michael Mol http://www.flickr.com/photos/28208534@N07/ under CC
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