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Get Thousands of Short Stories With 'Colossal' iPhone App

by Caleb Johnson on December 9, 2009 at 06:00 PM

We will be the first to admit that reading on the iPhone isn't the most pleasant experience in the world. In theory, it's amazing to be able to carry your favorite book on your cell phone -- an ability that products like the 'Classics' iPhone app offers to users. But when the device displays a mere 50 to 75 words at a time (translating to hundreds of screens of text), reading a novel becomes tedious instead of fun.

But we're happy to say there's a compromise, folks: that oft-forgotten form called the short story. The 'Colossal Short Stories Collection,' a new app currently under review by Apple, features more than 2,000 works of short fiction and gives users all the joys of mobile reading without feeling that their eyes might fall out of their sockets. According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), a story averages about 30 screens in length, and it takes between 15 and 20 minutes to read one. That's much more manageable. A page-up/page-down button lets readers breeze through text, but there's also an auto-scrolling option that lets you set the scrolling speed, essentially working like a teleprompter. As you'd expect, the list of authors is long and varied, with stories from Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and more.

We aren't making plans to throw away those worn and creased copies of our favorite books, but at a special initial price of just $0.99, this app seems like the perfect addition to our digital library. [From: The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

Tags: apple, application, appstore, books, cellphone, hgg, iphone, literature, reading, short stories, ShortStories, top

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