Evolving Literature

In Chapter Six of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, a newly-developed form of novel in Japan is introduced and called a “cell phone novel.”

These “novels” are described as “strings of text messages” that are then uploaded onto a website called “Mahou no iRando.”  There people can read and comment on them. They seem to be a huge hit in Japan. If publishing companies are impressed, they may even publish the cell phone novels.

However, a popular cell phone novelist called Rin says that “young readers are abandoning traditional novels” because their authors are writing completely complex sentences and are unfamiliar. Are we not interested in the classics because we don’t have the interest to understand them?

There is another type of novel called a “vook.” It is an online book or “e-novel,” as I have recently just figured out, that consists of videos or other multimedia, like audio.  It’s supposed to be more dramatic for the readers.

There have been many innovations in online reading than just scanning the pages onto pdf files and having a digital version of it.  I was wondering if in the future there would be even more revolutionary ways that books would advance into. There are already text messages that are collected to become publishable books and the theatrical e-novels, as well as the online news that has already been around. What other ways could literature and the arts in general evolve though the internet, and could it change our way of thinking about it in doing so?