I just came across this site http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/, more experimentation by Penguin in the world of Web 2.0. Penguin already impress with their online ventures, with Web sites such as amillionpenguins.com (a Wiki novel), Spine Breakers (a community around books for teens) and Blog a Penguin Classic (blogging and user-reviews for Classic books).

In We Tell Stories, there are six stories being added over the course of six weeks. They have a different theme for each week’s story;

• Week 1 (The 21 Steps) is a Google Mash-up story, which is a really cool idea and works really well. Unfortunately (in my opinion) the story is poorly written and too obvious. I didn’t read the whole thing, maybe it improves?!
  
• Week 2 (Slice) is a story told through blogs and Twitter
  
• Week 3 (Fairy Tales) is like a Choose Your Own Adventure, or a personalised book. Not particularly exciting in my opinion.
  
• Week 4 (Your Place or Mine) is a story written in real-time, which is interesting.
  
• Weeks 5 & 6 are yet to be released.

Apparently there are elements of an Alternate Reality Game too, but it’s not clear to me exactly how this fits with the site, further exploration is needed.

With many of these initiatives, in particular We Tell Stories, it raises the question of whether people are willing to read books online (or on-screen). Maybe not just yet, but once e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle support proper Web-browsing (and high speed Internet) e-novels will be set to take off.

Tim O'Neill, Managing Director UK

Labels: Design and Usability, Web Culture and Trends, Web marketing