Submitted by Mike Grenville on Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:12

A mobile literature channel has been launched in China. The first story is a romance called 'Distance' will be delivered by SMS with versions in MMS, WAP and IVR to follow.

Headquartered in Shanghai, Linktone Ltd has called the new channel “m-Novel”.

The first story is a romantic story titled, “Distance”, written by Xuan Huang, a prominent new-generation novelist from Taiwan. Xuan Huang, a well-known writer, TV and radio host, and flash producer, is the creator of the famous Taiwanese flash character, “A-Kuei”, a grade three student whose stories mirror part of the life of grown-ups. Xuan Huang has also been a columnist for the leisure sections of several print publications in mainland China and Taiwan.

Distance is a winding love story of a young couple that becomes acquainted because of a mis-sent SMS message. As Chinese characters are double-byte, the story only has 70 Chinese characters in each SMS message. The whole story is 1,008 Chinese characters told in 15 chapters with one chapter sent each day.

“Distance” will be initially offered in serial format via Linktone's SMS platform. Linktone expects to expand the story and channel to its other wireless service platforms such as multimedia messaging services (MMS), wireless application protocol (WAP) and interactive voice response (IVR). As well as the mainland China launch, a Taiwan-based wireless service provider is also launching the story.

The company has prepared a series of further stories for the “m-Novel” channel including another serial from Xuan Huang – “Cold Love in Taipei”.

Chief executive officer of Linktone Raymond Yang claimed that “The initial market response has been very encouraging.”

www.linktone.com