A new mobile service aims to battle declining literacy by letting people read books on their mobiles. It’s called ICUE, and it’s promising thousands of books to download to handsets, with an innovative way of displaying them which involves flashing words one at a time on the screen. That means you don’t have to keep scrolling down. Books both old and new are included in the service – a quick browse of the Classics section reveals Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – with books costing £1.50 or £4.50 to download.
ICUE: read books on your mobile phone
Monday, November 13, 2006 4 Comments
I have to say that sounds like a gruesome idea! Like something out of Clockwork Orange.
Maybe scrolling the text could have worked, but I don’t want to read a flick book!
I agree with JohnB, that just sounds weird to me.
hahaha bitches
I was intrigued because I saw Dave Gorman’s new book about his USA trip advertised on Charing Cross station. The poster mentioned a free chapter download.
I went for it and found that with the iCue software, the first chapter was impossible to read.
I use a Nokia N78 phone. It’s fairly new but even when trying to scroll a page of text in this icue ‘book’ the words jump all over the place.
As a result I found this software impossible to use and Dave Gorman missed out on a potential customer.