I shoulda linked to this a long times ago...
Will there be iPhone novels? Joanna at the TomorrowMuseum wonders.
Specifically, she's wondering about how the social technology impact of technology can be incorporated into the narrative and social relations of the novel. Just as important for me though, is that I've found in Joanna a fellow believer in the increased salience of the novel, more or less as we understand it now, long into the future. Sez she: "I’m optimistic that the generation growing up with mobile Internet is going to demand novels, and have a hunger for that linear, patient escape that only a good book provides."
In other words, we wish to take as given not only that the mobile internet could provide the means to read novels (various devices), the means to talk about and share them (various social media tools), and instead [merely] think about how it becomes part of the texture of the novel, like the letter and the phone call have.
And we notably don't assume that the novel becomes a video game. Why should it? They video game already exists—it doesn't need the novel.