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In an innovative distribution technique by Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd, mobile phone screens will now offer a handy, manageable and anonymous way to read some of the Mills & Boon’s tales of passionate love affairs. "For many people there’s still that embarrassment factor of carrying your Mills & Boon around. When you are using your mobile phone nobody knows what you are doing, whether you are texting a friend or playing a game," Timesonline quoted Alison Byrne, the UK publishing director for its parent company, Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd, as saying. Penguin, Random House and HarperCollins have all signed up with ICUE, a British company offering the capability to transfer books into mobile phone-friendly content. None, however, has pursued the idea with as much dynamism as the company founded in 1908 by Gerald Mills and Charles Boon. "Our Japanese operation has had great success selling our books in mobile-phone format," Ms Byrne said. "Japan is normally 18 months ahead of the UK. They are finding that it’s women who like reading on phones and romantic fiction that’s rising to the top." They are expected to be eight Modern Romance titles and 20 MIRA titles and will be will be available to download next month. Electronic Books (eBooks) have been more accepted in the US than in Britain but demand has been muffled by the lack of an eBook counterpart to the iPod. Jane Tappuni, the co-founder of ICUE, thinks that the solution is obvious. "It’s the ubiquity of the mobile phone that’s going to do it," Jane Tappuni, the co-founder of ICUE said. Books can be read in four ways: as autocue-style text moving from right to left across the screen, a scrollable text block moving up and down, single words flashed up in quick succession, or a full page of text. "Teenagers prefer reading one word at a time, but most adults prefer the horizontal scrolling style," Ms Tappuni said. — ANI
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