New Ways Of Telling Tales.(The Technologist)(We Tell Stories, Six to Start)

Byline: Barrett Sheridan

The experiment may uncover something about the way we'll tell stories to one another 10 to 20 years from now.

Google maps can do a lot of things, like find the nearest Starbucks or calculate the driving time to an amusement park. But can it tell a story? Charles Cumming, a British spy novelist, hopes so. His latest project, "The 21 Steps," is a reimagining of a classic pre-World War I espionage thriller by John Buchan called "The 39 Steps." Among the many differences between the two versions, however, is the unignorable fact that "The 21 Steps" is told entirely through Google Maps. There's still plenty of text to read, but the fun is in clicking the colorful pointer bubbles--the same ones that show the nearest Starbucks--that mark each scene, and watching the path traced by the protagonist as he races from London's St. Pancras train station to Heathrow airport and then to Edinburgh. The experience is still much like reading a short story, but the impact of seeing real-world places in their context, and catching the sly changes in pace and scale as the protagonist passes through them, makes it unlike any book you've ever picked up.

Which, of course, is exactly the idea. "The 21 Steps" is part of a larger project by the British branch of Penguin Books, in collaboration with Six to Start, a media company. Dubbed We Tell Stories, the aim isn't to reinvent the novel, but to find new ways to tell stories in the age of Web 2.0. "We wanted to do something you wouldn't have been able to create five or 10 years ago," says Dan Hon, a cofounder of Six to Start. "This is about seeing what potentials lie in online publishing."

The six-week-long project, which began March 18, debuts a new story every week, each loosely based on a different classic novel and taking a different form. In the second story, for example, Toby Litt's "Slice," the main character uses blog entries and Twitter text messages to convey her discoveries about a haunted house. The third story is a customizable fairy tale. Another titled "Your Place and Mine" was written live, and readers followed the story in real time, as it was being created. In short, each week is a different exercise in imagining the future of storytelling.

So far, the experiment is popular--We Tell Stories received nearly 50,000 unique visitors in its first week, with little marketing push. That's reassuring for Penguin, which has watched in dismay as readers abandon print media. Most publishers have tried to capitalize on the Internet by embracing e-books, digital editions meant to be read on electronic readers like the Amazon Kindle. E-books, however, "are pretty much the same thing as the print book but delivered in a different way," says Jeremy Ettinghausen, the digital publisher for Penguin Books UK, who came up with the idea for We Tell ...