For those not familiar with Hooked, in 2015 TechCrunch presented a summary:
So with Hooked, [founders Parag Chordia and Prerna Gupta are] commissioning short stories that take the form of text message conversations. Instead of turning pages, you tap the screen to bring on the next message. The app offers a limited number of free stories but charges a subscription fee (starting at $2.99 per week) for unlimited access.
Chordia suggested that this presents a couple of advantages over a standard book or e-book. For one thing, readers aren’t faced with “this block of text that just doesn’t have that natural feel on your phone that a casual game does.” It could also make it easier for readers to consume the story in small bites, say when they’re waiting in line or riding the subway.
At the same time, the stories are supposed to keep you, well, hooked. I read one of them, “Unknown,” and while I don’t think it was a great piece of literature, I have to admit that the mystery grabbed me — I kept hitting the “Next” button until I reached the end.
“Every line has to either advance the story or advance the relationships,” Chordia said. “Every message is a cliffhanger.”
Katherine Martinko wonders about Hooked:
For anyone accustomed to reading full-length books and not communicating constantly over text message, the format can seem very strange indeed. The plot development is limited to exchanges going back and forth between characters, sort of like a play, except the characters can never be in same place, otherwise they wouldn’t be texting. It does not allow for character development, complex imagery, or descriptive language. …
While I think it’s important to get teens interested in reading, I worry that spoon-feeding them over-simplified, thrilling fiction is not a good long-term solution to the problem. Books are a bit like food; it’s entirely possible to overindulge in ‘junk’ literature that immediately gratifies, but has little lasting value — whether it’s a complex story to mull over afterwards or important emotional lessons to take away from it. After all, much of fiction’s worth lies in character development and the empathetic bond created with readers over the course of a novel. To take that out of the equation entirely seems tragic.
Philosophizing about the social effects of such an app, however, does not change the data, which is every app developer’s primary focus. Gupta, clearly, is on to something pretty spectacular, when you consider that Hooked has recently become the top grossing book app for iOS in the United States and is now competing with Amazon’s Kindle and Audible apps to be the number one free book app in the U.S. Apple store, too. It’s impressive.
I think that context matters, and here the context of an SMS conversation provides information to the reader that may never actually need to be described: each character has a device capable of SMS, they are probably in a certain age range, certain things will never be known for certain – but inferred with a certain probability. I’m sure there’s more down this vein.
But another important aspect is that endemic to, in my view, all story-telling – it’s a teaching tool. Not in the overt sense, mind you, but in the very act of SMS, by learning the by-ways of an important communications tool of today. How can SMS be used to fool you? When someone uses this sentence structure, and later that happens, maybe this is something that can deployed in real life.
Just as in novels.
I haven’t seen Hooked in action, but it sounds interesting – and, for an author, like an intellectual challenge. Apparently, much like traditional publishing, there are gatekeepers – it doesn’t appear to be a free-for-all, and let the readers sort it all out. From Katherine:
There is a staff of 200 writers constantly pitching and creating content for Hooked. Stories are written in four or five segments, each about 1,000 words conveyed through texts. From Quartz:
“The kids can be absolutely brutal,” says Sean Dunne, one of about 200 writers who’s written for Hooked since it launched. His stories include “The Watcher,” whose first episode came out in early October and has 872,000 reads alone at time of writing. “For every story I publish there were 10 ideas shot down, that didn’t get approval.”
