Something to read

As promised in another blog post, I'm going to bring you into the loop of what I'm currently up to:
recently I joined a German literature project called Dembelo.


So what is Dembelo?

The concept takes a different view on authors: they are not some genius in their quaint room conjuring up brilliant words, but service providers to their readers.

The idea is to provide episodical stories (text knots) with the length of approximately 20 minutes of reading -- something which shortens the time waiting on the bus or in an anteroom or on a train ride or when nothing is on TV an you don't want to read a whole book. At the end of the text the reader decides how the story should continue; they click on one of eight choices to keep on reading for another 20 minutes, and another, and another... if they so wish.

The readers fund the text knots they want to read via micro purchases and see their wishes come true as soon as the worth of another text knot is reached. Theoretically like this an endlessly deep-rooted tree of stories is created as more and more episodes are created and the possibilities branch further and further; the contents of these episodes are supposed to reflect the readers' demands. So everyone can read what they want to read instead of paging through something that doesn't interest them.

Any excess profit is invested in new jobs to support the author teams working on the stories. We believe in social growth rather than profit. The system also considers that authors are creative, so coworkers are paid according to their efforts instead of fixed working hours.


Isn't this exciting and new? Doesn't that sound like something you might want to see?
If you like the idea you can support us on Patreon so we can make it happen (the page is in German though).