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Great news for fans of short fiction: The Colossal Short Stories Collection just landed in the App Store packing a whopping 2,222 public-domain works.
There are, of course, other story collections available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but this is by far the largest one.
You’ll find authors ranging from H.G. Wells and Mark Twain to Leo Tolstoy and Ring Lardner. All the greats are here, along with plenty of authors known mostly in scholarly circles.
The app lists them alphabetically by last name. Unfortunately, that’s the only way to peruse the collection: you can’t browse by story title, and there’s no search option.
On the plus side, Colossal offers a font-size slider, automatic bookmarking (meaning it returns you to where you left off in any given story), manual bookmarking (for easy revisiting of a selected page or story), and a variable-speed auto-scrolling option.
If you’ve balked at the idea of reading books on your phone, perhaps because you think the screen is too small or there’s too much page flipping involved, this might be a great way to start.
The average story in the Colossal collection takes 10-15 minutes to read, so it’s like you get to test-drive e-books without committing to (or paying for) an entire novel.
The app has an introductory price of just 99 cents, meaning it’s a no-brainer for anyone who likes to read. Even after it jumps to its permanent price of $4.99, it might just be the e-book bargain of the century.
