Colossal Stories
Colossal Short Stories Collection is a unique colossal library in one single app, getting together over 2222 short stories from almost 200 of the greatest literary classics ever.
✪ There is no mistake: Not 1, not 100, not 500 but over 2222 (two thousand two hundred twenty-two) great short stories from the most famous classics authors. ✪
You will never need to buy another short story book – ‘Colossal Short Stories Collection’ only includes selected best authors and stories, so there is always a great short story waiting for you to discover!
CNET: “All the greats are here, along with plenty of authors known mostly in scholarly circles… It’s a no-brainer for anyone who likes to read… Might just be the e-book bargain of the century.” [Read Review]
TUAW: “The vastness of the collection assures that you’ll always find something that you want to read… The interface is different from any other eBook… Clear and simple… Fun to check out some little known stories from well known authors.” [Read Review]
Switched.com : “at a special initial price of just $0.99, this app seems like the perfect addition to our digital library” [Read Review]
Short stories are the perfect literature to digest on the go, “byte-sized” for a quick 10 to 15 minutes evasion in the realm of the extraordinary.
Ideal for the book worm and the occasional reader alike – out of the over 2222 short stories, for every taste and mood there are hundreds waiting – tens of thousands of pages of adventure, suspense, horror, crime or romance.
This colossal anthology comes with batteries included: all stories are already in the app, so you won’t need any further Internet connection for extra downloads!
✓ ✪ Think about it! A collection of this magnitude would cost, in any library, hundreds of dollars and would fill entire bookshelves, weighting tens of pounds. But ‘Colossal Collection’ has great value for price costing just a fraction, and you can take it always with you on your iPhone or iPod Touch. And it takes less than 62 Megabytes of space on your iPod/iPhone, that’s less than than 1% for the 8GB version and less than 0.25% for the 32GB version! ✪
The software powering this unprecedented achievement is powerful, ergonomic and intuitive, with just the right set of features for mobile ebook reading. Designed to use the similar UI elements and intuitive scroll that power the iPhone’s Safari browser.
FEATURES:
✓ all content included, no online connection necessary; ideal for iPod Touch or iPhones with limited data plans
✓ perfect for the commuter and occasional reader; short stories content – bite-sized literature for quick 10 to 15 minutes evasion in the realm of the extraordinary
✓ the vastness of the preselected content helps the reader to discover great classics which they didn’t know before
✓ ergonomic, intuitive user interface specially designed for managing, browsing, bookmarking and effortlessly reading this huge collection
✓ elegant typography, classy look and feel
✓ continuous scroll (not page based), the BEST for reading on small screens; buttons for page up/page down scrolling
✓ auto scrolling (teleprompter like) with adjustable speed from the settings
✓ bookmarks and bookmark management page, auto-bookmark to last opened story
✓ intuitive grouping of the content – short stories are grouped by authors, which are grouped by their initial
✓ future updates will add hundreds more of classic short stories according to the reader’s suggestions, turning this app into a collaborative crowd-sourced project.
Including short stories by: H. C. Andersen, Balzac, James Barrie, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Chekhov, Daniel Defoe, Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gogol, Gorky, Thomas Hardy, Washington Irving, Jerome K. Jerome, Joyce, Kipling, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, Guy de Maupassant, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleksandr S. Pushkin, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells , Oscar Wilde… and hundreds others!
[NOW available on the AppStore for your iPhone / iPod Touch]
Get Colossal Short Stories Collection NOW on iTunes App Store
22 Comments to “Colossal Stories”
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[...] The Colossal Short Story Collection app, currently under Apple review, solved my problem almost entirely. Contained in the app are over 2222 short stories, all in the public domain, that can be read in 15-20 minutes each. The vastness of the collection assures that you’ll always find something that you want to read by authors ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to W.B. Yeats. An average story is around 30 screens. If light entertaining/distracting games can be referred to as casual gaming, this would be an app for casual reading. [...]
[...] The Colossal Short Story Collection app, currently under Apple review, solved my problem almost entirely. Contained in the app are over 2222 short stories, all in the public domain, that can be read in 15-20 minutes each. The vastness of the collection assures that you’ll always find something that you want to read by authors ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to W.B. Yeats. An average story is around 30 screens. If light entertaining/distracting games can be referred to as casual gaming, this would be an app for casual reading. [...]
[...] it just doesn’t feel right to me. Your personal preferences may vary, of course. The Colossal Short Story Collection app, currently under Apple review, solved my problem almost entirely. Contained in the app are over [...]
[...] The Colossal Short Story Collection app, currently under Apple review, solved my problem almost entirely. Contained in the app are over 2222 short stories, all in the public domain, that can be read in 15-20 minutes each. The vastness of the collection assures that you’ll always find something that you want to read by authors ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to W.B. Yeats. An average story is around 30 screens. If light entertaining/distracting games can be referred to as casual gaming, this would be an app for casual reading. [...]
[...] The Colossal Short Story Collection app, currently under Apple review, solved my problem almost entirely. Contained in the app are over 2222 short stories, all in the public domain, that can be read in 15-20 minutes each. The vastness of the collection assures that you’ll always find something that you want to read by authors ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to W.B. Yeats. An average story is around 30 screens. If light entertaining/distracting games can be referred to as casual gaming, this would be an app for casual reading. [...]
[...] The Colossal Short Story Collection app, currently under Apple review, solved my problem almost entirely. Contained in the app are over 2222 short stories, all in the public domain, that can be read in 15-20 minutes each. The vastness of the collection assures that you’ll always find something that you want to read by authors ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to W.B. Yeats. An average story is around 30 screens. If light entertaining/distracting games can be referred to as casual gaming, this would be an app for casual reading. [...]
[...] The Colossal Short Story Collection app, currently under Apple review, solved my problem almost entirely. Contained in the app are over 2222 short stories, all in the public domain, that can be read in 15-20 minutes each. The vastness of the collection assures that you’ll always find something that you want to read by authors ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to W.B. Yeats. An average story is around 30 screens. If light entertaining/distracting games can be referred to as casual gaming, this would be an app for casual reading. [...]
[...] The Colossal Short Story Collection app, currently under Apple review, solved my problem almost entirely. Contained in the app are over 2222 short stories, all in the public domain, that can be read in 15-20 minutes each. The vastness of the collection assures that you’ll always find something that you want to read by authors ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to W.B. Yeats. An average story is around 30 screens. If light entertaining/distracting games can be referred to as casual gaming, this would be an app for casual reading. [...]
This app delivers exactly what it promises: 2222 short stories. The biggest thing missing, however, is the ability to sort stories by title or genre; they’re only presented by author. This is great if my goal is to read something by (for example) Ethel M. Dell or Richard Harding Davis, but if I don’t know who they are and I just want to find some science fiction stories – or if I want to browse the titles of all the stories and look for something to catch my eye – then I’m out of luck. This is a big shortcoming in an otherwise fine app.
How much memory is required? I have an 8Gb iPhone and wonder how much space this app requires…
@Mark – the download is 23MB and once downloaded it expands to around 62MB, that’s about as much as 10 mp3 files on your iPhone. Less than 1% from the iPhone size
[...] find the short story is a better format for the iPhone than novels, and that’s why Colossal Short Stories Collection ($0.99, iTunes link) is such a solid app to have on your iPhone. It includes over 2,200 short [...]
Hi – I have downloaded Colossal SSC on my iPod Touch and again from the iTunes Store, but it will not open a story – crashes back to my icon page. Shows that I have 5.79 GB free. I would like to have your app to read but am getting discouraged. I have never had another app not work on this iPod Touch and have lots, including NY Times, Stanza, Eucalyptus. Any suggestions on what could be wrong? Thanks.
You should try restarting the iPod Touch completely(turn it off by pressing the lock button for a long time and pulling the red slider, then back on afterwards by pressing the lock button again).
Crashes like this happen from time to time with all apps(because of internal memory corruption), if the device hasn’t been restarted for a long time.
If this doesn’t work, one other explanation might be with the operating system on your device. Are you using the latest OS? (3.1?)
Hi Alex, Thanks very much for your quick reply to my problem. The restart of my iPod Touch did not solve the problem, but upgrading to the 3.1 OS did. Cost $4.95 which is justified by allowing your short story app to function properly. I am looking forward to reading some fine stories with your autoscroll. After I have used it some, I’ll leave you a strongly + review at the iTunes App Store.
Thanks again.
Hi, glad to hear the upgrade fixed the problem. Still, sorry for the inconvenience.
As time goes by, most newer apps and app updates will only be compatible with OS 3.0 and above, so it’s always a good move to update.
The good thing about upgrading to 3.1 OS is that it makes a whole range of newer apps compatible with your device, plus it fixes a lot of system bugs and issues.
Best regards
A request from a prospective buyer: maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I strongly prefer reading page-by-page as in Stanza or Eucalyptus. If you can add that feature, and also hide the bars at the top and bottom while reading (not just in autoscroll), I’d probably buy it. As it is, scrolling (auto or no) is unpleasant for extensive reading, and the page up/down buttons are difficult to reach and obscure much of the screen. Cool app though — a great collection of stories, and it’s a real service to present them like this — even if they’re free on Gutenberg, it can be almost impossible to find, say, a specific Chekhov story if you’re hunting for it.
Thanks for the nice words, I appreciate them.
As for the page-by-page suggestion, I’m sorry but this is a matter of opinion. Like you said, if you enjoy page-by-page reading, there are countless ebook readers that do just that. Me, on the other hand, do enjoy continuous scroll and reading in autoscroll mode, and hate that other ebook readers don’t have it. So it’s a matter of opinionated software, and I think autoscrolling is an acquired taste – you just have to try it a bit before you enjoy it.
For only $0.99, I think you would be safe to try this – the minor (and I think temporary) inconvenient you complain about will surely be compensated by the vastness and interestingness of the stories. Best case, you’ll get the hang of autoscrol reading and you’ll start liking the app. Worst case, you read a few cool Chekhov stories, maybe some Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy as well.
I didn’t mean to suggest that the scroll should be replaced with the page turning –I know it’s just a matter of preference — just that I myself would like the addition of a page turning option. It’s probably harder to program, admittedly. Maybe a compromise: hide the top and bottom bars while reading and make tapping some area of the screen jump-scroll a page down, as the down-arrow now does — that should be simpler. Funny how these little interface elements make a big difference in the reading experience, though I can see that a programmer might be frustrated with the fickleness of his audience.
Point taken, and the suggestion is welcome. I will work on an update to add two preference settings, to hide the two bars on request.
However, just so you know, in the current (latest) version of Colossal, the bottom bar is semitransparent, obscuring the screen a bit less. I do understand that even so it is eating up valuable screen estate.
Thanks for your suggestions
I click Colossal iCon & get author then
click story & it returns to iCon. No story
appears.Can anyone help?
Hi William,
Thanks for the bug report.
I found out about this issue (which only happens on older OSes – 2.x) a few days ago and have already submitted a patch update to Apple. It’s currently under review by Apple’s team and it will take a few days until it gets live.
Sorry about this,
Alex