Eli Horowitz, former managing editor and publisher of McSweeney’s, and Russell Quinn, co-founder of the digital studio Spoiled Milk, have set out to explore how we consume literature with a new serialized story app.

The Silent History, promises to be “a comprehensive account of the condition and its consequences, encompassing the years 2011 through 2043.

Buzzfeed explains how it works: “readers download an app and then receive daily doses of fictive oral history (‘Testimonials’) that they can read wherever. This is where the main plot unfolds. But the real innovation comes in the related, secondary piece: the geo-tagged ‘Field Reports’ that can only be downloaded when the reader is standing in a specific place, as shown by the mapping interface on the app. Currently, there are between 300 and 400 Field Reports written for locations around the world, but that will grow as readers add their own stories.”

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So on the face of it, this looks like Perseus could well be PGW’s savior – or is it? Never mind that already the company is responsible for CDS and Consortium clients, and adding the full roster of PGW clients would give it a gigantic stake in independent publishing, with the ramifications and consequences still very much up in the air. Never mind that there’s no word on which of PGW’s clients were included in the conference call, as grumblings have reached GalleyCat‘s ears of “musical chairs”-like prioritization, potentially leaving some struggling independent publishers out in the cold, with little recourse but to shut up shop. In other words, the news sounds good – but optimism is far from guaranteed.

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