Today is the 200th birthday of author Charles Dickens, yet also an oddly appropriate moment to announce a new edition of my book Accidental Empires in a very 21st century format.

Late last year a reader pointed out to me that 2012 is the 20th anniversary of Accidental Empires which was, in its own way, a pretty influential book. Accidental Empires was my attempt to blatantly apply the breezy style of Adam Smith’s The Money Game to the personal computer industry. And somehow it worked, because the book was eventually published in 18 languages and was a bestseller in several countries including the U.S. and Japan.

The book was also the basis for my 1996 TV miniseries Triumph of the Nerds, which has aired in more than 60 countries.

My reader wondered why there wasn’t an eBook edition?  Good question. The printed book technically remains in print, yet there is no eBook.

Well it turns out that eBooks had yet to be invented in 1989 when I signed the original contract with publisher Addison-Wesley, and there were no sharp-eyed lawyers working that day to claim all rights on all platforms, invented or yet to be invented.  So the eBook rights are mine.

Now here‘s my dilemma. I could rip up a pristine copy of the “updated” 1996 paperback edition, run that through my Fujitsu SnapScan scanner, and have the bones of an eBook edition almost instantly. Or I could spend a year or more to update the book for today’s readers, adding pictures (the original book had none) and some new chapters.

We’re not talking about a work of art here, but this is a book that some people feel pretty strongly about.  Dozens of company founders have told me over the years that they read it more than once on their way to the top (and sometimes back again). Hundreds of people have told me the book inspired them to find careers in technology or they used it to explain to their clueless loved ones what all the fuss was about. I could mess with the original text, sure, but doing so would surely upset someone.

And then it came to me — a whole new way to publish a new edition of Accidental Empires or any older but still popular book for that matter.  In an eBook edition I could add new material yet give readers the option to read the original text as published back in the 90’s or an updated text for today or even toggle back and forth.

But wait, there’s more!

Here’s where Charles Dickens enters the picture.  When his stories first appeared back in the 19th century, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Oliver Twist weren’t sold in bookshops, they were serialized in newspapers, unfolding one chapter at a time over weeks or months. The books came later.

I’ll do a 21st century version of the same thing, serializing Accidental Empires on the web.

So next month I’ll be starting a second blog with its own URL just for Accidental Empires.  I, Cringely will continue right here as ever (no changes at all), but on the book blog I will over several months publish — a chapter or so at a time — the entire 100,000-word book for the world to read, free of charge.

Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use in part to update the work when it later appears in eBook form.  What happened to these people?  What stories do you remember? Where did it go from here? 

Once the entire book has been serialized, my friend and eBook expert Parampreet Singh (he of the Toronto Singhs, of course) and I will pick the best of these reader annotations along with several thousand words of new material I’ve been saving-up and publish what ought to be an enormous number of electrons — Accidental Empires Rebooted.

This will be, as usual, both a grand adventure and a crap shoot. To minimize our financial risk I’ll run ads on the new blog. But to avoid pitching adult diapers and electrolyte replacements alongside my life’s work I’d rather sell out the entire blog to a single tech advertiser like a Cisco or a Salesforce.com.

If you know any outfit that might like to participate in what should be an amazing publishing adventure, please pass it on.

Newspapers are folding, magazines are fading, ad pages are down and angst is up in the serial publishing business as it struggles through a global technological transition and may not survive.  But what will be our next New York Times, our new Field & Stream, our improved Playboy?  That’s what the big guns of publishing are fighting about with their Kindles and iPads.  But I think they may have it all wrong and my friend Anina, the fashion model/girl geek may have it all right.

Anina has reinvented the magazine for your mobile phone.

Isn’t that what Apple is doing with the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch?

Not even close.

Anina, whom you may remember from her 2006 interview on NerdTV, has come up with a clever way to put magazines in your existing mobile phone. Her Mobile Magazines can be read on 2000 different mobile phone models.  If it has a color screen, your phone — however cheap it was to buy — can be an eReader.

Selling into an existing hardware base gives Mobile Magazines a huge advantage over fancy competitors like Apple or an Amazon.  Those companies have to first get people to buy their new hardware platform for hundreds of dollars before they can even hope to sell content for that platform, while Anina is sending content — color magazines with multiple pages, embedded links, and even e-commerce built-in — to the phone you already own.  And it doesn’t even have to be a smart phone, which is good, because 94 percent of mobile phones in use aren’t smart phones.

Mobile Magazines are the 94 percent solution, ready to go and ready to scale right now.

Apple, Amazon and Sony are playing catch-up to Anina but don’t yet know it.

If your web site or blog has an RSS feed, you can use it to automagically make a Mobile Magazine.  I made one for this blog in less than 10 minutes and it will keep publishing for free until I turn it off.  Adding more pages and active links costs some money but not much.  You can read my magazine on most any phone that can receive (not even send) SMS text messages.

You can read a Mobile Magazine where you don’t even have mobile phone service, like in a tunnel or on a plane!

If you have an iPhone  you can mount your magazine right on the desktop with your other apps, completely bypassing both iTunes and the App Store.

Use your phone to read the Mobile Magazine version of this column: http://mobilemags.360fashion.net/10703.

Or (again with your mobile) just click here:

Picky readers will say, “The screen is tiny, the content is hobbled, there is nothing to be excited about here.” But remember this same content can be read today on two billion devices throughout the world.

There will never, ever be two billion iPhones.