Text Messaging the Classics? NokidN.

2b or Nt2b? That is the question some educators may ask of a new service that aims to condense classic literature into text messages—such as Hamlet’s immortal query.

Dot, an English mobile phone company marketed to college students, is sponsoring the service in the United Kingdom and plans to offer the messages to subscribers beginning this month. Downloads of highly condensed versions of entire books will be free and limited to 120 characters—not a small feat considering that the first round of releases includes such weighty works as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

“This is a serious learning aid,” says Lesley Land, a publicist for dot. “We don’t mean for you to throw away your Cliffs Notes, and obviously you need to read the book, but this is meant to help.”

To keep things serious, dot engaged John Sutherland, an English professor at University College London and chairman of last year’s Man Booker prize committee to help translate entire works into a few lines of 21st-century text.

But Pam Holley, president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, wonders if there really is any value to the hyper-abridged texts. “If it would lead the kids to books, that would be wonderful,” she says. “But I keep thinking about the poor people who spent years writing these tomes. In the end, what they’re really teaching kids is how to write a great annotation.”

Case in point? This brief introduction to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “5SistrsWntngHsbnds.NwMenInTwn-Bingly&Darcy Fit&Loadd.” Translation? “Five sisters wanting husbands. There are two new men in town—Bingley and Darcy. They are handsome and wealthy.”

“Of course, kids like text messaging so much that if you’ve got the classics there, maybe they’ll think classics are cool,” Holley adds. Dat wd B grt.