It's often lamented that the art of deferred gratification has vanished from our instantly downloadable culture, but the increasing popularity of serialised novels suggests this may not be the whole story.
This won't come as news to anyone who spent the autumn of 2014 gripped by the unfolding drama of the Serial podcast, which took the No 1 spot on iTunes before it was even released, and 18 months later had racked up 80m downloads. Though non-fiction, Serial was cited as a gamechanger for the way we consume stories. But, as many pointed out, it was merely changing the game to a model that dominated publishing for the second half of the 19th century - and built the careers of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins and many others.
