There are companies selling ringtones, video-on-demand services, mms.. etc. Now they want to sell text to you.

Random House, the country's leading trade book publisher, announced Thursday that it had purchased a "significant minority stake" in VOCEL, a San Diego-based company that describes itself as a provider of "premium-branded applications for mobile phones."

Other publishers had mixed reactions. Penguin Group USA and St. Martin's Press said they had no current plans to invest in phone texts. But Oxford University Press said it was interested, and Simon & Schuster "has been testing the waters," according to spokesman Adam Rothberg.

"We're talking to all kinds of people about it," he said. "It's obviously one of the next frontiers in the e-book world."

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