Ed Caldecott: The Rise and Fall and Rise again of the glorious short story; how new gadgets can save the genre

Saving the occasional fits of popular passion induced by Roald Dahl or Raymond Carver the short story has spent fifty long dark years in the publishers' cupboard. 50 years of falling sales, declining commissions and lack of interest from the general public has dragged the short story from its 1950s pedestal to the lonely tables at the back of Waterstones where they are plastered with the inevitable 'buy this and get something else we don't want free'.

In the days of Chevrolets and Space-Age Biscuits John Updike reckoned that selling just five short stories to the New Yorker could keep him, his wife and young family in good comfort all year round. Thirty years previously, F Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 by the Saturday Evening Post (equivalent today to $40,000) for a single story. America has always been a bastion of short fiction but across the pond Somerset Maugham made millions out of the genre.

Their medium was the publication of single stories in magazines and they were enormously popular.

Books got cheaper, then radio and TV arrived and suddenly publishers were cramming short stories into collections and selling them as inferior novels. Overall sales declined and in recent years it's been nearly impossible to find short stories published individually.

But, at last, good news for the short story. Last year Jhumpa Lahiri's collection Unaccustomed Earth won a Pulitzer Prize and sold more than 600,000 copies. Short story writer Alice Munro won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her body of work and Elizabeth Strout also won the Pulitzer Prize for a collection of short stories. The short story seems to be sneaking out of the shadows.

After all they do have a place in our busy lives - in William Boyd's words offering an 'aesthetic daisycutter bomb of an experience that do their work with ruthless brevity and concentrated dispatch.' I think we could all do with 15 minutes of that.

But the white knights of this story, hideously ubiquitous gadgets charged with corrupting the young and turning our brains into distracted mush, are the iPod, iPad, Kindle and Mobile Phones. These are the new mediums of the twenty first century that are helping the short story to find its place. In addition the latest gadget has resurrected the oldest form of the genre - the spoken story.

The really great thing about the spoken word is it allows people to multi-task around the stories. You can iron, walk to work, pacify the children and drift off to an audiostory. The beauty being is it's short, so you can pack it in (to paraphrase Edgar Allan Poe).

Spoken Ink is the first company on the internet to sell stand-alone downloadable audio stories by published authors. The company publishes its own titles, a mixture of new writers and best-sellers and also retails for major publishers such as the BBC, Naxos and CSA Word. What's unique about Spoken Ink is you can buy and download audio stories in the same way and for the same price as you download songs.

If you want to rediscover the short story and the pleasure of being read to why not download one of Spoken Ink's audio stories, free this week for National Short Story week, and be part of the revival.

Click here for a free audiostory download