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z2008-01-17- Mobile Reading Japan Yourgrau
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last edited by BillSeitz on Jun 21, 2008 12:07 pm

Back in 2005, the [AP] noted that many people in were reading books on their -s. It takes some getting used to. Only a few lines pop up at a time because the phone screen is about half the size of a business card... In the latest versions, cell-phone novels are downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications... A recent marketing study by Bandai found that more than half the readers are female, and many are reading cell-phone books in their homes... A writer who goes by the single name Yoshi wrote Deep Love, a series of stories about a Tokyo teenage prostitute. He began by posting them on an obscure cell-phone site he started and made reader payment voluntary... It went on to become a movie, show and manga, or Japanese-style comic book. It's even been turned into a real book, with some 2.6 million copies sold.

noted this as support for treating the as because of its ubiquity. Learning content must be open and connectible to stay current and in use.

In May'2007 [Malcolm Lithgow] placed the in the context/history of the , and also noted Japanese adoption rates. He doesn't think the is as good as a for devices.

In Dec'2007 [Richard Lloyd Parry] noted This week the 2007 bestseller list, published by Japan's biggest book distributor, Tohan, revealed that five of the year's most successful novels, including the top three, were first written for downloading on mobile phones before being republished in book form... The new dominance of mobile novels - keitai shosetsu in Japanese - is all the more remarkable for the speed with which it has come about. They did not exist in 2002, but the following year online sales were worth 1.8 billion yen (L8 million). By 2006, the figure has risen to 9.4 billion yen (L42 million)... Several publishers operate mobile novel websites from which phone users can download novels for a subscription of about 300 yen (L1.33) a month. The stories are divided into gobbets which can be read in about three minutes, the typical distance between two stops on the Japanese ... "It is a world of right and wrong, and is quite un-literary." This, of course, is their appeal. "High school students experience mobile phone novels as real life," writes the high-brow literary journal, Bungakukai, which features keitai shosetsu in its latest issue. "For these readers, they are a substitute for pop music and comics."

(In Dec'2007 announced we're starting to carry titles from Harlequin.)

wrote a series of stories designed for distribution in . I went to his reading last week:

Jun'2008: [Josh Catone] profiles [Quill Pill], which helps writers assemble stories written in 140-char chunks.

Maybe this is better for writing?


 



Bill Seitz, fluxent at gmail dot com, Weblog