Mobile Phone Novels

This article in The Sydney Morning Herald claims that half of the top 10 selling works of fiction in Japan are composed on mobile phones.

Half of Japan’s top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined “to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture”.

The Japanese market has happily been paying for mobile books for some time. This kind of phenomenon is not going to happen soon in the west, but Japan is years ahead on many technical fronts. Mobile data services have been available and popular in Japan for years. Whether we catch up in the same way is open to speculation. But don’t rule out the option that you may, say by around 2015, be reading novels on your mobile.

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to my RSS feed




  1. Jim Murdoch

    yeh but itl al b n txt & I wont b abl 2 rtfb

Leave a Comment




About Writing:

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. Robert Heinlein

Save a Blogger from Begging: Buy Books:


chinese jacket

Signed first editions
at special prices.

821 feed subscribers

My Website

Visit my website for news of readings and appearances, reviews of and extracts from my novels, interviews, quotations on writing, revolution, lies, time and dance, art, serial killers, and humour. Read short stories, view author images and much more.

Submit your news

Please continue to let me know about literary-related news. I can't promise to publish everything, but if it grabs my interest . . .

Text Size

If you find the text of this blog too small or too large for easy reading, you can alter the size of the font in your browser's View menu. Alternatively, press the CTRL key and roll the mouse wheel forward or back.

Donations

Via Paypal, using johnbakeronline[at]operamail[dot]com