The second post I ever did on this blog was on September 15, 2005 here and discussed the embrace by Japanese of mobile phone technology.
I explained that the Japanese were reading novels on their mobile phones. Cell phone novels were downloaded in installments and read a few lines at a time on the small screen.
According to Wired News, more than half the readers were female, and they were reading the cell phone books in their homes--not just on trains or while standing on line or waiting for appointments.
This morning's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that the Japanese are now WRITING novels on their cell phones and uploading them for fans.
According to the WSJ:
Mobile novels first appeared about seven years ago when the community-based Web site, Maho i-Land, made it possible for budding writers to turn out stories with a cover page and chapters like a real book. About three years ago, phone companies began offering high-speed mobile Internet and affordable flat-rate plans for transmitting data. Users could then access the Internet as much as they wanted to for less than $50 a month...
The novels with the most online readers also tend to sell well in the bookstores. Starts Publishing Corp., a small Tokyo publisher, was one of the first to take advantage of the mobile-novel genre when a...fan called up and begged the company to turn her favorite story into a book. It sold 440,000 copies. Starts and a few other firms have turned more than two dozen of the most heavily accessed stories on Maho i-Land into printed books selling for about $9 each.
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