The mobile-phone novel

They say young people don't read any more. What do they know? In Japan, the latest craze is reading novels on a mobile phone


keitai shosetsu - novel to mobile phone

By Murad Ahmed

In Japan, a new literary genre has taken off. It’s called keitai shosetsu, or the mobile-phone novel.

These short books are written by text message and posted on the web. The stories have taken a particular form; most are written by and for young women and are about difficult subjects such as pregnancy and abortion.

These novels are hugely popular. Maho i-Land, Japan’s largest mobile-phone novel site, contains more than one million titles. The site is visited 3.5 billion times a month.

Publishers have caught on, and text-created books top many Japanese bestseller lists. Love Sky by Mika, and its sequel, have together sold 2.6 million copies. Many titles are filmed or made into manga cartoons.

Source: TimesOnline