Cell Phones Put to Novel Use

Cell Phones Put to Novel Use

Cell Phones Put to Novel Use



Now, Japan's cell-phone users are turning pages.

Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels – classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium.

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.

But improvements in the quality of liquid-crystal displays and features such as automatic page-flipping, or scrolling, make the endeavor far more enjoyable than you'd imagine.



Such times could be just around the corner in the United States, where cell phones are become increasingly used for relaying data, including video, digital photos and music.

U.S. publisher Random House recently bought a stake in Vocel, a San Diego-based company that provides such mobile-phone products as Scholastic Aptitude Test preparation programs. Random House also said it reached licensing arrangements with Vocel to provide cell-phone access to the publisher's Living Language foreign language study programs and Prima Games video game strategy guides.

Cell-phone books are also gradually starting to gain traction in China and South Korea. In Japan, though, some people are really getting hooked, finding the phone an intimate tool for reading.


The Tokyo-based wireless service provider offers 150 books on its site, called Bunko Yomihodai, or All You Can Read Paperbacks. It began the service in 2003 and saw interest grow last year. There are now about 50,000 subscribers.

"It's hard to understand unless you try it out," Kajita said, adding that the handset's backlight allows people to read with the lights off – a convenience that delights parents who like to read near sleeping infants.



Surprisingly, people are using cell-phone books to catch up on classics they never finished reading. And people are perusing sex manuals and other books they're too embarrassed to be caught reading or buying. More common is keeping an electronic dictionary in your phone in case a need arises.

Cell-phone novels remain a niche market compared with ring tones, music downloads and video games, said Yoshiteru Yamaguchi, executive director at Japan's top mobile carrier, NTT DoCoMo. But no longer is reading books on a phone considered unbelievable, he said.

In Japan, cell-phone books have already won respect as an emerging culture.

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.

Deep Love, which uses erotic language and violence to create a page-turner despite a preposterous plot line, became a hit, mainly through word-of-mouth among young adults. It went on to become a movie, TV show and manga, or Japanese-style comic book.

It's even been turned into a real book, with some 2.6 million copies sold.

Like the internet, cell-phone publishing offers an opportunity for unknown writers, and it delivers new kinds of fun because it's interactive, said Katsuya Yamashita, executive producer at Starts Publishing, which publishes Yoshi's works.

Another work by Yoshi, a horror mystery, has a cell-phone web link that readers click. One pulls up a video clip of a bleeding face; another shows a letter that tells people to go on living.

Yoshi, a former prep-school instructor who sees his readers as "a community," reads the dozens of e-mail messages teenage fans send him daily and uses their material for story ideas.

He also knows immediately when readers are getting bored and changes the plot when access tallies start dipping for his stories.

"It's like playing live music at a club," he said. "You know right away if the audience isn't responding, and you can change what you're doing right then and there."