Japanese Cell Phone Novels
Publishing Newscell phone / Japan7 Comments
I find this so interesting. Last year in Japan 5 of the top 10 selling books were “cell phone novels”. These novels are entirely written on cell phones using all of the abbreviations emoticons that I have so much trouble understanding.
These are very short novels but very successful. In fact the number one best selling book last year was in fact a cell phone novel entitled “Love Sky” written by Mika. The author explained her success due to difficulty most of her fans have in reading actual books and understanding their long difficult sentences.
That statement seems so hilarious, but I think these “books” are obviously interesting enough for the publishing houses in Japan since most of them are turning these cell phone novels into real books.
I wonder when this trend will hit our shore?
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That is such a sad statement if true. I understand the ease of using abbreviations when text messaging and you want to get a message out quickly. I just don’t see books written this way becoming the next big thing.
I wrote a story for their phones, but I doubt very much I could put the whole thing up in abbreviations. Some things just don’t translate well.
The novels aren’t all written in abbreviations, they just use them. Phonetext in any form irritates the heck out of me though so I wouldn’t want to read it.
I don’t think there’s as much impetus for them to catch on here. In Japan, especially the cities, most people ride trains to work, and the rides can take hours. People used to read manga, because in that environment you want something that doesn’t require a lot of concentration. But now many of the manga readers have switched to cell phone novels because it’s just handier. These novels are popular because they’re simple enough to be followed on the small screens and in a commuter situation.
There might be a market in NYC, but for most people in the states commutes = driving, and outside of that who would want to read a cellphone? Maybe bored students? I dunno. I just don’t see it catching on.
I don’t think that it’ll ever catch on in North America. Not only for reason that Jan explained (transport and so on), but also because we’re just not techno-savvy enough in my opinion.
This, I can understand… Remember, we’re not talking about English which is a relatively easy language. Japanese is hard: the structure of a sentence, the grammar and even the writing. I mean, I gave up reading French novels because I don’t like the flow… so I’m not surprised that some fans find it difficult to read actual novels in Japanese. It’s not sad, just a reality.
Actually, English is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. I didn’t find learning to speak basic Japanese to be very hard at all and I’m not one who takes to languages easily.
Hopefully, never.