Recently the first Mobile Phone Novel Awards were held in Japan. The winner was a woman from Osaka, whose novel concerns a love affair between a schoolgirl and a gigolo. You can see a Japanese version of the report here. The Japanese have apparently been reading novels and manga on their phones for a few years, though this is the first time I’ve heard of this phenomenon. Some of the authors of these novels apparently write them entirely or partly on their phones as well, which must lead to very sore thumbs!
I think such novels are quite popular in China, but do you know if they have caught on elsewhere?
Have any of you read a mobile novel like this? Are they written in a different style to printed books?
I can’t imagine how aggravating that must be… I can’t stand reading long text-messages let alone a complete novel.
That’s…. fascinating.
It actually blew my mind.
Think of the convenience and the paper it would save…
Has anyone checked out or purchased the Sony Reader?
It stores about 80 books and reads like paper – no laptop screen. It also plays MP3 files. But, it’s expensive and the format looks to be proprietary. You can only get books from a special website where they have the downloadable files. You also have to pay for the books.
And who could forget about the time Google asked to make all the books readable online?
Polly–Hah, what will it take to get Sony to learn that the proprietary format thing is a mistake every time? First Betamax, then ATRAC, then SACD, now this…
Poly I read an article in a Brazilian informatic magazine about Sony Reader. Unfortunately this gear is not on sale in Brazil yet. But it is great. I download a demo version of some books, it is useful. For whom that still don’t have Sony Read, the good way is to download Microsoft Reader and read books at the computer, or goes to http://www.gutenberg.org and download their books in HTML.