Mobile phone books are taken to the next level
It has come to no surprise that the end-users of Japan and Finland have taken the mobile phone to the next level of literacy.
To the Japanese, the mobile phone has always been more than the obvious. In helping them pass the time on the daily commutes, the added-value comes in the form of mobile phone novels
A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each. The first mobile phone novel was written six years ago by fiction writer Yoshi, but the trend picked up in the last couple years when high-school girls with no previous publishing experience started posting stories they wrote on community portals for others to download and read on their cell phones.
Magic iLand is a leading community portal that now purveys a free novel library where users can download text. Since being launched in March 2006, it has quickly established itself and now adds at least 10 new titles per month.
The Finnish novel, “The Last Messages”, tells the “story of a fictitious information-technology executive in Finland who resigns from his job and travels throughout Europe and India, keeping in touch with his friends and relatives only through text messages.”
It’s not just any novel, mind you. The approach and execution is brilliantly done. The 332-page is written entirely in the format of 1,000 mobile phone text messages and replies. In the SMS fashion it was written, the texts are “rife with grammatical errors and abbreviations.” The Finnish author Hannu Luntiala notes,
I believe that, at the end of the day, a text message may reveal much more about a person than you would initially think
That holds very true.
I’m keen to seeing plot-aware software that delivers more to the sensory experience with scent, sound and tactile ‘vibration’ feedbacks.
Link: Text message novel published in Finland, Big Books Hit Japan’s Tiny Phones
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