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Text-message lit a hit in Japan

The latest news from the annals of text-message lit comes from Japan, where cell-phone novels – books composed on a cell phone’s cramped keyboard and consumed on its tiny screen – are producing bestsellers, emoticons and all.

The Sidney Morning Herald reports that the phenomenon, called keitai shousetsu, is racking up some impressive sales numbers:

Remarkably, half of Japan’s top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way – on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined “to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture”.

Even more surprising, those figures refer to the sale of conventional, paper-and-glue books, not the text-message installments that are sent out to subscribers prior to the book’s publication. Here’s one keitai shousetsu editor’s rationale for why the e-book subscription translates into a physical sale.

It might seem strange that young readers are going out and buying the book after they’ve already read the story on their mobile. Often it’s because they email suggestions and criticisms to the author on the novel website as the story is unfolding, so they feel like they’ve contributed to the final product, and they want a hardcopy keepsake of it.

Too bad participatory novel-writing is the way of the future, not the past: this Quillblogger would have liked to have had a crack at, say, The Brothers Karamazov – another bestseller at the moment in Japan. Cut that sucka’ down to size!

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