Writing novels with the cellphone
Today’s NY Times edition has an article on the new trends apperaring in Japan where youths are using cellphones for writing novels, some of them becoming best-sellers. This is not suprising in a country where the cellphone has become a common use communication tool.
Some of the authors was a girl who has been writing all the novel with the cellphone and uploaded daily to a special website thought for this kind of writers. Her writings became lots of fans and at the end of the novel, the novel was ranked n.1 on the Internet. When is was printed it was n.5 in Japan.
It’s evident that traditional novelists ans literature experts may consider this kind of writing as an under culture, because it uses the same schematic writing than the sms messages on the cellphone. But from Communication Science this is an interesting event that should be studied as an evolution on how ITC is forcing changes in the way people communicate.
A less sensationalist article on the Japan Times Online explains more about this kind of writing trend called “keitai novels”.
It has been said for years that tools will not force people to change their behaviour, but the trigger for new tools should come from consumer’s needs, and this is not really the way things are happening. Techies may bring good inventions that do not get the immediate acceptance from the consumers, but with their usage consumers can transform technology tools into new instruments.
Kindle is a good idea, the same as the Sony reader, but they force people to carry another widget what makes autonomy more difficult. I was frustrated by beeing banned to have Kindle in Europe, so I decided to check what the offer was to get novels and books on the cellphone. The offer is abundant and to very reasonable prices. The only problem is that you better download these books with your computer and transfer them later to your cellphone, if you don’t want to pay large bills for cellphone data transfer. But there’s available some software where you can read an manage mobile books easily.
Here some links: