A little over a decade ago a Japanese man in his mid-thirties used his cell phone to text ("publish") a work about subsidized dating in Japan. Deep Love, as the title translates into English, became so popular that it eventually was published as a "real" book (selling over 2.6 million copies!), and later was spun off into a TV series, manga and a movie. Thus was born the world's first cell phone novel:
As textnovel.com, the first English-language website devoted to this phenomenon, relates the story:
Cell phone novels are ongoing serial literature generally written in short chapters totalling up to around 100-200 words per chapter.... The cell phone novel phenomenon [was] started by a young writer by the pen name of Yoshi in 2000.... In the beginning, there was no website or location on which his cell phone novel could be read, so instead, he sent out his ongoing chapters to readers via emails and MMS. Yoshi later created the first mobile website with a small investment, providing access to his content on phones all across Japan. Using various campaigns such as promotion leaflets handed out on the streets, he targeted high school students and gathered a huge reader base.
Later, publishing companies and agencies picked up on the trend quickly, creating websites and networks that allow young aspiring writers to express themselves online via their mobile phones....
The concept spread rapidly throughout East Asia, and reached Europe and Africa by mid-decade. By 2007, five of the top ten bestselling novels in Japan were cell phone novels:
Young readers, especially young women, became the primary readers, and authors, of such novels. Dana Goodyear, in a long article that appeared in The New Yorker in 2008, explained the appeal:
In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with nineteen-fifties America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants—the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones. The stories are like folktales, perhaps not literally true but full of telling ethnographic detail...
Despite the fact that critics have blasted the phenomenon as an augury of the end of Japanese literature, Japan's traditional publishing industry has embraced the phenomenon, going so far as to hire writers specifically for cell phone novels.
The first English-language translation of a cell phone novel, Secondhand Memories, appeared in 2008 on textnovel.com:
Cell phone novelists traditionally have not been paid for their work when it appears online, regardless of how many millions of times such work may have been viewed. [Ed. note: sort of like bloggers.] Only when such works appear in print do such authors generally get paid.
Although cell phone novels have enjoyed considerable success in a few European nations (most notably Germany), it remains to be seen how enthusiastically these novels will be embraced by English-language readers. Folks interested in creating a private library of such books will likely want to follow one or more of the blogs that now cater to fans of cell phone novels....
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