Reading on the move: Big in Japan

Trends in Japan, a site dedicated to spotting new trends in Japan (natch) identifies “reading on the move” as a thing that is taking off.

A growing number of people are reading novels and other books on their mobile phones and computers. Easy to access and a cinch to carry around, these electronic books are convenient and, thanks to plans offering unlimited data transmissions at a fixed rate, reasonably priced as well. Late-night use has shot up, particularly among young working women in their twenties and thirties. “Mobile phone authors” command loyal followings among book fans.

At OZCHI recently, Genevieve Bell keynoted about a bunch of things and one of the things she said was that these sort of novels are also Big In China. However, she thought that the reason for this popularity was that the affordances of pictographic languages mean that they have a much greater textual density than Roman characters. You can write quite a rich story in the limited characters SMS allows because each Japanese or Chinese character represents a whole word or even a phrase.

For this reason, I predict that we will not see these mobile novellas by SMS take off here or in any western country