Cell Phone as e-Book Reader (in Japan)

aussie_a writes "Reading books on your cell phone has become the latest feature in Japan. With games, e-mails and the news already standard features, the Japanese cell-phone is more then just a phone. Novels are downloaded in segments and are run as Java-based applications on the phone. But users can do much more then just read the book, they are able to search for books, write reviews and send fan mail to the authors."

Comments

Kinda hard to read on the ol' nokia 3390

[tivoKlr]

Man, that would take forever to read on my little old Nokia 3390. I can see like 10 letters per line, and a whopping 5 lines of text per screen.

Maybe good for a Haiku, but that's it...

Only in US...

[ceeam]

... this is news.

I'd use it with a little improvement

[DumbSwede]

My cell-phone has 320-240 resolution, more than adequate for reading, especially if the fonts where anti-aliased and well designed. BUT the interface totally sucks currently. Perhaps if it had a couple of easy to use scroll wheels that made scrolling through text a breeze, and you could choose to view in windscreen vs. the default portrait by holding it sideways, then we can talk about reading on your cell-phone.

Still might be nice to have for when standing in line somewhere and you've forgotten to bring a novel or magazine.

I assume someday soon cell-phones will be powerful enough to transcribe voice accurately enough that you could navigate around on the net reasonably enough or even get some work done.

This does give me an idea for making a cell-phone friendly version for people reading my Blogs.

Re:Good For Scrolls

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how english text would look like on a cell phone; kanji doesn't use that much space.

Re:mistakes

[glesga_kiss]

Yah, this article is a few years out of date. There have been eBook readers available on mobiles for several years. I've read maybe 10 different books cover to cover on mine.

Re:To small?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you have a 7" screen, you can't display more than a few lines of text at once!

Do you always set your font size to 50pt? Most phones these days give your a very comfortable newspaper-like column to look at.

A book has superior resolution

True, so why don't you print out your web pages before reading them to take advantage of 600dpi or whatever your printer is capable of?

no expiry date

Stick to txt - there are plenty of works available in plain txt.

can lend it away and such

To borrow a phrase, your strawman is on fire - we're talking about *computer files* here.

Re:It seems obvious to me how this would work best

[Lord_Dweomer]

"but a text-to-speech eBook phone could be the next big thing"

You know...I hate to burst your bubble, but there's this thing called "audio books" where you can listen to recordings of people reading your books. There's also a website called Audible.com that lets you download these for your iPod.