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

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: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Yah, this article is a few years out of date.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: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.