Novels Composed on Cellphones Topping Japanese Best Seller Lists

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has up an article examining the rise of blogs/novels that make the transition to published books. Recent Japanese best-seller lists have been heavy with these texts, many of them actually written on cellphones for a cellphone reading audience. Commentators note the popularity of this form of literature coincides with cell providers moving to unlimited data packages. 'The affordability of cellphones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than personal computers, had been an integral part of their lives since junior high school. So they read the novels on their cellphones, even though the same Web sites were also accessible by computer. They punched out text messages with their thumbs with blinding speed, and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.'"

Comments

Re:cellphone novels

[wrook]

Ya, the first time I used Japanese predictive text entry I was amazed. My Japanese is pretty bad, but I actually find it *much* easier to write text messages in Japanese than English. Now, I only text to my Japanese reading friends and directly phone English speaking ones. I hate English texting.

To give you an idea of what it's like to text in Japanese using predictive text entry, here's a kind of walk through the process.

First you type a character. Each character in Japanese is a phoneme/syllable (called a mora). The phone gives you a list of about 15 words that might fit. It's really amazing how often those fifteen words are right. Even if they aren't, by the next character, you almost always have the word.

Then the phone gives you a list of particles/sentence fragments. Almost every word in Japanese is followed by a particle - a single character word that indicates the grammatical function of the previous word. But since there aren't that many particles. they usually have room to give you a couple of common sentence fragments that could also fit in that context where you were typing; usually common grammatical constructions. You choose the one you want.

Then you type a character for a word again. You keep doing this until you get to a verb (usually at the end). At that point the software give you a choice of "okurigana" which will allow you to choose the inflection (sort of like a conjugation) and politeness level of the verb/sentence. And you are done.

You can type whole sentences in only a few keystrokes. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if people can type faster on their cellphone than they can on their computer. It really is that easy and convenient.

Re:Hmm

[dancingmad]

I guess my only real question is, are any of these novels any good? Or are they appealing just because of the gimmick used to compose them?

From what I hear they're awful. A lot are written by high school students, according to my coworker, and he personally found them rather stupid and boring. But he recommended them to me as a way to pick up contemporary spoken Japanese.

That said it's not because they're composed on cellphones that makes them interesting - they originally were cellphone downloads, if I am not mistaken. So a lot of people downloaded them when they had nothing else to do and read them during down time. Plus I think they tend to probably appeal to the high school set (in regard to themes, style, etc).