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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.'"
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?
As someone who actually uses Japanese predictive text type input on both PC and phones, I'd say it is much easier than english.
The thing about japanese, is that you can represent much more information in a compact way and it is easier to predict what kind of words/structure come next. If I'd like to say "I don't want to go to a maid cafe today.", it would be written as "kyou MEIDOKAFUe ni ikitakunai".
The first word you'll get immediately by typing in the "ki" kana, since "ki" in the start of a sentence is very often kyou (today), kinou (yesterday), etc.
"MEIDOKAFEe" might be a rather rare in general use, but since I got a mail from a japanese girl inviting me to a maid cafe, it just requires you to type "me" and "i", plus "ka" since it gets split in to words the first time.
The particle "ni" is amongst the top 8 you can select right after entering any word that seems to expect a particle next.
"ikitakunai" you can write by using "i" to get "iki" with kanji. "takunai" is a pretty standard ending meaning you don't want to do something, and might be on the top of the list already. If it isn't, just typing "ta" will give you that option.
Current phones also make it so that you can navigate the list of words both horizontally and vertically, which makes it even faster.
- These characters were randomly selected.