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

cellphone novels

[H0D_G]

2 b or not 2 b tht is th ?

Re:cellphone novels

[ArwynH]

The thing is, Japanese is far easier to enter on a keypad phone than English, meaning short-cuts like you see in English are not required. In fact due to the predictive text software, using weird language slows down typing speeds. Predictive text software also works a lot better with Japanese than it does with English. Well used phrases and sentences can be reduced to just a few key-presses and the average word, around 3-7 key presses (~2 characters). The result is the ability to write a 30-50 character reply email, with decent grammar within 1 minute or so.

BTW that 25yrs age limit is way off-mark. The youngsters maybe faster than the rest of us, but everyone uses smiles, as well as a selection of graphical images available with the phone. I've even got them from my mother-in-law, who is way past the official retirement age.

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:cellphone novels

[Dogtanian]

My boss using "u" and "2" and such as words when she emails me. True, but it's not as bad as "Bon" and "Jovi" or "Nickel" and "Back".

That's the Japanese for You

[Eli Gottlieb]

Name something technologically possible to do that nobody would really want to do for any good reason, and chances are the Japanese have done it just to see what would happen. Oh, and to see if it could be used to sneak tentacle pr0n to middle school kids on their train home. The internet is for porn, after all.

Well, that and Slashdot.

With Apologies to /.

[Rie Beam]

Composing with a cellphone? What a novel idea!

actually came up at work last week

[dancingmad]

Keitai shousetsu, or mobile/cellphone novels are interesting. I was actually talking about them at work last week since one of my co-workers recommended them for picking up the nuance on contemporary spoken Japanese to me. He did mention however, that a lot of the authors were high school girls, and so he personally found the novels boring. I ended up doing an amazon search on published versions of the novels and checking the library, both of which turned up several books.

The books aren't brilliant works of art by any stretch of the imagination, from what I've gathered, but are mostly for people to read on their phones when there is nothing else going on (train rides, etc.). But like my coworker said they are probably a brilliant way to pick up contemporary Japanese; the writing style is that of young people today and the kanji used are a lot less (because these are high school kids not Akutagawa).