Japan has come out with an alternative to the regular novel. Known as ‘keitai shosetsu’ or the mobile phone novel, this trend of writing short novels using the cell phone as their medium is becoming increasingly popular. Obviously the novels aren’t as voluminous as ‘War and Peace’, nevertheless they consist of about 200-500 pages, each page containing around 500 Japanese characters. It costs around $10 to download each of these novels. This trend was started six years ago by a fiction writer Yoshi, but it gained immense popularity within a short span of time, especially with high-school girls and women in their 20s who happen to be the readers as well as the writers of this form of the novel. Due to this reason, the novels are amateurish in nature with the content mostly limited to romance and the style of writing is casual avoiding complicated expressions. Questions have been raised whether this trend can significantly impact Japanese literature, as these novels don’t exactly follow the conventional norms of novel writing and lack in many aspects such as characterization, setting, etc.
But this doesn’t impact the popularity of this genre. Many of these mobile-phone novels have been turned into real books, few selling around 400,000 copies after publishing. A few of these have even made it to the top 10 bestselling fiction works. What further helps this mobile phone novel boom, are the prizes which are being given out to the best mobile phone novel with the Japan Keitai Novels Prize offering ¥2 million prize money. Also, certain mobile phone websites such as the Magic iLand helps in popularizing this genre by offering a wide selection of mobile phone novels in their free novel library where readers can download from. It also includes reviews and instructions on how to write a mobile phone novel. It also has plans to create software which would enable the novelist to add visuals and integrate sounds, thereby further enhancing this particular genre.

Via: Wired