Wow great overview of cellphone novels in Japan and very helpful thoughts about what cultural and technological factors may have made them adopted more quickly there than elsewhere.

We are beta testing a website in the U.S. (www.textnovel.com) that allows users to write their novels online or with their cellphones (by sending in an MMS text or email) and allows readers to subscribe to the stories chapters as they are published and comment on them. Readers can receive updates by text or email. We are hopeful that this will become a way that younger authors and readers in particular can share fiction. I am really hopeful that we get a story as compelling as some of those that have been written in Japan in this medium.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

Stan
Founder
Textnovel.com

The author of this book is also called Mika, and actually this was presented as a true story. So many readers thought they read what really happened to the author, but in reality, it appears that the book is only loosely based on the author’s life, but all the advertisement campaigns presented it as as sad love story that really happenned.

Also there is nothing unbelievable about this story, cellphone novels are not new, they’ve existed for 8 years at least. One man called Yoshi wrote many such novels about sad love stories and became highly popular amongst teenage girls, who are the main consumers of such “literature.”

The Japanese cellphone handsets have big colorful, nice to look at screen, there are many phones there with beautiful screens like the Iphone’s. Also Japanese is more suited to cellphone keypads than English because Japanese doesn’t have an alphabet but a syllabary, apart from a few exceptions, each “letter” or “sign” represents two sounds, a consonant a vowel ex: karaoke in Japanese is written as ka-ra-o-ke, with 4 “letters” but in English it takes 7 letters. So it takes more time to type on a non Azerty keyboard in English than in Japanese.

And cellphone Japanese takes less time to type and is normal Japanese, it would be structurally impossible to shorten Japanese anyway like in English, unlike cellphone English which requires big efforts without an azerty keyboard iy you want it to look normal.

And these novels are written and published in byte sized installments on cellphone website where readers can leave their comments, so the authors don’t write 150 pages in one go, but not even half a page, maybe 10 or 20 lines since it must be readble on a cellphone.

Also, since 4 years back, carriers have launched unlimited data plans, but before, there were customersd who ended with astronomical charges $1000 by using too much data.

So all this favours cellphone novels.

I am sure the same could happen in Western countries too with azerty keyboards and unlimited data plans.

As for cellphones, it is common in Japan to buy it, so if you want to change, you must buy a new one also they are sim locked, so you cannot use the same phone with another carrier you must also buy a new one if you want to change.

Average phones are better than average phones in Europe or the US,, but high end ones like PDA’s are worse.And the calling plans are not that cheap either, so most people don’t use their phone to talk, just write emails.

@yui : thank you for the additional insights!