RicDay on Publishing

No, not the forest-consuming paperweights we once used to look up telephone numbers before Internet lookup tools arrived — books written for cellphones! The idea may sound odd, but there is a huge market for these.

The earliest novels written and published for cellphones appeared in Japan around 2003, and in China and South Korea shortly after that. The approach was the 19th century one (think Dickens and Thackeray) of publishing books by serialization.

Writers in Japan started to post short novels for people to read on their cellphones and PDAs. A chapter at a time was published as a text message to cell phone subscribers. Subscriptions were free. “Chapters” in China are typically between 1,000 and 2,000 words (characters) long; in Japan they started out being very short text messages, then grew as reader software partially replaced text messaging for stories.

A pioneer in Japan was Yoshi, whose Deep Love cellphone novel series, launched in December 2002, drew a huge audience and a quick offer of a print contract from Starts Publishing Corp. The print version of the series has sold over 2.6 million copies in Japan and spin-offs have included a TV series, a manga (illustrated novel), and a movie.

In 2003 Bandai Networks, a Tokyo wireless service provider, launched the All You Can Read Paperbacks (Bunko Yomihodai) to supply cellphone books by subscription. Within two years the site listed 150 titles and 50,000 subscribers.

Another popular cellphone author also published by Starts, Mika, saw her novel Koizora made into a movie in 2007 and sales of Volumes 1 and 2 of the printed book passed the 2 million copies level by year end.

Authors like Yoshi and Mika use a combination of reader feedback and access tallies (statistics of how many people access each chapter) to determine if readers are getting bored, then change the plot to keep the audience hooked.

All this is impacting print in a very positive way. Yoshi and Mika are not anomalies. Last year, five of the top ten best-selling print novels in Japan were first published on cellphones.

Japanese publishers who take these cellphone novels to print have a pre-built audience: people who have read the chapters on their cellphones and now want the print version, plus those who prefer print and respond to the buzz surrounding a popular cellphone novel.

Could this work here?

There are some obvious differences between Japan and North America. In Japan:

• Large numbers of people endure long commutes on public transit
• The written language is very compact
• The tradition of Haiku makes brevity comfortable
• Cheap cell phone subscriptions allow nearly unlimited text
• Reading is a common lunchtime pastime

There are some experiments underway, including one which uses Twitter. My guess is that Europe might be more fertile territory for cellphone novels than North America, because of the greater use of public transit in European cities.

Smartphones a solution?

The North American solution may well be smartphones. The Apple iPhone, Blackberry, htc Diamond and similar phones are better suited to the longer text of English writing.

Japanese authors have begun targeting smartphones, using links in their text to display images or invite discussion. We could use similar approaches in North America to test reader response to books ahead of launch, and potentially build some of that all-important buzz which we once got from pre-release reviews… before the news media abandoned reviews.