The Japanese, those dedicated early adopters of new technology and devotees of the 17-syllable Haiku, have apparently become very enthused about reading short stories on their mobile phone handsets.
According to David Wood, founder and executive vice president of Symbian, the stories, collectively called Keitai Shosetsu, are written specifically to be read on a handset.
Wood told Silicon South-West's recent Wireless 2.0 conference that Keitai Shosetsu have attracted a 25m audience.
Apparently, when the 2007 Japanese bestseller list came out, it turned out that the top three most popular novels were all written initially for the mobile phone.
The tales are divided into short excerpts, each of which take about three minutes to read, which is the average time between stops on the Japanese Tube.
When put into ordinary book form, the top seller, called Koizora Setsunai Koi Monogatari (Love Sky), sold 2m copies. It's a tale of a teenage girl who is bullied, gang-raped, becomes pregnant and suffers a miscarriage. A sequel (Your Sky) sold 1m copies.
Apparently the stories are simply written with melodramatic plots which are big on violence, sex and sentimentality. The authors are, apparently, usually women in their 20s.
Literary critics have slammed the Keitai Shosetsu for their allegedly illiterate style. They are, apparently, written in a non-literary style, but one which appeals to the young.
They appear to be rather self-lacerating. One quote from Love Sky reads: "I'm short, I'm stupid, I'm not pretty, I'm rubbish, and I've got no dreams."
The whole package seems a bit like the way Charles Dickens got his stories taken up so avidly by the Victorians.
The Keitai Shosetsu are making money for the network operators. A subscription costs about £1.30 a month and, in 2003, Keitai Shosetsu pulled in £8m. Three years later, in 2006, they grossed £42m.
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