Elgan: Will cell phones save books?

of Japan's top 10 best-selling books last year -- half! -- started out as cell phone-based books, according to the New York Times.

The books-on-phones genre started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that people in Japan were writing serialized novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries.

The popularity of these blog novels on cell phones sparked huge interest among readers in writing such novels. Last month, the site passed the 1 million novel mark.

Some of these amateur writers become so famous on the cell phone medium that the big publishing houses seek them out and offer lucrative deals for print versions. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school.

One of the apparent reasons that cell phone literature has taken off in Japan is that so many Japanese people, including students, have long daily commutes in trains too crowded for open books. The size and portability of cell phones have made them the most important source for all media, including "printed" media.

Which raises the question: Can the English-speaking world replicate Japan's cell phone book craze?

Cell phone books in America

However, there is clearly at least some unmet demand for cell phone books here. I asked readers of my blog, The World Is My Office, about whether they currently do, or would, read books on their cell phones. A reader named Jonathan wrote: "The size of the screen has never been an issue. Having to recharge the phone has never been an issue. Traditionalists who talk about the intimacy of cozying up with a good book seem to forget that it is the material that sweeps you away. I become just as engrossed in a book on my phone as any print book I've read."

If Jonathan represents a huge potential market for English-language cell phone books, why hasn't the genre taken off? I think another blog reader answered that question exactly when he wrote: "As an aspiring writer, I'm fascinated by this genre. How does a writer access the venue for cell phone novels? I've searched the Net and came up empty-handed."