March 26, 2006
Japanese mobile readers help book business
To offset to the drudge of their daily ride to work, Japanese commuters are reading on cell phones. Short stories, comic books and manga are all readily available, reports the BBC.
... "Bandai Networks is one of the largest publishing outfits in this brave new world.
They have their own steadily growing mobile site, with 20,000 users subscribing to a catalogue of 400 plus titles.
.... And perhaps more importantly, it is reversing the younger generation's apathy towards reading.
Science Fiction author Chiaki Kawamata says: "A high school student wrote to me to tell me that he read 1,000 books in a single summer. There's absolutely no way he could have done that with regular books and without having the novels on his phone instead."
This renewed interest in the written word is also spinning off into regular bookshops. It seems that this could be one medium which, though still somewhat rare, may, in the final analysis, prove to be pretty well done."
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