In China, 25 Million People Use Only Their Cell Phones to Read Books

The Atlantic, on how in China as 25 Million People read books on their cell phones, entire genres of literature may be revived, such as mid-length novels and poems, which have fallen out of favour.

According to Clifforn Coonan in Beijing for The Irish Times, almost half of Chinese adults read books in different forms and about 25 percent of readers -- some 220 million people read electronic media. Of these, almost 120 million people use their mobile phone to read. 

And almost 25 million people only use their cellphones to read books." Coonan quotes Zhang Yiwu, a respected literature professor at Peking University, who said "the appearance of mobile phone literature may revive the declining mid-sized novel and poem in China."

Coonan notes that the concept came from Japan, but for Chinese readers it has the advantage of avoiding censorship, which remains a factor in traditional book formats. "Tens of thousands of writers publish their works for free online," he writes, "to be downloaded by readers on to their phones.

Read full article. 

Frankfurt Book Fair 2012: Emphasis on mobile phones as the ebook revolution goes global

Among the digital trends at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year: Startups selling ebooks, self-publishing developments, and an emphasis on mobile phones as the ebook revolution goes global. paincontent.org reports.

Going global, thinking mobile

As digital reading expands globally, it won’t look the way it has in the West. In particular, mobile phones could be key in less wealthy countries, but many of those opportunities are so far untapped.

Ebooks are already selling well on mobile phones in China. ... China has over one billion cell phone users and 300 million smartphone users as of March 2012 and China Mobile, one of two major telecom providers in China, is the country’s largest ebook platform.

Publishers may be reluctant to sell foreign rights to China Mobile, as it takes a huge cut of sales — at least 50 percent and sometimes as much as 70 percent — and sells the ebooks at a 90 percent discount from the print price.

A panel on potential for ebooks in sub-Saharan Africa also focused on mobile. Ben Williams, a South African bookseller mentioned mobile payments company M-PESA as “one of the most sophisticated banking services you can have in Africa” and said digital bookstores could be built on top of it.

Read more.

Kids' Author Writes Book For Mobile Phone

Best-selling children's author Terry Deary has launched a text novel which he wrote on his mobile phone - in an attempt to get kids reading. Sky News reports.

The Perfect Poison Pills Plot is a black comedy for young adults which has been narrated by rapper Chipmunk.

Inspired by the popular Japanese 'keitai', the Horrid Histories author typed the story on his Nokia E6 phone with each chapter only 70-100 words long.

Deary told Sky News: "This is an attempt to meet young readers on their own ground. They're so comfortable with texting and mobile phones. "They don't own books, they don't want to read books, they don't even know where to buy books.

The novel, which is 1,500 words long, can be read directly on mobile phones.

Related articles about cell phone novels.

Author Rewrites 'Alice in Wonderland' in Text Messages

Author Susan Crimp has updated the classic tale with a modern-day twist .

Titled "Alice's Adventures in NYC Wonderland - The Text Generation", the book's text message format is intended to engage a new generation of potential young readers who might otherwise never pick up the original Carroll version or even watch the film.

[via DNAInfo.com].

Artist who has saved all her text messages since 1999 turns them into a book

Artist Tracey Moberly text messages are not as boring as yours, or mine ("thanks!" "CU later", "Are you coming home for dinner?") so she has turned them into a book, called TEXT-ME-UP!. Manchester Evening News reports.

Moberly has quested to Siberia, Haiti and Colombia, agitated artistically against corporations such as Coca-Cola, nor released a thousand pink balloons over Manchester to seek out random new text friends. Tracey Moberly, 47, has done all this, and much more.

Her book weaves some of the 60,000 texts she has received into a narrative about her life – is a jostling, lavishly-illustrated compendium of art, protest, humour and autobiography.

There is also poignancy. In the book’s preface, we see a text that never reached its destination. On a discarded mobile phone, two years after her father’s death following a stroke, the artist found a text which started “It’s dad”, but was, for whatever reason, never completed and never sent to his only child.

Read full article.

Brits Text War and Peace Every Five and a Half Years

In a move to get some publicity, the UK consumer affairs magazine has worked out that the average UK mobile phone user transmits the equivalent of a copy of the equivalent of epic novel War and Peace every five and a half years. Cellular News reports.

The average mobile user sends 10 texts a day. With most phones allowing up to 160 characters per text, it would take five years and six months to text all 3,197,779 characters of Tolstoy's War & Peace.

Five literary classics by text:

-- The Complete works of William Shakespeare - 30255 texts

-- War & Peace - 19986 texts

-- The Count of Monte Cristo - 16258 texts

-- Ulysses - 9404 texts

-- Great Expectations - 6269 texts

Modern Dating: What's Lost in Texting

Judith Acosta, for the Huffington Post on language modification, reflecting changes in our culture and in our collective consciousness.

The minimization of communication is no accident. It comes as a consequence of minimal thinking, lethargy and indifference. To some, this is the death knell of American and Western civilization, the end of democracy as we know it (which requires active and informed participation by all citizens), the end of the broadest literacy rate in the history of mankind and the end of equality of opportunity (for this too, takes an active, watchful and observant eye).

Read full article.

Texting is writing, researcher says

The days of traditional college writing instruction are nearly over, contends a Michigan State University researcher who found that college students now rank texting as the No. 1 form of writing and cell phones as a top writing platform. Michigan State University reports.

Lead researcher Jeff Grabill, professor of writing and rhetoric, studied the writing behaviors of more than 1,300 first-year college students across the nation from a variety of institutions and locations from April to June.

Texting is indeed writing, students said, and they value their texts more than any other writing style – even above social networking status updates and comments.

People may argue texting is bad writing, but it’s writing many people do every day, said Grabill, co-director of MSU’s Writing in Digital Environments Research Center.

Contrary to the popular belief that “kids these days don’t write,” college students lead complex writing lives and write more than any other generation, he said.

Other key findings:

-- E-mail is for “old people.” Students use it primarily to communicate with professors and parents, and while they do it frequently they don’t value it highly.

-- Students prefer to write alone rather than collaborate with classmates.

-- Most writing on Facebook is related to interpersonal messaging. Students more often comment on posts and status updates of friends than post things to their own profiles. They also report using Facebook for writing everything from lists to screenplays to poetry.

Read full article.

Links to articles related to postive and negative studies on the effect of text messaging on student's writing skills.

Scary Stephen King text message worth $175 in class action settlement

Some 60,000 cell-phone users who had signed up to receive “promotional messages” from Nextones.com in order to get a free ringtone got just such a text message on January 18, 2006 advertising a cell-phone-related Stephen King book.

This resulted in a class action that was thrown out on the grounds that plaintiffs had agreed to “terms and conditions” permitting such cell-phone advertising; moreover, the federal law prohibiting the use of an automatic telephone dialing system applied only to systems that dialed numbers randomly or sequentially, and the defendants were operating off of a list of opt-in telephone numbers.

Read full article in Overlawyered

Previously:

-- Stephen King Tries To Ring Up Book Sales

-- Woman bids $ 25'000 to name King character "CELL"

Read books on a mobile phone, get them via Bluetooth

Blackbetty, a mobile book publisher, presented mobile books at this year's book fair at Frankfurt a couple of weeks ago. Blackbetty's books may be downloaded free of charge via Bluetooth.

Samples of well known authors and complete books are available for download.
Visitors may select their favorite book at a touch screen terminal. Afterwards they simply download their chosen content to their mobile phone by ubiquitously available Bluetooth. No additional hardware or software is needed to read the mobile book.

The Bluetooth terminal has been developed by Bluetooth marketing specialist Haase & Martin, Germany. The terminal is a leading software solution, completing other technologies like hotspot enabled city light posters for single file transmissions.

Web resources of Blackbetty's mobile books are available at www.mobilebooks.com

Press release

Emoji Dick: Moby Dick to be translated into Japanese emoticons

Thousands of people will be paid small sums to translate portions of the original 1851 text into Emoji, the picture character language widely used in Japanese SMS messages. The Telegraph reports.

While the premise of the project – titled Emoji Dick – may be whimsical, it highlights the innovative ways in which the labour pool of bored internet users is being tapped to complete complex tasks.

Fred Benenson, the New York-based web product manager behind the idea, has launched an online appeal to raise $3,500 to pay for the crowd-source translation.

Read full article.

New Collins dictionary has text messaging guide too

Imagine a dictionary that offers tips on text messaging abbreviations for Indian cell phone users and has a Shakespeare guide too. Well that's exactly what two new Collins dictionaries have to offer. Samay Live reports.

The Collins Cobuild Learner's Illustrated Dictionary includes text messaging abbreviations for cell phone users, said Rob Scriven, managing director of the Collins Language Division.

..."Dictionaries have changed over the years. They have become more local in flavour incorporating indigenous words so that they are more friendly for non-English speaking users," Scriven told.

CellStories offers free short stories

A website launched on Tuesday will post a short story every weekday to any Web-enabled cellphone for free.

Readers are welcome to submit their own stories. They should be around 1500-2000 words, the equivalent of 10-15 minute read.

Created by Dan Sinker, who teaches journalism at Columbia College Chicago, CellStories.net is not limited to any particular gadget and is designed to be as simple as possible to work on any handheld mobile device with Web access.

... Among authors who have pledged to contribute to what promises to be an outlet for literary writing is 2008 Story Prize finalist Joe Meno. Authors will not be paid as the site is not yet designed to make money, Sinker said.

[via Reuters]

Horror Story: Court Says Stepehn King's SMS Campaign May Be Illegal

According to a report in Online Media Daily, an appellate court ruled Friday that book publisher Simon & Schuster might have violated federal law in 2006 by allegedly sending unsolicited text messages promoting Stephen King's "Cell."

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that sending SMS messages potentially violates the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits companies from using automatic telephone dialing systems to make calls to cell phones unless the owners have consented.

The decision appears to mark the first time that a federal appellate court has said that the telephone law applies to text messages. The ruling could have far-reaching effects on mobile marketers who send SMS ads.

Brooklyn novelist Peter Brett writes cell phone novel in F Train

Brooklyn author Peter Brett's first novel, "The Warded Man," was tapped out on his smartphone on while commuting to work on the F train. The Daily News reports via Switched.

"I had about 45 minutes each way, and everyone who takes the F knows that 45 minutes can turn into an hour and a half." I wrote over 100,000 words on the train" over two years of commutes, he said.

The 400-page novel, has sold 2,500 copies since Del Rey Books released it in the U.S. five weeks ago.

It has hit best seller lists in Poland and England, where it was released late last year.

After selling the book, Brett left his job - and the daily commutes - in October 2007 to pursue writing full time.

Related:

-- The first Swiss phone novel

-- Text message novel published in Finland

-- Harlequin's Mobile Novels

-- CellScript.com offers cell phone novels to US mobile subscribers

-- Next hot trend for cell phones: Reading?

-- An SMS Romance in 1008 Chinese Characters

-- India's first SMS novel

-- Novels delivered to your phone

-- China cell phone novel launched on Friday

-- Rushkoff to write SMS novel

-- First bilingual short story book written in SMS-shorthand

-- Coming to a cellphone near you: A novel

-- Mobile fiction micropublishing

Woman publishes book full of text messages sent to her dead husband's cell phone

A 65-year-old woman of Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, will publish a book of e-mail messages she sent to the cell phone of her husband after he died of an asbestos-related disease to mark the first anniversary of his death this month. Asia Daily News reports.

Toshiko Fukuda expresses her grief over the loss of her husband, who died at age 69, and her enduring affection for him in the book, titled “Job Transfer to Heaven Without Family–I Wanted to Be With You Longer).

... Fukuda has never forgotten to charge her husband’s cell phone. But one concern is that the messages received on his phone will eventually disappear as new ones come in. Hoping to keep them as a record, she has compiled about 50 messages and a written memoir about the days they spent together.

“I hope this book will deepen people’s understanding of asbestos-related diseases and help lead to early detection and a cure,” she said.

[via boingboing via BBGadgets]

A mobile phone novel read via a T-shirt

The Manga Man, Alexander Besher's new sci-fi book is available to read online for free and according to New Scientist, it's not just a traditional print novel, but comes with a swathe of pictures, video and audio.

More unusually (at least by Western standards) is that the book is being published direct to mobile phones.

And in a marketing gimmiick, Besher has come up with the sly idea of getting T-shirts printed with a QR code, which when scanned directs people to the website for the novel.

Read full article.

Cell phone scribe held over molesting girl

A cell phone novelist from Omitama, Ibaraki Prefecture, was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of molesting a high school girl of Hyogo Prefecture who was a fan of her novels. Daily Yomiuri Online reports.

Yokomori had posted a romantic story to a cell phone site under the pen name Misa. The girl became a fan after reading the novel in February, and became acquainted with Yokomori on a bulletin board of the cell phone site.

Author nun finds new outlet in cellphone fiction

Japan's best-known Buddhist nun is reaching out to a new audience by writing a mobile phone novel at the age of 86. Reuters reports.

Jakucho Setouchi, a prolific writer and translator of 11th century epic romance "The Tale of Genji," is latching on to a publishing revolution -- short works of fiction distributed piecemeal by cellphone often become best-sellers in book form.

"At this age, there are few things that interest me. But it was the first time I had written a cellphone novel, and it was exciting," Setouchi was quoted by a local newspaper as saying.

The story, entitled "Tomorrow's Rainbow," is about a high-school girl who is deeply hurt by her parents' divorce, but finds the love of her life in a boy named Hikaru."

New in Japan: Cell Phone Picture Books

Following the huge popularity in Japan of cell phone novels published on mobile phones, a printing company is launching its first cell phone picture book.

According to Tokyomango, "the picture book will be read page by page, like a kamishibai—no scrolling, just clicking from page to page. It will include both popular children's titles and original content.

The company hopes to have 50 titles and 10,000 downloads by September."

Mobile phone novels ring up big sales, but critics fear for Japanese literature

Last month in Japan, the year-end bestseller tally showed that mobile phone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it. The New York Times reports.

"Of last year's 10 best-selling novels, five were originally mobile phone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time mobile phone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.

Whatever their literary talents, phone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of."

... Mobile phone writers are not paid for their work, no matter how many millions of times their novels might be read online. The pay-off, if any, comes when the novels are reproduced and sold as traditional books. Readers have free access to the web- sites that carry the novels, or pay at most $1 to $2 a month.

Rin, 21, whose mobile phone love story was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year, said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

"They don't read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them," she said."

The latest thing for print - text

Andy McNab, the former Special Air Service Regiment man turned bestselling author, plans to hunt for new readers of his next book via mobile phones. The Guardian reports.

Posters advertising Crossfire, his latest novel out next month, will invite mobile phone users to request by text the first chapter, to be downloaded in audio or text version to their phones. They can also use the PayPal system to order the print version of the whole book.

McNab's pursuit of a new readers follows a trial this year when the paperback version of his book Recoil was available to order on mobiles."