Mobile Phone News:

Well apparently those weird and wonderful Japanese have come up with a way to spend their lonely time, by writing novels on mobile phones. Seemingly young women have found that they can use their uber texting skills to write entire novels on the teeny tiny keypads of Japanese phones.

Mobile phone novels have been, until recently dismissed in Japan as a genre which would not take off but the year end best sellers list for 2007 included 5 mobile phone novels in the top 10. Admittedly most of these novels have been republished in book form as opposed to it costing a million pounds to send 4000 concatenated text messages.

Not surprisingly most of the stories are set around love, although they are mostly written in short sentences (just like texting) and don’t really have a deep and meaningful plot.

After doing some research i found this quote which explains how these mobile phone novels got started…

“The mobile phone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making website, Maho no i-rando, realised that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialised mobile phone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached 1 million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.”

So there you have it kids, instead of happy slapping and uploading it to youtube, maybe you could spend your time writing novels whilst waiting for your friends at the bus stop?