Mobile Authoring

When it comes to reading books, I'm still traditional in a sense that I prefer to actually hold one in my hands. Although I've read a few e-books, they're still a far cry from the experience brought by the real thing. Reading is an intimate matter because it's a one-on-one conversation: the author is trying to tell you, the reader, a story. Like TV, it's a one-way relationship, but it's personal nonetheless. E-books have the potential to be the same, but since they require a laptop, a PDA or some other device to run, it isn't the same thing because of the distractions they bring. Why read when you can play a game on your PDA or browse the Internet on your laptop?

Of course, writing books is a totally different thing. Most authors prefer to use computers and laptops while some still use more traditional means. In Japan, however, both methods are obsolete because the authors there use their cellphones.

Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined "to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture".

It's personally difficult to imagine writing a blog post using a cellphone, so I can't even begin to think how writing an entire novel would be like. Still, this is Japan we're talking about. It's known for quirkier things.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

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Mobile Authoring

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