History of Books Written on Mobile Phones

The first book known to be written entirely on a mobile phone was a novel written by Japanese fiction author Yoshi back in 2000. This year has marked the transition of this trend to American and European authors with some authors even making it onto the bestseller lists with their cell phone novels. What has happened in the intervening years? Let’s take a look back at the short history of books written on mobile phones. Then we can take a moment to think about what may come next in this new genre of tech writing.

Yoshi: The First Mobile Phone Author

The first author to write and distribute novels via the mobile phone platform was an author named Yoshi who began this cutting-edge work in Japan in 2000. Yoshi identified a market of readers who would be interested in receiving books on their mobile phones. The main focus of these books was the delivery method which was considered a novel new approach for bringing books to people who wouldn’t otherwise have read them. The idea was that people who wouldn’t carry around a book might be happy to read a novel on their phones. Yoshi authored five books including a highly popular novel called Deep Love that went on to become not only a bestselling book but also the inspiration for a comic, a TV series and a film. In the same span of time that this occurred, the sale of mobile phone books in Japan went from zero to euro 60 million.

Two-Part Growth of the Mobile Phone Novel Industry

The book and mobile phone industries in Japan rapidly came to realize that there was a huge market for readers of novels in the mobile phone format. Many businesses were launched which created libraries of books that could be read on the mobile phone. At the same time, more and more authors began to write their books on their mobile phones. The industry grew in these two different directions.

The first area of growth was the development of online libraries for reading on the mobile phone. This trend grew around the world as more and more sites began to be established and online reading became more popular. Of course, this also led to the development of new devices like the Kindle Reader which are designed specifically for the purpose of allowing the user to read books in a mobile digital format. In both cases, entire libraries of both new and old books are accessible to the mobile reader.

The other area of growth for the industry was the growth of popularity of those authors who wrote entire books using only or primarily the mobile phone as the platform for writing. There was a novelty to reading books that were authored in such a manner and an entire culture grew up around this in Japan. It was called Keitai.

The Keitai Culture

Keitai was the name given to the culture surrounding people who authored books on their mobile phones and delivered them via the cell phone platform. There are a few things that these cell phone novelists tend to have in common which unites them as a community. First of all, they almost always author their works under a pseudonym using a first name only. For example, one of the most popular cell phone novelists is simply known as Chaco.

Another commonality among the keitai culture is that the audience for these books is primarily preteen and teenage girls. These are girls who have had cell phones their whole lives and who are comfortable reading books on their phones. In fact, it is said that some of these girls don’t read printed books at all but are active readers of cell phone novels.

Yet another thing that these authors tend to have in common is the style of writing that they use. The mobile phone format has created a certain type of writing that is characterized by a very simple sentence structure and a reduced use of adjectives. Basically these novels are written succinctly with short form. They are driven primarily by dialogue and the force of emotions rather than having long drawn-out character development.

Of course, as with any genre of writing, there are differences among cell phone novelists. These traits of keitai culture don’t necessarily prevail in all of the books that can be read via the mobile phone. However, they are common enough to stand out as characteristic of those mobile phone novels written in Japan in the past several years.

Explosion of Awareness About Mobile Phone Novels

People outside of Japan didn’t really know much about the keitai culture and mobile phone novels until two or three years ago. At that time there was an explosion of media attention to the genre of writing. In late 2006 several major cell phone companies in Japan came together to hold a mobile phone novel competition which drew a lot of international attention. In 2007, five of the top ten bestselling books in Japan were printed books that originally started as highly popular mobile phone novels before being converted to print form.

Mobile Phone Novels Today

The explosion of awareness about mobile phone novels in the past few years has caused the trend to gain traction around the world. Japan is no longer the only place where mobile phone novels are being written, turned into print form and then selling well. Authors in both America and Europe are starting to pick up on the trend. One example is American author Peter Brett whose four hundred word novel The Warded Man has recently placed on bestseller lists in Europe. This trend has been aided by the fact that advances in mobile phone technology make it easier for people to write on their cell phones. Imagine the difference between writing a novel on your smartphone’s QWERTY keyboard and writing one on the keypad of the phone that you had seven years ago.

In addition to those authors that are gaining attention for their mobile phone novels, there are probably many writers out there who use this tool to some degree without others knowing about it. Anyone who blogs from his phone and later writes a book or ebook based on that blog is benefitting from this same trend. And many people are starting to be inspired to work on their own novels during their commutes now that people like Peter Brett have gotten attention for doing so. It is possible that we’ll see new developments in this genre of literature as phones become even more advanced.