My father, who is always trying to keep up to date on things, poor thing, likes to send me emails about stuff he finds interesting. But the other day he sent me an article from the New York Times I found rather interesting that appealed to both my Asian obsessions and blogging love. The newest craze in Japan...Cellphone Novels. The new generation of Jap kids are getting their thumb work-outs with a new way of.....book publishing? Call it what you want but it seems if you got the thumb dexterity to handle it, you could write a book...on your cellphone....and make money?

That's write! (pun intended) These newly-bred authors' books have been so popular that they're being published in hardcover form at your local book store and making the top 10 best-selling book lists! Come in, cell phone online-publishers, mobile book websites, and fancier mobile gadgets; just a few of the things being generated from these new species of books.

What worries me about this is with the Instant Messaging/Text Messaging format of writing is that it seems the ability to create a normal sentence is becoming more and more difficult. I have found that whenever I need to write up a report or just write something out by hand I have a tendency to want to write in short code and emoticons. For example, I now really have to think hard to write "people" instead of "ppl" when writing by hand. I often wondered if one day words like 'people' would be shortened altogether as full spellings become phased out. I fear that, as technology becomes the norm (and soon babies will be popping out with cell phones in hand), our grasp of correct spelling and proper grammar will wane. The human way of communicating will retrogress to animalistic grunts and pointing. I know. Well, maybe I'm being too extreme :-) . But as these "cellphone novels" come to surface it only ascertains my fear on some level.
What will the English language be like or the human language in general in the next 10 yrs as mobile communication changes the structure of words and short code suddenly becomes the newly accepted vernacular?

Anyway, those of the older generation have placed cell phone novels into the category of graphic novels since the short dialogue and thin character descriptions are on par with a comic book without pictures. What defines a comic book then is the question? Being a big fan of manga (japanese graphic novels or comic books from which a lot anime derives), I am deeply intrigued by the cell phone noveling concept. I haven't had the time to read one yet but I plan to this weekend (and will write a review on that as well)
Call me old-fashioned but I fear Internet will lead to world destruction or at least play a vital role in it...as soon as I map out how I'll let you know.

In the meantime, this article raises some good questions. Will Cellphone Novels Kill the Author? My answer, no, just like the blogging medium has not interfered with any other writing forums like magazines and books. Something about the experience of holding, smelling, and carrying a book just cannot be entirely replaced with an electronic forum. I just can't see it. But it may happen. What makes a best-selling book doesn't necessarily mean it's quality. Statiscally, the general public do not go to a bookstore unless a book becomes a movie. Then the book becomes a best-seller. But let's face it. Bookstores were never geared toward the general public but towards the educated and intellectual. How much of that is the American general public?.........it's ok. I'll wait for an answer. If we're talking about classic, long-lasting, timeless literature cell phone novels will not replace that category no more than a soap opera will take the place of good theatre. But it definitely does seem to have inspired a new generation into writing in an innovative way that hasn't been done before. And it was created during our era! How cool is that?

And I still think the idea is pretty cool.

On a side note, though I average 2,000 texts a month, I just don't think I'd be such a hard-core texter that my thumb nail would cut into my flesh and put me out of commission like the person at the end of this article O_o

Here is the article:

TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone 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 cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.

“Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.

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

One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

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Rin, 21, tapped out a novel on her cellphone that sold 400,000 copies in hardcover.

After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.

Rin wrote her novel while commuting to her part-time job.

“My mother didn’t even know that I was writing a novel,” said Rin, who, like many cellphone novelists, goes by only one name. “So at first when I told her, well, I’m coming out with a novel, she was like, what? She didn’t believe it until it came out and appeared in bookstores.”

The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized 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 serialized cellphone 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 one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.

The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.

“Their cellphone bills were easily reaching $1,000, so many people experienced what they called ‘packet death,’ and you wouldn’t hear from them for a while,” said Shigeru Matsushima, an editor who oversees the book uploading site at Starts Publishing, a leader in republishing cellphone novels.

The affordability of cellphones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than personal computers, had been an integral part of their lives since junior high school. So they read the novels on their cellphones, even though the same Web sites were also accessible by computer. They punched out text messages with their thumbs with blinding speed, and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers.

The writers are not paid for their work online, no many how many millions of times it is viewed. The payoff, 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, but the sites make most of their money from advertising.

Critics say the novels owe a lot to a genre devoured by the young: comic books. In cellphone novels, characters tend to be undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist of dialogue.

“Traditionally, Japanese would depict a scene emotionally, like ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country,’ ” Mika Naito, a novelist, said, referring to the famous opening sentence of Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country.”

“In cellphone novels, you don’t need that,” said Ms. Naito, 36, who recently began writing cellphone novels at the urging of her publisher. “If you limit it to a certain place, readers won’t be able to feel a sense of familiarity.”

Written in the first person, many cellphone novels read like diaries. Almost all the authors are young women delving into affairs of the heart, spiritual descendants, perhaps, of Shikibu Murasaki, the 11th-century royal lady-in-waiting who wrote “The Tale of Genji.”

“Love Sky,” a debut novel by a young woman named Mika, was read by 20 million people on cellphones or on computers, according to Maho no i-rando, where it was first uploaded. A tear-jerker featuring adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and a fatal disease — the genre’s sine qua non — the novel nevertheless captured the young generation’s attitude, its verbal tics and the cellphone’s omnipresence. Republished in book form, it became the No. 1 selling novel last year and was made into a movie.

Given the cellphone novels’ domination of the mainstream, critics no longer dismiss them, though some say they should be classified with comic books or popular music.

Rin 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. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

As the genre’s popularity leads more people to write cellphone novels, though, an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a cellphone novel if it is not composed on a cellphone, but on a computer or, inconceivably, in longhand?

“When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone,” said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of cellphone novels. “Some hard-core fans wouldn’t consider that a cellphone novel.”

Still, others say the genre is not defined by the writing tool.

Ms. Naito, the novelist, says she writes on a computer and sends the text to her phone, with which she rearranges her work. Unlike the first-time cellphone novelists in their teens or early 20s, she says she is more comfortable writing on a computer.

But at least one member of the cellphone generation has made the switch to computers. A year ago, one of Starts Publishing’s young stars, Chaco, gave up her phone even though she could compose much faster with it by tapping with her thumb.

“Because of writing on the cellphone, her nail had cut into the flesh and became bloodied,” said Mr. Matsushima of Starts.

“Since she’s switched to a computer,” he added, “her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.”