On the bus ride home, my AvantGo feed of Wired News presented me with this astonishing information.
Apparently,
TOKYO — Your eyes probably hurt just thinking about it: Tens of thousands of Japanese cell-phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens.
In this technology-enamored nation, the mobile phone has become so widespread as an entertainment and communication device that reading e-mail, news headlines and weather forecasts — rather advanced mobile features by global standards — is routine.
Now, Japan’s cell-phone users are turning pages.
Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels — classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium.
Once again, I find myself living in the future of the future. Really, it’s not at all what I had planned. I had a hovel in the country all picked out, replete with peeling lath walls and choked with charcoal dust, tracked with crushed pastels and aromatic with turpentine and linseed oil. Oh well; this only adds to my conviction that personal desire is a thing of absolute irrelevance.
Returning to the topic at hand from such – ah – pastoral reflections, I am becoming aware of the odd limitations that the Palm OS and associated apps enforce upon users. In this case, my immediate reaction to seeing the story, of course, was to blog it.
But how? AvantGo provides no direct URLs in the story feeds. I could copy it to the clipboard, paste it into mo:blog, thumb out a few words, and save it to sync when I got home – or even upload remotely as I did yesterday.
But how in the world could I get a screenshot of the eye-popper that prompted the entry? Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have some longer-form thoughts on the general topic of this rather absurd mountain-climbing I’m engaged in. As I have remarked, I had literally no idea what I was getting in to. I thought this whole thing was a done deal and I was walking down some well-trod path, one that preferably passed though a bucolic countryside and ended in a garden cottage.
Eh, all that charcoal dust would just give you black lung.
Much better to live in the gleaming, shiny world of a future that will never be.
New Zen koan:
What is the sound of one hand reading?
What you have to remember is that:
1. Japanese writing takes up 35-50% less space to write because their kanji picture characters are denser, the language hasn’t invented spaces between words, and Japanese is whole hell of a lot vaguer.
1. These cellphone novels are more like manga comics without pictures than literature: the majority are PORN.
See more info at my
“>website.
taro: thanks for the perspective.
I actually have been reading novels (mostly classics) on my Palm handheld for about two years. So, having recently bought a Palm-absed phone, it’s sort of old, Mark Twain – and – Guy de Maupassant news.
BUT and ALSO
Whatever gave you the outlandish idea that manga is not literature?
and FURTHERMORE
As a lover of pulp lit, maybe this presages a resurgent market for pulp in the US; which would mean more direct, plot-tortured writing oriented to a mass audience. Which is quite possibly wonderful.
A “resurgent market for pulp in the US” … oh pleeease.
I’m not talking about O’Henry-on-a-bad-hair-day. I’m not even talking of the bottom of Argosy Magazine’s rejection pile of 1955.
I’m talking about leeches on sucking on Satan’s rectum in the lowest sump of Hell: cellphone companies of Hades and Japan Inc who vet keitai novels for publication and collect 80% commission on leech feces.
L8r…
Taro, deep in the fetid bowels of Japan Inc.
PS: My mom used to be one of Mickey Spillane’s ghostwriters and ohhhhhh did her pulp suck.
haw!
i think that’s what i’m talking about, too. “True Crime,” “Weird Tales,” “Thrilling Sports for Men,” “Doc Savage,” etc. Since this is now, not then, the content would necessarily be incredibly lurid. It would, after all, have to top the movies.
I like technology, honest, but after a couple of experiments I got rid of my PDA in favor of a notepad (paper) a cheap datebook, and a book. I kept insisting on trying to edit word processing docs on my PDA just to prove that it was all worth while, but after a while I got tired of that. Actually, my first two PDA’s were Psions. I really really really liked them, but Palm ran Psion out of business, and I never liked anything about the Palm machines that I had. What’s all of this about leeches sucking on Satan’s rectum? Anyhow, I’m finding that for every cool application I come across, I come across 10 that are stupid, lame or just don’t work.