In Japan half the top selling books are written on mobiles

In the first six months of 2007 half of the top selling books in Japan were written on mobiles. First it looked like a misspelling, shouldn’t it at least be read on mobiles and not written. But people actually compose entire novels on their cell phones (thank God for T9) and it’s hugely successful.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, mobile phone novels (keitai shousetsu) have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, “turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.” The #1 hit book, Koizora (Love Sky) has sold more than 1.2 million copies and another book, Moshima Kimiga (420 000 copies) started with instalments uploaded to an internet sit and sent out to “thousands of young subscribers”.

And the great way with this new vogue is that the Japanese market is very enthusiastic about it, happily paying to read this content online via their mobile phones.

And since Japan usually is years ahead of the Western nations on many tech fronts; mobile phones data services were available and popular in Japan years ago as the rest of us are only now catching up, it might just be fair to say that on top of the bestseller list in 2015 might consist of keitai shousetsu.

Read books on your phones.