Mobile Phone Novels are Booming!

In November 2007, a movie called “Koizora (Love Sky)” was released. With a popular young actress playing a leading character, Koizora is a love story about a high school girl who, despite her boyfriend’s death, carries on with her life. Words in the movie’s official website claim, “12 million people cried over the movie!” The story has stolen the hearts of many young people and it all started with a mobile phone novel.

The story of “Koizora” originally came to light on a mobile phone site and attracted overwhelming support from high school girls and young women. It was an initiator of what we now call “mobile phone novels.” After the story was uploaded to the mobile phone site, the number of hits to the site exploded and the subsequent positive public response led to it being made into a movie.

Now, many people cannot live without their mobile phones and young people are very accustomed to using them. For them, it is easier to read novels on mobile phone sites than it is to buy books and turn pages. There is an increasingly popular model in which novels that are at first posted on the Internet become so popular that a lot of them are turned into books, and then made into movies. Because of easy access to mobile phone sites, this mode of entertainment is catching the attention of increasing numbers of younger people.

Anybody with a mobile phone can upload novels, readers can send in their comments to the stories at any time, and writers can change stories based on readers’ reactions. A company that built a system where writers and readers can engage in interactive communication like this is Maho i-Land, which runs a website “Maho i-Land.” This company established real time communication for novel readers.

Maho i-Land launched a general portal site for mobile phone novels called “Maho no Toshokan (Magic Library)” in March 2006. When the site was launched, it contained approximately 400,000 posted stories. This number continued to grow, and exceeded 1 million in May 2007. A staff member in the PR section of the company says, “Mobile phone novels are one of the means of self-expression forms for our users. We would like to continue to support their self-expression activities.”

There is a wide variety of mobile phone novels available. Since most readers and contributors consist of teens and people in their 20s, the majority of content is love stories. However, there are many stories involving mystery, love between parents & children, and friendships as well. Some of the web-based books that have been turned into paperback books have become bestsellers and sold more than 1 million copies. Unlike writing for printed books, writing and posting stories on mobile phone sites requires the following of certain rules.

To read sentences easily on a phone’s tiny screen, sentences have to be short with more line breaks. The writers’ vocabulary is likely to be of a lower than usual standard since they are not able to use kanji characters that are difficult to convert from hiragana characters on mobile phones. The sentences are simple and make you feel like you are reading everyday conversations through e-mails. On the other hand, the very familiarity of this mode of communication is what is attracting so many young people.

Maho i-Land
maho.jp

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