Publishing’s New Frontier: The Mobile Phone

“Love Sky (1.3m ‘copies’ sold, a film in the offing) is the latest of a new best-selling type of story, the keitai shosetsu, literally ‘portable (phone) novel’, read not on a page but on your phone screen. Armed with the latest in mobiles, Japan’s ‘oyayubi zoku’ or ‘thumb tribe’ are lapping up these novels, often written by teenage first-timers, themselves reared on the fast-paced, melodramatic world of anime….”