Next hot trend for
cell phones: Reading?

Reading with the lights off
It's especially effective for intensifying the thrills of a horror story, said Satoko Kajita, who oversees content development at Bandai Networks Co. Ltd.

The Tokyo-based wireless service provider offers 150 books on its site, called "Bunko Yomihodai," which means "All You Can Read Paperbacks." It began the service in 2003 and saw interest grow last year. There are now about 50,000 subscribers.

"It's hard to understand unless you try it out," Kajita said, adding that the handset's backlight allows people to read with the lights off — a convenience that delights parents who like to read near sleeping infants.

Users can search by author, title and genre, and readers can write reviews, send fan mail to authors and request what they want to read, all from their phones.

A recent marketing study by Bandai found that more than half the readers are female, and many are reading cell-phone books in their homes.

Surprisingly, people are using cell-phone books to catch up on classics they never finished reading. And people are perusing sex manuals and other books they're too embarrassed to be caught reading or buying. More common is keeping an electronic dictionary in your phone in case a need arises.

Cell-phone novels remain a niche market compared with ringtones, music downloads and video games, said Yoshiteru Yamaguchi, executive director at Japan's top mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo. But no longer is reading books on a phone considered unbelievable, he said.

Opportunity for unknown writers
In Japan, cell-phone books have already won respect as an emerging culture.

A writer who goes by the single name Yoshi wrote "Deep Love," a series of stories about a Tokyo teenage prostitute. He began by posting them on an obscure cell-phone site he started and made reader payment voluntary.

"Deep Love," which uses erotic language and violence to create a page-turner despite a preposterous plot-line, became a hit, mainly through word of mouth among young adults. It went on to become a movie, TV show and "manga" or Japanese-style comic book.

It's even been turned into a real book, with some 2.6 million copies sold.

Like the Internet, cell-phone publishing offers an opportunity for unknown writers, and it delivers new kinds of fun because it's interactive, said Katsuya Yamashita, executive producer at Starts Publishing Corp., which publishes Yoshi's works.

Another work by Yoshi, a horror mystery, has a cell-phone Web link that readers click. One pulls up a video clip of a bleeding face; another shows a letter that tells people to go on living.

Yoshi, a former prep-school instructor who sees his readers as "a community," reads the dozens of e-mail messages teenage fans send him daily and uses their material for story ideas.

He also knows immediately when readers are getting bored and changes the plot when access tallies start dipping for his stories.

"It's like playing live music at a club," he said. "You know right away if the audience isn't responding, and you can change what you're doing right then and there."

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