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BBC video on e-books–including cellphone books in Japan
March 28, 2006 | 8:31 am
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By David Rothman
Among other topics, a BBC video tells of the boom in short cellphone-based novels in Japan.
Just in one summer, a high school student is said to read 1,000 titles, and some novelists are training other authors to write for tiny screens. Hello, Sadi? Almost surely the Japanese agree with your advice on sentence and paragraph lengths. Of interest to the Association of American Publishers, the popularity of e-books for cellphones in Japan is said to be increasing interest in reading to the point where even paper books are benefitting.
In the video I noticed a quick mention of a subscription model of $10-$15 monthly charges. This could be a good example for U.S. publishers–along with the Japanese focus on adapting content for the medium. Also, there’s a lesson for hardware makers: the increasing size of screens on mobile phones in Japan. Now that traditional PDAs are on the way out, that should make sense in the States as well.
Meanwhile the explosion in celllphone book is another argument for the reflowable approach for e-book software, a major plus of OpenReader-style standards and the anthesis of the traditional Adobe philosophy. Even Adobe recognizes this in an IDPF context, and Jon Noring will have a few comments in the next day or so. E-book files need to be able to display well on devices ranging from cellphones to 32-inch monitors.
(Via Nick Hampshire, who appeared on the show and discussed the Sony Reader. Thanks, Nick!)
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Comments:
[...] BBC on current e-book developments It’s been a long time coming, but the e-book has finally crossed into mainstream. BBC has a story that wraps pretty up everything up we’ve been talking about in the past few weeks. It talks about forthcoming e-books readers such as the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad, about the benefits of E Ink technology, the strong demand for audio books, the nasty aspects of DRM, and about iTunes-like stores for e-books. Heck, they did such a good job, they even quoted our friend Nick Hampshire from Afaics Research: "I think we are talking about a whole new breed of author. New skills, new content, new ideas, new ways of thinking particularly, and this will be quite a wrench for some of them to make that move, but it offers new possibilities. The possibility of being able to create a book that includes audio components, moving image components that includes interactive components is something which to my mind offers enormous possibilities." Appendum: Check out this BBC accompaining video (Realvideo) to find out how mobile readers in Japan pass the time with e-books on cellphones (via Teleread!) __________________ Need advise on finding the right e-book reader device? Check out our new comparison matrix! [...]
[...] from Teleread.org, illustrating an article the popularitiy of short cellphone-based novels in [...]
[...] [Via: textually.org, image from teleread.com] [...]
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