What Are The Implications?
Five of the ten best selling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones, according to THE ECONOMIST magazine.
What are the implications of this for authors, publishers, distributors and printers?
Does this indicate a change in the way novels are written? Is this a sign that a younger generation of writers are more mobile and don't want to be shackled to a computer? Will future authors be more "nomadic" — able to work and write anywhere, even while on the move? Or is this a return to simpler time when authors carried their manuscripts with them everywhere they went and worked on them when they could?
Labels: author, mobile phone, nomad, novel, writing
posted by Bill Frank @ 6:51 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Do the differences between the glyphs used in Japan and those glyphs of the traditional Latin alphabet have any influence on this I wonder?
I think it's a sign of young authors at work. Mobile phones are simply another tool with which we can work today. I think it would be incredibly frustrating to write a book on a phone, but younger people are using their phones more than computers, so they're used to it. I'm sure computer-based wordprocessing is much more powerful, so I don't see it going away anytime soon.
I don't know if the differences between the glyphs used in Japanese are as important to this trend as the different working styles of younger authors.
The cell phone is just another tool an author can use to write a book. Typewriters didn't do away with handwritten manuscripts. Word processors didn't completely do away with typewriters. Blogs, tweets, mobile phones and knowls haven't done away with word processors either.
There are more tools with which to write a book. Regardless of the tool, however, it's the power of ideas that drive publishing forward, not the tools with which the ideas are written.
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