Thumbs Race as Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html? pagewanted=2&_r=2
I am often struck by the phenomenon of text messaging - written communication between people who can neither read nor write - and their culture of arrogance about it. A couple of passages from this article struck me: Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers. and "They don't read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them," she said. "On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don't want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I'd like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre." ~(no)rave!
