Spanking New Forms of Media Publishing

Simply because time is of the essence, there has been a trend to mobilise the media. This trend has brought about the birth of moblogs(mobile blogs). With this in mind, blogs are even more accessible than before; allowing users to update their blogs with a camera phone equipped with GPRS. This may arguably be just a fad; but it has definitely been a catalyst to this:

The Cell Phone Book: Interactive Literacy For New Media


A recent essay published in the New Yorker entitled "Twilight of the Books: What will life be like if people stop reading?" tracks a long decline in the popularity of reading books in the U.S. since at least 1937. According to the essay, "Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability(Crain 2007). Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer, Steve Jobs shared the same sentiment as the author, stating that "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore."

A recent study has shown a steep decline
in literary reading among schoolchildren.

However, the solution to this catastrophe is right under our noses. A point to note is that half of the top 10 best selling books in Japan last year started out as cell phone books.

The books-on-phones genre kick started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that people in Japan were writing serialised novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries(Elgan 2008).

Contributing to the cell phone book craze in Japan are long commutes where book reading is hard to do, but scanning the ubiquitous cell phone is easy and convenient. The Japanese have figured out a way to make reading participatory, through cell phones and blogs(Elgan 2008).

On hindsight, Cell Phone Books are here to stay and may cultivate the reading habit among kids and adults alike. Afterall, a cellphone is more of 'need 'rather than a 'want' these days. Beg to differ? Kudos to the land of sashimi, Motorola and Studio Ghibli!




References
Elgan, M. 2008, 'Will cell phones save books? ',Computerworld. [Online] viewed on 6 May 2008, at http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9060501&pageNumber=1

Crain 2007, 'Twilight of The Books', The New Yorker, viewed on 5 May 2008, at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain