Word: celling
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...many respects, Katsura Okiyama is a typical Japanese woman in her 20s. The mother of one enjoys spending time with her friends and loves Disney. But, less typically, she is a writer. And, quite exceptionally, her medium is not a PC or even pen and paper. It's her cell phone...
...Japan, not only are people reading novels on their cell phones; they're also writing novels with them - uploading SMS-length installments to specialist websites where they are in turn downloaded to the phones of millions of readers. The most popular are printed as books and sell in the hundreds of thousands. Okiyama's first keitai shosetsu or "cell-phone novel," K, was written on her 3G Sharp handset and finished with a speed that would have left Barbara Cartland eating her literary dust. In book form, it is 235 pages long. "I think I was writing 20 pages...
...Internet has been formative in the evolution of Japan's latest literary genre. As early as 2000, keitai shosetsu were appearing on the website Maho i-Rando, which offered MySpace-style homepages, to which readers posted diary entries via their cell phones. But "people wrote in asking for a place where they could be expressive and creative," says Akira Tanii, the site's founder. "We gave them a tool that allowed them to publish novels, short stories and poems, chapter by chapter, just like a real book." Many of the early titles were collaborative products: site members would post reactions...
...major book wholesaler Tohan's 2007 best-seller list, five out of the top 10 books in the fiction category are keitai shosetsu, including the top three. The new genre is provoking fierce indignation among Japan's literati, many of whom think that keitai shosetsu should stay on cell-phone screens. But it is undeniably shaking up a publishing industry whose sales have been declining for a decade. A professional author of fiction is lucky to sell more than a few thousand copies of a title. A popular cell-phone novelist sells several hundred thousand, and recruitment for new talent...
...separate series of studies using simulators Strayer and his colleagues asked participants to navigate various traffic conditions while talking on a cell phone, then again while talking to the same person, this time in the simulator. The cell-phone talkers were far more distracted than drivers who talked to a passenger: 50% of the drivers on cell phones missed a designated exit, while none of those talking to a passenger did. "You communicate differently when you are in the car with someone because both people are aware of and can adjust to conditions that might require more concentration," Strayer says...