Keitai Novels Boom in Japan

The Economist has an interesting piece about the successes the Japanese publishing industry are having with novels written specifically for mobile phones:

WITH sales of books in decline, a new market has come as a godsend to Japan's publishing companies. Sales of mobile-phone novels—books that you download and read, usually in instalments, on the screen of your keitai, or mobile phone—have jumped from nothing five years ago to over ¥10 billion ($82m) a year today and are still growing fast. It may not be literature, but it sells. Mica Naitoh, a popular keitai author whose bestselling book had 160,000 downloads a day, says many of her readers never even buy old-fashioned books. For one thing, she says, today's trendy handbags are far too small.