Just because I've always wanted to work Frank Zappa in here somewhere*

I've no numbers to back this up, but I often wonder if Japan is the future of how books are produced and consumed. Annual sales are dropping over the last ten years, and the new authors are doing things a little differently.

"Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.
One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors."

These books seem to mimic text messaging, insofar as sentences are short, plots are fairly predictable and use "expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25."
I promised to try sunny side up this year, so I'll take down my dark cloud backdrop, and see this as a sort of training ground for the traditional novel as the NYT suggests.
Still though, I think Frank might be right.*

Posted by Dave