Attention writers: A new market

When I was but a lad my room looked like a book annex. Stacks of Imagination, Manhunt, Galaxy, Mike Shayne, Gold Medals, Ace Doubles, Ballantines etc.

In my college days my room was still filled with mystery and sf but supplemented with Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Dreiser, Roth, Evergreen Review and the precursors of Flower Power...the City Lights poets and the invective of the first underground newspapers.

In the Seventies my various apartments were lined with bookcases that contained all the above plus runs of Westlake and Block and Rendell.

And all of the above could be found in the basements of the houses Carol and I bought over the next twenty-seven years. Lots of money for unreliable contractors for built-in bookcases.

And then with the cancer giving away about sixty to seventy per cent of all of it so Carol wouldn't have to deal with it all when my time came to shuffle off.

But there was one constant. Books were books and magazines were magazines. You could see that at a glance. You could pick them up and hold them if you still had any doubts.

But then came the internet and duffers like me had to undergo the Phil Dickian-like trauma of confronting a world that was evolving and redefining itself every few days. And after my initial knee-jerk sneering and scoffing I began to dig it. And still do. What a wonderful world the net is.

The evolving and redefining bit I mentioned? Well, every once in awhile I, in my dufferness, can still be forced to face the fact that the net will never rest in the way it defines what we call books and magazines.

Here, an excerpt from a recent Galleycat:

Posted by Ron | 08:04 AM | Trends | Email this post

"Mobile Novels" Already Big in Japan
After spotting my item earlier this about Harlequin serializing romance novels by email, a reader steered me towards an article that ran last week in The Times of London on Japan's "mobile novel" phenomenon, and the "anxious debate about the nature of literature and the future of reading in Japan" provoked by the success of the keitai shosetsu.

"Five of the year's most successful novels, including the top three, were first written for downloading on mobile phones before being republished in book form," Richard Lloyd Parry reported, describing their format as "short, simple sentences using relatively few characters, featuring melodramatic plots heavy on violence, sex and tear-jerking sentiment."

Ed here: I already have my title ready if the mobile novel people ever contact me. I Want To Screw Your Bloody Brains Out On Valentine's Day.

I think that pretty much covers all the mobile novel bases doesn't it?