"How'd you get thumb callouses?" "Oh, they're from writing my latest novel"

John's post earlier today about the Kindle made me remember a Wired article about the popularity of cell phone novels in Japan. (There's also this NYTimes article about it here.) Here's what Wired describes it:

A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each. The first mobile phone novel was written six years ago by fiction writer Yoshi, but the trend picked up in the last couple years when high-school girls with no previous publishing experience started posting stories they wrote on community portals for others to download and read on their cell phones.

It's no Kindle, but it works. The NYTimes chimes in when discussing how cell phone novels have been published on paper and turned into bestsellers. Much like critics who are wary of the effect of the internet, videogames, and other technologies on people's atrophying, book-starved minds, naysayers are worried that "the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature."

Gosh. Where have I heard that before? Meanwhile, I'm just excited that stuff like this is even possible. I wonder if this kind of online distribution would be possible in the States for amateur writers, such as participants of National Novel Writing Month. I just find it very inspiring that a bunch of unpublished high school girls can spawn a whole industry this way.