Mobile novels surge in Japan

The Japanese site Maho i-land has a huge community of members devoted to reading and writing novels on mobile phones. Three years ago, the site had 30,000 members. Since then, mobile operators have offered affordable flat rate wireless internet and mobile data usage has surged. Maho now has over six-million members.

While typing a 200 page novel on your mobile phone may not be everybody’s cup of tea, for some it has become second nature. “PCs might be easier to type on, but I’ve had a cellphone since I was in sixth grade, so it’s easier for me to use,” says Ms. Nakamura, who has written eight novels on her little phone.

Service Interruption

There was a brief system outage today caused by a database failure. Most of the data has been restored, except for some newly registered users and about 150 recently uploaded stories. We are working to restore the rest of the data, in the meantime all system functionality has been returned to normal.

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update sept 25: the system data is now fully restored. If you are still experiencing any problems, please contact us.