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Cell Phone as e-Book Reader (in Japan)

Posted by timothy on Sun Apr 03, 2005 01:00 PM
from the doubles-as-a-vision-test dept.
Books Media Handhelds Hardware
aussie_a writes "Reading books on your cell phone has become the latest feature in Japan. With games, e-mails and the news already standard features, the Japanese cell-phone is more then just a phone. Novels are downloaded in segments and are run as Java-based applications on the phone. But users can do much more then just read the book, they are able to search for books, write reviews and send fan mail to the authors."
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  • Good For Scrolls (Score:4, Informative)

    by pressesc (873084) on Sunday April 03 2005, @01:02PM (#12127279) Homepage
    This [pressesc.com] is how the story lead would appear on a cell phone. Is it good for anything but Haiku?
    • Has it occrred to
      anyone that
      japanese characters
      are ideograms and
      takes up about
      two english
      letters on a
      cell phone?
      (same applys
      to chinese,
      korean, etc)

      • set @pedantic = 1 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by kahei (466208) on Sunday April 03 2005, @01:37PM (#12127482) Homepage


        Korean characters are not ideograms, except when they borrow chinese ones for names and hard words. They're phonetic, and a very elegant system it is -- or was, until the inevitable blurring and decay.

        They were founded on Confucian principles -- 'male' sounds stick up and 'female' sounds lie passively underneath them. Gotta love that Confucianism @_@

        Japanese characters are often ideograms, but to be honest the text is no more than maybe 1.5 times the density of English, for colloquial dialog. I think the key might be that the users are train passengers reading pulp novels, so that:


        1 -- there isn't room to open a book


        2 -- you don't really need to backtrack and appreciate the structure and rhythm :)

    • First - it depends on a phone, of course. Width of about ~150..200px is probably where it starts to be comfortable. Second - this is how they teach you fast reading - by using text in narrow columns so that your eyes don't need to move left-right scanning the lines. Third - they used a pretty interesting writing system there in Japan you know.

      BTW - reading on Palm is a sheer pleasure for me now (I've read several rather big books in the last couple of months). Beats paper books all the time. With RTA-like

    • No, THIS is how they look like (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ag0ny (59629) <(moc.yn0ga) (ta) (yn0ga)> on Sunday April 03 2005, @02:02PM (#12127612) Homepage
      I happen to have a few phone catalogs here. I have just scanned a page on a DoCoMo catalog showing the screens (and font sizes) on the latest phone models.

      The image is here [ag0ny.com]. This is a 1Mbyte JPEG file, be warned.

      As you can see, this is more than enough to read a book, specially if it's written in Japanese.
    • "This is how the story lead would appear on a cell phone. Is it good for anything but Haiku?"

      I don't exactly have a top-of-the-line phone here, but I read the news on it all the time. I'd prefer a PocketPC, but this'd do in a pinch.
  • I know that some day the paid editors will edit, but until then:
    "the Japanese cell-phone is more then just a phone" -- should be than

    In any case, that's lame that it runs as a J2ME app. I read stuff right now on my phone, and it's straight html and you can actually work with it, where the Jap J2ME apps are probably drm'ed to hell and back.

    I'll stick with my html, and there are plenty of PDF to html converters.
    • "the Japanese cell-phone is more then just a phone" -- should be than"

      Or: "The Japanese cell phone is more! Then: just a phone"

    • Yah, this article is a few years out of date. There have been eBook readers available on mobiles for several years. I've read maybe 10 different books cover to cover on mine.
    • In any case, that's lame that it runs as a J2ME app. I read stuff right now on my phone, and it's straight html and you can actually work with it, where the Jap J2ME apps are probably drm'ed to hell and back.

      Jup, but these J2ME apps allow some e-book reading enhancements like auto-scrolling and such.

  • Old News (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Story dated March 18. They're using Tamagotchi now.

  • To small? (Score:4, Informative)

    by vidarlo (134906) <vidarlo AT freakforum DOT nu> on Sunday April 03 2005, @01:08PM (#12127315) Homepage
    Interesting discussion. [slashdot.org]

    I think that a mobile phone will have far to small screen. Even if you have a 7" screen, you can't display more than a few lines of text at once! A book has superior resolution, no expiry date, can lend it away and such. I see none of those features on a mobile phone.

    The day we can have a a5-sized sheet of e-paper, with a small 20g heavy data module, then maybe can e-books take off. But a book is something everyone know, it's universally, needs nothing but light, and works fine.

    • Re:To small? (Score:2, Informative)

      by FRiC (416091)
      Reading e-books have been quite common in China and Japan for a long time. Unlike languages that have to be spelled out, Chinese characters take up much less space and don't have to be word wrapped or hyphenated. Having a small display isn't a problem at all.
    • Maybe american phones will have too small a screen, but you seem to be several years behind the rest of the world in that respect. Japan seems to be several years ahead of the rest of the world.

      My phone is basically a PDA with a wireless modem inside it. It has a similar sized screen to an IPAQ. I can get a pretty reasonable amount of text on the screen, certainly enough to make it useable. And with my 1GB memory card, I can carry pretty much an entire bookcase around in my pocket.
      • RTFA. The article discussed java applets, j2me, not html or txt. Go over it again when knowing this, and report the answers to me!

  • Going blind... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03 2005, @01:08PM (#12127316)
    You are on screen 3 of 1,490,548,734 of the Great Gatsby.

    *previous page* *next page*
  • I for one, look foward to reading Tolkien in this kind of format:

    "In a ho"
    le in the gr
    (then I thumb the arrow button)
    ound lived a "
    hobbit.

    I figure my thumb will implode by the time the poor dwarves get taunted at Rivendell.

    • One file to hold them all, one phone to deploy them,

      One number to buy them all and in your commute enjoy them.
    • I figure my thumb will implode by the time the poor dwarves get taunted at Rivendell.

      Which is why e-books have auto scroll and/or autopage features; the Palm ebook readers have had auto-scroll for years.

      e-books are convenient. They're difficult to read, but the one thing I found annoying was that it's very hard to flip back in the book to find some reference you might have missed. Like reading Anna Karenina, there's so many people coming and going you have to keep going back to see who all these people
      • but the one thing I found annoying was that it's very hard to flip back in the book to find some reference you might have missed.

        Really? Funny, when I had a Rocket eBook the search function was probably the most useful feature. "Bob? Who's Bob?" *Search upwards for Bob* "Oh, thats who!" Click return to bookmark.

        No more flipping pages for me!

        Of course if you dropped it you were out $300, so I can see why it never caught on ;)
    • If that's your cell's screen size.... Does it have rotary dialer?
  • I am shocked this has not been done before , i think it is the definition of ingenius ,, so simple yet so brilliant.
    an online serachable library that you can pick and choose from on the train or in the park .The way mobile phones are heading with increased screen size and memory not to forget the dropping costs it is only natural that it swallows the Ebook market.The only problem i would have with this would be if i were not able to back up the books to my computer , though that may not be an issue if it h

  • Only in US... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ceeam (39911) on Sunday April 03 2005, @01:12PM (#12127336)
    ... this is news.
  • My cell-phone has 320-240 resolution, more than adequate for reading, especially if the fonts where anti-aliased and well designed. BUT the interface totally sucks currently. Perhaps if it had a couple of easy to use scroll wheels that made scrolling through text a breeze, and you could choose to view in windscreen vs. the default portrait by holding it sideways, then we can talk about reading on your cell-phone.

    Still might be nice to have for when standing in line somewhere and you've forgotten to bring a novel or magazine.

    I assume someday soon cell-phones will be powerful enough to transcribe voice accurately enough that you could navigate around on the net reasonably enough or even get some work done.

    This does give me an idea for making a cell-phone friendly version for people reading my Blogs.

  • Bah (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nexzus (673421) on Sunday April 03 2005, @01:15PM (#12127354)
    I would imagine that anyone with a Smartphone or Treo does this already.

    I've got an iPaq 6315, and one of the reasons I purchased it was to read E-books on my way to work. I used to use a old Palm to do the same thing, but I like the screen on the iPaq more, and it's one less gadget to carry around.
    • Kinda the same here: I use my trusty T3 for ebooks...isilo for straight text, repligo for pdf. Being able to easily read a book one handed (no page flipping) and carry along at least ten books (+reference books, dictionaries etc) have actually made me prefer my palmpilot to normal books (except for textbooks).

      Still, I prefer my cellphone as a seperate entity...it's so much handier for when I need to relay information to someone on the other end of the phone.
  • Hmm ive been doing this since 2002 on my old Nokia 7650. I mostly use eBook reader [my-symbian.com]eBook reader for Symbian phones now on a 6600. There are loads of document readers/editors available from .pdf to MS word. I guess as the article says "Such times could be just around the corner in the United States, where cell phones are become increasingly used for relaying data, including video, digital photos and music.". Oh wait this is already available worldwide.
  • Instead of relying on a screen to visually read the eBook, you already have a built-in private speaker in the earpiece, and could give voice commands to the software to read the next page, resume, go-back, or pause. The only concern then is not to interfere with the phone's ability to take a call, and battery life might be impacted more, but a text-to-speech eBook phone could be the next big thing.

    Handsfree would be an asset, as holding the phone up to your ear for that long might be tiring, or if you're stupid enough to drive and use one, cause accidents.
    • Have you actually tried to listen to a book using current text-to-speech technology? I tried converting a book from project gutenberg to audio, but it pronounced words so inaccruately with a tone so irritating that I could not bear to listen to it after a few minutes.

      Downloading entire books read by a human in an audio format isn't practical either, as audio files that long tend to be several hundred megabytes, and flash media isn't exactly cheap either.

    • "but a text-to-speech eBook phone could be the next big thing"

      You know...I hate to burst your bubble, but there's this thing called "audio books" where you can listen to recordings of people reading your books. There's also a website called Audible.com that lets you download these for your iPod.

  • The Japanese language makes a lot of things like this possible, or at least a lot easier than in other languages. In Japanese, it doesn't take as many characters to describe a sentence as it does, for example, in English. (This is one of the reasons all kinds of IM 1337 5p33k has developed, like "c u l8er" or "brb".) This means that the small screens on cell phones are large enough to facilitate many innovative uses.

    Here in the United States, people seem more content to haul around laptops, like this Powerb

  • I routinely read books on my Nokia 6600, while on the bus, or waiting etc. I convert them into txt and read with ReadM - free text reader.
  • If you have a PDA phone, like a Treo, you can already do this [ereader.com]. And you don't even need to buy the classics [gutenberg.org].

    I suppose it's kinda neat that non-PDA phones can read books this way, but downloading bits at a time? The way American phone companies gouge you for data usage, fees would pile up quick.

  • I already use programs like TiBR [indevsoftware.com] to read textfile novels on my Treo 600. It's a little scrunched, but I don't really notice it; things are probably considerably better on the Treo 650.

    Project Gutenberg has plenty of textfile novels ripe for reading. Cory Doctorow's stuff is also pretty good. I read his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [craphound.com] entirely on my cell.

    Another handy resource is the University of Virginia Library's Etext Center [virginia.edu], which has 1800 freely-available eBooks.
  • The last seven or eight books I've read have been e-books on my phone (Treo 650). And I didn't have to pay per page for it, either: Plucker [plkr.org] plus Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] plus stuff like the Baen Free Library [baen.com] for more recent titles equals a big bookshelf's worth of free-of-charge books in my pocket wherever I go.
  • I dunno about e-book reading, but small screens are perfect for newspapers.

    Think about it: newspapers (printed ones) have narrow columns and short paragraphs. All the important info is at the top of the story. That's the perfect thing to be reading on your cell phone. In fact, that's what I do on my Treo... the first thing I do every morning is sync a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald.

    I reckon that a forward-looking newspaper could sell versions of their newspapers especially for cell phones. However, it
  • Actually I've been doing a lot of research on this topic in the last couple of weeks. The PDA market has basically collapsed in Japan, so I've been planning my move to a portable phone ("keitai denwa" in Japanese, hence the Subject). A few comments and observations:
    1. The hardware is amazing. I'm using a Sanyo device with an amazing range of features. Latest ones I just discovered are the zoom for the camera and the quick switch for image size.
    2. Some models (like Kyocera's) can work as a kind of high speed mo
    • Forgot to mention the big missing feature is handwriting input a la Grafitti. However, when working in Japanese, the predictive input system is quite good, and it greatly reduces the amount of clicking you have to do.

      I feel like going deeper into the list of amazing and weird features it does have...

  • I have been doing this for over a year and a half on both my P800 and my A780. They both have Opera, and I just strip Project Gutenberg [promo.net] eTexts or other [sourceforge.net] books down and break them into chapters. As long as the HTML formatting does not specify width, the page should display fine on any small screen. (The script I use is at SourceForge [sourceforge.net]).

    This can be done on any phone or PDA that has any kind of web browser. Even PocketIE can handle simple pages (although it cannot use CSS and it loads pages slowly). Thi

    • a) portable

      My phone is more portable than a book, plus I've always got it with me. I think there are 3/4 books on it right now. Handy for 10 min killing waiting for a taxi/bus etc.

      c) made out of recyclable materials

      That phrase always makes me laugh. So what if something is recyclable? How is that any good for anyone? Toilet paper is recyclable, but you don't see folk putting it in a special coloured bin. Books should be passed on and not disposed of anyway, though perhaps that's what you meant.

      Plus

    • Sony had some really cool electronic paper [gizmodo.com] (there was a story on /.) that offers the best of both worlds (or at least could, would probably need a revision or two), it offers high resolution, you only need power to switch pages not to keep them displayed and IIRC it also had some nifty mechanism to fast forward through books.

      Of course it's Sony, so it's locked down with DRM and a proprietary format noone else uses but as they apparently have changed their ways recently (They opened up Blu-Ray and it even s

      • better link [guardian.co.uk] (This link is actually from the article in my first post, should have read it before posting =)

        Offers much more information, for example:

        One much-repeated fallacy about the Librie is that power is used only for turning pages. While it is true that the "ink" particles stay in position without consuming power, the electronic innards do drain the juice, hence the inclusion of a standby mode. Nevertheless, the three AAA batteries used to power the Librie should stretch to an impressive 10,000 page

      • that offers the best of both worlds (or at least could, would probably need a revision or two)

        Your parenthetical comment is spot on -- the Librie's display technology is certainly something to watch, but the Librie itself sucks.

        The display is very slow to update, which is theoretically fine for a book, but Sony doesn't seem to have taken this into account at all when designing the user-interface -- it's constantly trying to display conventional GUI elements ... slooooooowly (imagine how frustrating menus

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