Your eyes probably hurt just thinking about it: Tens of thousands of Japanese mobile phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens.

Several mobile phone Web sites offer hundreds of novels - classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium.

Mobile phone books are also gradually starting to gain traction in China and South Korea. In Japan, though, some people are really getting hooked, finding the phone an intimate tool for reading.

It was especially effective for intensifying the thrills of a horror story, said Satoko Kajita, who oversees the content development at Bandai Networks Co. Ltd., a Tokyo-based wireless service provider that offers 150 books on its site.

"It's hard to understand unless you try it out," Kajita said.

A recent marketing study by Bandai found that more than half the readers were female, and many were reading mobile phone books at homes.

Surprisingly, people are using mobile phone books to catch up on classics they never finished reading. Also people are perusing sex manuals and other books they're too embarrassed to be caught reading or buying. More common is keeping an electronic dictionary in their phones in case the need arises.

In Japan, mobile phone books have already won respect as an emerging culture.

A writer who goes by the single name Yoshi wrote Deep Love, a series of stories about a Tokyo teenage prostitute. He began by posting them on an obscure mobile phone site he started and made reader payment voluntary.

Deep Love, which uses erotic language and violence to create a page-turner despite a preposterous plotline, became a hit, mainly through word of mouth among young adults. It went on to become a movie, TV show and "manga" or Japanese-style comic book.

It's even been turned into a real book, with some 2.6 million copies sold.

Like the Internet, mobile phone publishing offered an opportunity for unknown writers, and it delivered new kinds of fun because it's interactive, said Katsuya Yamashita, executive producer at Starts Publishing Corp., which publishes Yoshi's works.

Yoshi, a former prep-school instructor who sees his readers as "a community," reads the dozens of e-mail messages teenage fans send him daily and uses their material for story ideas.

He also knows immediately when readers are getting bored and changes the plot when access tallies start dipping for his stories.

"It's like playing live music at a club," he said. "You know right away if the audience isn't responding, and you can change what you're doing right then and there."

Source: Shenzhen Daily/Agencies