12.15.08: I have a piece in this week's issue of The New Yorker, about young women in Japan who write novels on their cell phones and are taking the literary world by storm. The novels, published as regular books, are selling amazingly well: five of the ten literary bestsellers for 2007 originated as cell-phone novels (keitai shosetsu in Japanese). The readers, like the authors, are young women, teens, and girls in the provinces, who likewise read the novels in short installments on their phones, through specially-designed media-sharing Web sites. They buy the books as souvenirs, emblems of their membership in an on-line community.