Lately I can't get enough of reading about the Kindle, the new e-book reader from Amazon.com that looks like a heating tile on the Battlestar Galactica and holds 200 books. Which I thought was pretty exciting technology, until I learned that not only have the Japanese been reading books on portable devices for years, but they're actually using them to write books:

In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones...

One book, Koizora (Love Sky), about a high-school girl who is bullied, gang-raped, and becomes pregnant, has sold more than 1.2 million copies since being released.

Oh, those Japanese and their gang-rape. Lovable scamps! Anyhow, if you're writing a book on your damn phone, your thumbs must look like Popeye's forearms. Maybe it's easier since they use those little pictures for letters? Like, you put together a picture of a tree and a picture of a river and it's a whole sentence or something. That must speed things up.

For their part, Amazon has set up something called Digital Text Platform. You can upload whatever text you want, charge whatever you want for it, and they'll put it up on their Kindle store. If anybody's dumb enough to buy it, Amazon gives you 35%. Hmmm... Any requests, suckers?