[by Blake Robinson] Many bestselling novels in Japan are now being written on mobile. They’re called “keitai shousetsu” and comprise half of Japan’s top-10 works of fiction from 2007. Each has sold an average of 400,000 copies and are written entirely on cell phones complete with emoticons and common SMS abbreviations, reports SMH.

One of the most successful works, Moshimo Kimiga (If You...), was written by a nursery school teacher who goes by the pen name Rin. Her work is 142-pages of high school drama about an HIV-afflicted teen, which apparently appeals to adolescent Japanese girls; and audience who depend on their cell phones much as a hiker would a compass.

Another piece called Koizora (Love Sky) has even been optioned to be made into a film. It tells the tale of a high school girl who becomes pregnant after a gang raping, but eventually has a miscarriage. Despite the subject matter of the keitai shousetsu works Goma Books president has a positive outlook for future of the medium, so positive in fact that he’s determined to turn the medium into “a new kind of culture.”

Ironic to the source medium, however, many of the works are now being successfully sold in hardcopy. Moshimo, for instance, has sold more than 420,000 copies — not counting the original electronic version that was marketed in installments.

Whatever the case, before discrediting this phenomenon as just another teen fad, consider this, one publisher recently translated to keitai shousetsu Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and has sold 300,000 copies, which isn’t bad for a public domain work being sold in a digital format with little overhead.

While I can’t imagine reading Dostoevsky on a cell phone, or anything of much length, it’s interesting to see e-books finding their ways onto more devices than just Amazon’s Kindle.