The landscape of fiction is changing. I’ve talked before about e-book readers, and Amazon’s Kindle has recently become available in the UK.

But in a sense, e-book readers aren’t so exciting. They take precisely the same content as a printed book and turn it into a portable electronic format.

Mobile phone novels

Mobile phone novels are written in instalments and delivered to subscribers. More revolutionary are mobile phone novels, already extremely popular in Japan. These novels are written in daily instalments and delivered directly to the phones of subscribers. The writers tend to be young and female, their stories tend towards the over-the-top soap-opera-esque melodrama. The kind of story that ends with a cliff-hanger every day, encouraging the reader to come back for more.

But if this format sounds like it couldn’t possibly produce ‘literature’, remember that Dickens and Dumas both wrote many of their greatest novels in instalments for periodical magazines. Mobile phone novels have certainly proved successful. In 2007 five of the ten best-selling novels in Japan had originally been mobile phone novels.

This development throws up some interesting possibilities for fiction. While the Kindle is the headline-grabbing piece of e-reading technology, the iPhone is far more widely owned (Amazon is estimating it will have sold 2.2 million Kindles by the end of 2010, while Apple had sold ten times that many iPhones by January 2009).

And iPhone users can download a nifty little piece of e-book reading software, Stanza, for free – which includes thousands of free classic books. The technology certainly now exists to make novels written specifically for the mobile phone a genuine possibility.

‘Smart’ novels

Japanese writers of mobile phone novels already use typography to enhance their storytelling: when a character is anxious, the lines might be close together; if they’re relaxed, lines could be widely spaced or drift across the screen.

The possibilities of such enhancements only increase with the sophistication of the device:

• Could an iPhone story address the reader by name, or use contacts from the ‘most-phoned’ database as characters?
• Could the story ‘know’ if you’re reading it for the second time and perhaps alter itself accordingly?
• Could it respond to where the reader is, to what time of day it is, to the headlines in the news that morning?

Opportunities for writers

These small-screen formats might mean a return of the short story as a widely-read form. It’s never quite been clear why the short story went out of favour: certainly short stories can be as gripping or entertaining as novels, but it’s been widely-held in publishing circles in recent years that ‘short stories don’t sell’.

Collections of short stories are generally sold to publishers for much lower advances than novels. But the short story might be an ideal form for reading on an iPhone, on a tube journey or waiting in a queue.

As a writer, I’m interested by the different possibilities of writing on a device like the iPhone. I recently experimented with writing short stories on mine: I found that it was fairly easy to write, but hard to edit.

In some ways this was quite liberating – like a return to the old discipline of working on a typewriter, where your words become unalterable after your fingers have touched the keys.

It reminded me of Jack Kerouac, who would apparently glue many sheets of paper together into one long roll, so he could write without having to stop to change his sheet of paper. Writing long like this can take your work off into interesting directions. So perhaps it’s not impossible that mobile phone novels will produce a masterpiece one day!