Japanese publishers aren’t just printing p-books from cell phone novels—they’re leaving in the shorter lines and the rest even though the medium is different. If you subscribe to the New Yorker, you might check out this week’s dispatch from Japan on the cell phone scene there.
So what do you think? Are the Japanese publishers correct to preserve so much of the cell phone format?
It’s a tricky issue–this relationship between content and format. The 1970s version of The Solomon Scandals had much longer paragraphs than the current version. Here’s the rule I followed when I updated the book. With the e-book version in mind, I shortened paragraphs as much as I could without irritating readers of the p-version.
Tech wasn’t my only consideration. Whatever the medium, people these days just aren’t as patient with long paragraphs as in the past.
Handling the complex
When I had complex thoughts that I’d have put in the past in one extra-long paragraph, I generally used another approach. I created short scenes with the graphs that I would have combined into a single.
In addition, with shorter attention spans in mind, I tried to keep chapters short.
That said, I don’t know if the Japanese publishers are doing their reader a favor by so slavishly sticking to the original cell phone format, which uses horizontal lines instead of the vertical ones normally found in Japanese books. But I could be wrong. What do you think? I’d be especially interested in hearing from readers familiar with Japanese culture.
Detail: Alas, the New Yorker piece is apparently hidden behind a pay wall.
Jan 2 Update: Here is the link to the actual article, Letter from Japan: I Heart Noves by Dana Goodyear.
Image credit: CC-licensed photo from mujitra.
Japanese writers have long employed a more “granular” approach to formatting text. For example, dialog gets its own paragraph, separated from the dialog tag (if any). Japanese “quotation mark” fonts often include the indent. Manga has probably been a recent influence.
There is considerable variation among writers, but as a general rule Japanese writers use a lot more paragraph breaks. When translating genre fiction (Japanese to English), I regularly combine paragraphs at a ratio of two and even three-to-one.
Italics are not used. Most “text decoration” is done with typographic symbols, which makes ebook conversion quite straightforward. Also, mass-market paperbacks in Japan use A6 (4 x 6 inches), and the A6 “light novel” format maxes out at about 40,000 words.