世論 What Japan Thinks

I’ve read a grand total of exactly one book on a PDA, and zero on mobile phones. I just found it too tiring squinting at a small screen, and as I’m not on an unlimited plan, downloading material to my mobile phone is prohibitively expensive. To find out what Japan thinks, let’s look at a survey reported by japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research on the topic of electronic books.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 20th of September 2007 1,088 members of goo Research’s online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.0% of the sample was male, 17.3% in their teens, 19.9% in their twenties, 18.0% in their thirties, 17.2% in their forties, 16.6% in their fifties, and 11.0% aged sixty or older.

Note that DoCoMo and SoftBank (and most likely au too) have free manga libraries for their customers, if you have an unlimited contract and looking for something to download and practice your Japanese on.
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infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey on the topic of electronic publishing contents consumption on mobile phones, or in other words reading books and magazines on a cell phone.

Demographics

Between the 8th and 15th of May 2007 5,380 people chose to complete a survey made publicly-available through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menuing system. 62.8% of the sample was female. As has been noted before and will be highlighted within the article below, this tends to bias the survey towards heavy users on unlimited usage plans, but unlimited plans are becoming the norm these days, with now over 30% of DoCoMo users on fixed-price plans.

Note that perhaps interestingly the original Japanese survey uses the term “comic”, not “manga” to describe the picture book format, so please don’t get upset by me using “comic” too!

I’ve personally never downloaded any reading material to my mobile phone, as I love the tangibility of real paper, and squinting at a tiny screen must be tiring on both the eyes and the arms.

SoftBank Mobile have also just recently started advertising that they have over 500 comic titles available for free download.
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japan.internet.com recently released an opinion poll, performed in conjuction with goo Research, to see what people thought about the novelisation (or novelization, if you prefer) of blogs and other web contents. 1,013 people completed their internet-based questionnaire, with 60.4% female. 27.0% of the respondents were in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, and 6.4% in their fifties.

When a similar survey was carried out a year ago, during the height of the “Densha Otoko” boom, 35.0% of the people surveyed then said they would want to buy a novelisation of a blog.

I can’t say I’ve come across any blogs I’d like to see as a book, although having said that I don’t follow any regular diary-like narrative-based blogs, which would seem to be the best material for making into a book.
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