The short story is generally regarded to be a dying form, but maybe the mobile phone will bring it back.
The June issue of Writing Magazine (www.writingmagazine.co.uk) mentions a young Japanese author known only as Yoshi, "who handed out flyers to 2000 teen-age girls outside a Tokyo subway station, publicising his story Deep Love. Yoshi used the limitations of the format--such as the text limit of 1600 characters that a mobile phone can hold--to his advantage, writing snappy prose that kept the pace moving and favouring simple language. As a result, Deep Love appealed to those who tended not to read in other formats."
"Within three years, his website had received twenty million hits and Deep Love graduated to conventional print, with sales of over 100,000 and then to the silver screen."
