The eBook market in Japan keeps growing. Japanese who were famous for their high consumption of printed media use more and more digital media. Today 82% of all eBook are read on mobile phones. According to the ‘Keitai Hakusho 2009’ (impress R & D) the mobile e-Book market was 290 million dollars in 2008. 65% of all eBooks were mobile mangas (comic books) and mostly consumed by young men. For Japanese women mobile novels are really popular now.

The latest surveys conducted by Japan Internet.com K.K. and Research Plus show that the mobile novel market is changing very quickly. Two surveys, the first in October 2008 and the second in March 2009, focused on mobile novel and Japanese women in their 20s, 30s and 40s.

Compared to half year ago the usage of mobile novels went up 9%. Today 24.3% read mobile novels on a regular base, compared to 15.3% in late 2008. The most popular mobile novel site is still ‘Mahou no island’ with a market share of 38%. But that’s a big loss compared to a half year ago. Many new novel sites appeared in late 2008 and now have a combined market share of 35%.

Most content of ‘Mahou no island’ and other ‘mobile novel’ sites is produced user-created content. The satisfaction with this content deceased a little bit (-2%) but is still very high (58.9%). By far the most popular mobile novel genre is still ‘romance and love’ with 61%, followed by ‘mystery’ and ‘fantasy’ with only 8%. Research Plus even calls the new media ‘mobile novels’ the new ‘Harlequin’, referring to Harlequin Enterprises Limited, the world leading publisher of series romance and women’s fiction.