“Cell Phone Novel” Readers re-read on paper after reading on their phones
2010/01/22
This report is the third installment of our periodic market research project regarding Cell Phone Novels (Keitai Novel in Japanese). The goal of this project is to determine the market recognition of Cell Phone Novels, as well as direction in usage patterns.
Based on research conducted by Internet.com and goo Research, the market recognition of Cell Phone Novels remained very high, with 90% of users surveyed recognizing the genre. Furthermore, users continued to read the printed renditions of the novels just as much as they did on the web.
The user demographic data for the current installment is as follows:
* 1081 users, from all over Japan
* 53.3% were men
* 16.4% were aged 10-19
* 18.2% were aged 20-29
* 21.3% were aged 30-39
* 16.1% were aged 40-49
* 15.7% were aged 50-59
* 12.3% were aged 60 and above
The percentage of users who had heard of the genre Cell Phone Novel was at 94.2% and 92.6% in August and October 2009 respectively. This grew to 2.4 points to 95% (1,027 users) for this installment.
Of the users who had heard of the genre, 24.7% had in fact read at least one such novel. This is up 0.6 points from 24.1% in our previous installment (the percentage was 27.0% for the first installment). The percentage relative to all users surveyed was also up at 23.5%% (1.1 point up from 22.4%). This percentage was the highest for the first installment at 25.4%.
Furthermore, of the 254 users who had in fact read at least one Cell Phone Novel, 193 users read the novel on the Web, and 109 users read the printed edition of the novel. This means that at least 48 users read the novel on both the Web and on paper. This trend has not changed from the first and second installments of this survey, with around printed editions standing at around 50% of Web readership.
From this survey, we can conclude that the market recognition of Cell Phone Novels continue to be high at 90%, and the trend that the number of users reading the novels on paper being about half of that who read the novels on the Web still remains.
