According to their press release last Friday, two Japan-based startups have launched a site that matches user-generated mobile books with voice actors to provide professional-sounding audio books for the mobile. Mobile books are booming in Japan, rising quickly to become a $283m industry in 2008, up from $46m in 2005, and representing 70% of all digital book consumption. The industry is widely expected to expand to $1.4bn by 2010.
The service called "MazeNama Gakuen" invites users to create mobile novels based on a set of 22 pre-defined characters. The panel selects 8 quality novels among the entries, then lets the community pit the novels against each other. The final selected novels will then be enacted by Japan-famous voice actors and released as podcasts.
The two startups effectively joined forces on their separate mobile offerings, the free user-generated mobile voice-post site "Mazeteyo Mobilevoice" by Tokyo-based Visual Works and the user-generated mobile book-post site "Forest Novel" by Hokkaido-based Crypton Future Media. The service launched last Friday is currently only available on Japanese mobiles on the three main carriers in Japan.
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