Half of Japan’s top 10 best-selling books last year — half! — started out as cell phone-based books, according to the New York Times.

The books-on-phones genre started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that society in Japan were writing serialized novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries.

The popularity of these blog novels on cell phones sparked huge interest among readers in writing such novels. Last month, the site passed the 1 million novel mark.

Some of these amateur writers become so famous on the cell phone medium that the big publishing houses seek

them out and offer lucrative deals for print versions. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school.

One of the obvious reasons that cell phone literature has taken off in Japan is that so many Japanese society, including students, have faraway daily commutes in trains too crowded for open books. The size and portability of cell phones have made them the most fundamental source for all media, including “printed” media.

Which raises the question: Can the English-speaking world REPLICATE JAPAN’S CELL PHONE BOOK CRAZE?