What The Hell Is A Cell Phone Novel?

Am I just being old-fashioned? A lot of my recent posts have revolved around the idea that book reading is a special kind of reading. Specifically, that it is a lot different from the kind of reading one does on the internet, that kind of reading being characterized by its brevity, its short attention span, its schizophrenia (reading an article about the war in Iraq six seconds after you finished catching up on Brangelina's latest adoption). I think I may have gone slightly too far, though. Every other article I read about books or publishing deals with how they are being made to fit into this impatient, disjointed mindset. For example, did you know that 86 percent of Japanese teens read cell phone novels? CELL PHONE NOVELS. Reading something like that I picture Dickens a la text "it ws the bst of tms it ws the wrst of tms LOL TTYL" and I can't help but conclude that if people accept this sort of thing as a novel, the novel will soon die off. This isn't reading! Flipping to a page of your e-book in between checking your email and playing cell phone games is not reading, I cry out instinctively. But it is. Upon checking my outrage and taking an honest look at myself I realize that I very rarely read in concentrated, studious bouts, but more often during commercials, while waiting for something to start, or as I carry out tedious office work and try to pay attention to my audiobook at the same time. I'm sure an earlier generation would have cried out at this just as much, but I know that I still get a lot out of reading. Admittedly it is impossible to read anything challenging this way, so some of the loftiest benefits of reading are out of the question; I probably won't have any philosophical relevations or blazing moments of intellectual clarity, or whatnot. But I am still doing something which is, in fact, quite different from everyday internet reading. Like dolphins and sharks, blurby book reading and normal internet browsing may have evolved similar characteristics to survive in today's tech sea, but they are fundamentally different. I maintain that book reading is special, but in more than one way. Many of its qualities can remain intact even as others are, in my opinion, being destroyed. Even if one reads in distracted bursts, there is an ongoing narrative or argument that requires sustained attention. It isn't like flitting from site to site. And the content is typically more profound than most internet browsing fare. So even I don't fully embrace these changes, I accept them as less than appocalyptic. And I know, in any case, that there's no use in insisting on some artificially inflated standard for readers to live up to. They'll either ignore you or be driven away. Is it better to adapt to what people want, at the possible expense of quality? Yes, I think it is. So I'm going to try to tone it down a bit.