The 21st century marches onward

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Publishers Follow TRAINMAN to New Model

Japan's Shinchosha has sold over 500,000 copies of TRAINMAN, a book of e-mails from a chat room in which a man's efforts to win a girl over were "encouraged, derided and ultimately celebrated," the LA Times reports. Spinoffs include multiple manga and a film version shooting this summer.

"It has also sent Japanese book publishers frantically surfing chat rooms looking for the next gold mine of electronic correspondence. TRAINMAN proved that the narrative threads of a chat line can be quickly and cheaply edited into book form, conveniently bypassing the need for the ego management that goes with nurturing writers."

The Times says Japanese publishers have created whole divisions searching chat rooms for good stories.

Those nutty Japanese! They've never worried much about age-of-consent laws. If that happened here, the "girl" would have turned out to be a 52-year-old sheriff's deputy from Maricopa County, and the man would be in jail.