First Book Ever Written Using Mobile Phone is Published
Italian author Robert Bernocco has amazed the literary world by publishing the world's first book written using a mobile phone. Bernocco published it on Lulu.com, the online marketplace for digital content and brain-child of Canadian businessman, Bob Young.
Context & Ripple Effects
The mobile phone has been quietly crossing over from communications device to creative tool: Reuters covered filmmakers shooting movies on cellphones back in February 2006 (Have a cell phone? Make a movie), and gizmag's March 2007 universal charger story marked how thoroughly the hardware had saturated daily life. Robert Bernocco's mobile-written book, published through Lulu.com — the self-publishing marketplace built by Canadian businessman Bob Young — extends that crossover to long-form text.
What makes the Lulu.com angle matter is distribution: a manuscript composed on a phone can go straight to a print-on-demand marketplace with no publisher, typesetting house, or retail shelf in between. The claim of a 'first' is a marker moment for both self-publishing platforms and handset makers looking for reasons to position phones as production devices rather than just consumption screens.
First-order effects
- Bernocco and Lulu.com get the marketing value of a documented first: the author gains visibility, while Lulu acquires a proof point that its pipeline can carry work created entirely off the desktop.
Second-order effects
- Rival self-publishing and digital-content marketplaces are pushed to treat mobile-composed manuscripts as a normal input rather than a curiosity, competing on how frictionlessly phone-authored work reaches print and digital sale.
Third-order effects
- If the phone-as-pen pattern holds, the default authoring tool for long-form writing detaches from the PC, and publishers plus marketplaces compete instead on who owns the path from pocket-sized drafts to paying readers.
The trend: Mobile phones are evolving from communication and capture devices into end-to-end creation tools, with open self-publishing marketplaces turning what people write on them into sellable products.