Women fuel Japan's mobile manga craze

Japanese business site JINBIN has a slightly odd, but somewhat interesting, piece on the popularity of manga downloadable to mobile phones.

There has to be a better name for that. "Mobile manga," maybe? Anything beats that website's phrasing: "manga for receiving by mobile phones."

According to the article, 3 million pieces of manga offered by NTT Solmare Corp. -- the leading distributor of manga-by-phone -- were downloaded by mobile phone users in March, at a cost of 40 yen each (roughly 36 cents, U.S.). So that's what, a little over $1 million in one month? I was never good at math.

And who's behind that insane popularity? Women, mostly.

"When we increased the distribution of manga pieces targeted at women, the sales exploded," Solmare's Katsuyuki Kobayashi told the website.

Competitor eBOOK Initiative Japan launched last year, serving primarily teen-age girls and young women. "As a result," JINBIN reports, "the monthly sales have gone up by 10 folds in the past year, and the number of monthly down loading has topped 100,000."