Messaging with pagers became popular with teenage girls in Japan in the 1990s, and the popularity of mobile communication devices eventually gave way to the development of literary genres based on these new media forms. The use of compact and highly contextual writing is a well-established part of
Japanese literary tradition, and cell phone novels have been compared to classic Japanese literature such as the 11th-century
Tale of Genji. The first cell phone novel was "published" in
Japan in 2003 by a Tokyo man in his mid-thirties who calls himself Yoshi. His first cell phone novel was called
Deep Love, the story of a teenager engaged in "subsidized dating" (
enjo kōsai) in
Tokyo and contracting
AIDS. It became so popular that it was published as an actual book, with 2.6 million copies sold in Japan, then spun off into a
manga, a
television series, and a
film. The cell phone novel became a hit mainly through
word of mouth and gradually started to gain traction in
Taiwan,
China, and
South Korea among young adults. In Japan, several sites offer large prizes to authors (up to $100,000 US) and purchase the publishing rights to the novels. Kiki, the pseudonymous author of
I, Girlfriend won the Japan Keitai Novel Award in 2008. In 2005,
Random House purchased a share in Vocel, a
San Diego–based company which mobile study guides. In Europe it started in about 2007, promoted by people like Oliver Bendel and
Wolfgang Hohlbein, and publishers such as Cosmoblonde or Blackbetty Mobilmedia. Teenagers in South Africa have been downloading an m-novel called
Kontax – a novel specifically written for mobile phones. The pioneer cell phone novel in North America, a novel called
Secondhand Memories by Takatsu – that can be viewed on Textnovel, the first English language cell phone novel site founded in the United States – has been viewed more than 60,000 times and published in print in 2015 as a paperback. == Reason for popularity ==