The fact they are discussing is that manga sales in America have dropped 43% in the past 4 years, with declining sales in Japan as well. Considering the interests the forum has, I thought this might make for some interesting discussion.
A few possible reasons are discussed:
- The manga market has become too saturated with junk titles
- Fewer anime shows that can act as a gateway to manga are showing on American television
- Bookstores that traditionally sold a lot of the manga like Borders have gone out of business
- No digital market strategy
- An aging readership
I think lack of a coherent and robust digital plan has been the most damaging. Like other traditional media that has ignored or been slow to react to the ubiquitous technology in modern life, manga has suffered by not adopting a business solution that makes digital media a major part of their publishing. This is also tied to the aging readership - older adults are more likely to buy manga, but most the young readers are used to getting everything for free online. Online movies, online books, even free-to-play MMOs.
I would also say that junk titles are also a problem. Or maybe simply the saturation of the market. Back in the 1980s and most of the 1990s, there were very few manga titles that made it stateside to America. If you were a manga fan it was easy to collect and read them all. In fact, most of the manga that Americans had access to was top-shelf quality-wise, because only the largest of Japanese hits would be considered for publication abroad, so the American market was getting the best of the best.
Now there is so much manga available that it is overwhelming. With whole aisles devoted to manga in bookstores, sometimes stacked two books tall to a shelf, that is a lot of manga to browse and try to find something in. There is also a practice I have seen more and more of - shrink-wrapping manga volumes. As Michael Pinto discusses on Fanboy.com, this hurts "discoverability" of new manga titles. You'd better damn well know what titles you want before you come to the store, because you won't find any new interests by browsing.
Add to that disturbing development the fact that manga in America is usually $10-$12 dollars a volume. That's a lot of money to pay for something sight unseen on the hope it will live up to the backcover blurb once the plastic is torn off. This lack of discoverability means I rarely find a new manga series to start. Usually I have to rely on word of mouth (which never seems to line up with my interests) or by checking out scanlations of manga series. Sometimes this means disappointment when I buy the manga and find it has been censored by the American publishers or the translation isn't as good as the scanlation.Every volume of manga was shrink-wrapped. I often see this where expensive art books are sold, but usually there’s one display copy that you can thumb through to see if your $50+ will be well spent. Yet there was no display copy to be found in the many aisles of Kinokuniya, and like a supermarket selling meat each and every package was “sealed for your safety”. Now I understand that there are a few crazy people with too much time who might read the entire volume in the store — or photograph it. But the side effect of this is that someone like myself can’t make a purchase from taking a quick look inside the book.
Software people have a name for this — it’s called “discoverability”. . . . It’s the idea that from a casual glance you may find something that you weren’t looking for that engages your attention. Part of what killed the music business was that outlets like radio and MTV stopped playing their product. When this occurred most people stopped discovering new artists — and the result is that the while a Lady Gaga may occur occasionally break out, for the most part you have a stagnant business in sharp decline. And what happened to music CDs is now happening to manga.
. . . . The result is that a kid discovering an older artist for the first time will be stopped dead in their tracks at the shrink-wrap. . . . And just so you know many of the titles that were shrink-wrapped were aimed at non-otakus like kids titles and romantic girly girl manga.
Another problem I often see at bookstores selling manga is that they will have some, but not all volumes. If I do go to a bookstore knowing what manga series I want, I'll often discover that crucial volumes are missing. They might have volumes 1 and 3, but not 2. As a consequence of this, I usually buy all my manga online (which again suffers from lack of discoverability - I have to already know what I want). This has led to a change in my reading habits. Instead of going to the bookstore and buying each volume as it comes out, instead I go online once or twice a year and buy all the volumes that have been released since the last time I read the book. By this time many of the volumes are marked down or I can get bundle deals.
So what does everyone else think?
