December 18, 2024
Manga goes digital
Back in 2016, Jason Thompson opined on Gizmodo that "Manga publishing is dying." Unable to adapt to New Media, "most Japanese publishers have no coherent digital strategy and the extra step of licensing [manga] in America makes them even slower to react to change."
Yeah, I know, hindsight is 20/20, but that bit of prognostication aged rather badly. In less than a decade, Japan's manga market practically turned itself upside down and is currently the most profitable it has been in thirty years.
The shift has been reflected in the content itself, from the traditional pen and ink approach depicted in Bakuman (2013) to digital drawing tablets in Sleeper Hit (2016) and Eromanga Sensei (2017). By 2022, the digital manga market in Japan was twice the size of the print market.
I once bought Japanese manga from Honto. To take advantage of Honto's more affordable shipping rates (compared to Amazon-Japan), the entire process took about a month. Now Honto no longer stocks and ships paper books and I can get Japanese manga from BookWalker instantly.
Customer convenience is only half of the equation. Industry observer Haruyuki Nakano notes that
Hence Sony's interest in acquiring Kadokawa. Having Kadokawa under the same corporate umbrella would let Sony tap into the licensing income streams while eliminating the need to shop for content on behalf of its studios and streaming services. Because Sony would already own the IP.
Successful businesses adapt to new technology and the evolving marketplace. Traditional publishers like Kadokawa and the much bigger Hitotsubashi Group remain powerhouses in the industry. Japan's keiretsu can't turn on a dime. But once they get their bearings, it's full steam ahead.
Publishing is publishing, regardless of how the content gets distributed.
To paraphrase Seth Godin, they figured out they were in the storytelling and information business, not the newsprint business. Compared to magazines, higher quality tankoubon (print digest) sales have remained fairly robust.
Physical media is seeing a decline in video as well. Panasonic and Sony haven't updated their Blu-ray player lines since 2018. Samsung stopped making new players in 2019. LG stopped manufacturing Blu-ray players altogether. When the current inventory runs out, LG will not restock.
But just as vinyl LPs are still being pressed, there will be an ongoing demand for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. And I am also sure that print books will outlast them all.
Yeah, I know, hindsight is 20/20, but that bit of prognostication aged rather badly. In less than a decade, Japan's manga market practically turned itself upside down and is currently the most profitable it has been in thirty years.
I once bought Japanese manga from Honto. To take advantage of Honto's more affordable shipping rates (compared to Amazon-Japan), the entire process took about a month. Now Honto no longer stocks and ships paper books and I can get Japanese manga from BookWalker instantly.
Customer convenience is only half of the equation. Industry observer Haruyuki Nakano notes that
For some years now, publishers have been switching emphasis from traditional publishing to the rights and IP business. Shueisha had income of ¥51.1 billion for nondigital publishing in the period from June 2023 to May 2024, compared with ¥72.0 billion for digital publishing and ¥75.3 billion for business including publishing rights and sale of goods.
Hence Sony's interest in acquiring Kadokawa. Having Kadokawa under the same corporate umbrella would let Sony tap into the licensing income streams while eliminating the need to shop for content on behalf of its studios and streaming services. Because Sony would already own the IP.
Successful businesses adapt to new technology and the evolving marketplace. Traditional publishers like Kadokawa and the much bigger Hitotsubashi Group remain powerhouses in the industry. Japan's keiretsu can't turn on a dime. But once they get their bearings, it's full steam ahead.
Publishing is publishing, regardless of how the content gets distributed.
To paraphrase Seth Godin, they figured out they were in the storytelling and information business, not the newsprint business. Compared to magazines, higher quality tankoubon (print digest) sales have remained fairly robust.
Physical media is seeing a decline in video as well. Panasonic and Sony haven't updated their Blu-ray player lines since 2018. Samsung stopped making new players in 2019. LG stopped manufacturing Blu-ray players altogether. When the current inventory runs out, LG will not restock.
But just as vinyl LPs are still being pressed, there will be an ongoing demand for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. And I am also sure that print books will outlast them all.
Labels: anime, bookwalker, business, crunchyroll, ebooks, japanese tv, kadokawa, manga, publishing, sony, viki
October 30, 2024
Mieruko-chan
Donna Howard investigates the provenance of relics and antiques with the help of people from the past who are only visible to her.
For Natsume, his second sight (inherited from his grandmother) often results in the supernatural Shinto world intruding on his otherwise ordinary day-to-day life.
Mieruko can see dead people too. Her name is a pun on the verb meaning "I can see." That makes her privy to an extensive and weirdly thriving ecosystem of the living dead invisible to all but a select few.
Unfortunately for Mieruko, she has a hard time telling the good dead people from the bad dead people.
Even the guardian deities (inari) at the Shinto shrine are fierce and intimidating. Most of the dead people and creepy crawlies look like mutating corpses. Which is bad enough, except when they realize she can see them. Mieruko has gotten good at maintaining a look of deadpan indifference.
The rules governing Mieruko's abilities mirror those in Natsume's Book of Friends (which just debuted a new season). Creatures from the spirit world can only physically interact with you if they catch you looking at them first. Maintaining an attitude of stoic indifference can be the best recourse.
Which brings me to a new word I learned reading the manga: suruu sukiru (スルースキル), a transliteration of "through skill." Weblio defines it as the "ability to ignore bad things happening to you." In other words, the skill to work through a problem by tuning out and not getting upset about it.
But like Natsume, a girl's got her limits. There are times when Mieruko has no choice but to lend the ghouls an ear. Occasionally she discovers their intentions are benign. At other times, not so much. It's easier when the monsters behave like monsters, but even there she can jump to the wrong conclusions.
The occasional Sixth Sense twist will also fool the reader. And there's a touch of Dexter in the cat killer arc as well (which is featured in the anime).
Her best friend Hana is a ghost magnet ("Like moths to a flame," an old soothsayer ally observes), though not having second sight herself, she's clueless about their presence. One of their classmates also has second sight, though not being as powerful as Mieruko, she misjudges their respective abilities.
These moral dilemmas lend Mieruko-chan depth without being depressing or nihilistic. Some of the stories are genuinely heartwarming. If you're a fan of Edward Gorey or Charles Addams, Mieruko-chan is right in your wheelhouse.
Written and illustrated by Tomoki Izumi. Published in Japan by Kodansha and by Yen Press in the United States. The anime is based on the first three volumes of the manga. A live-action film adaptation is scheduled for release in 2025.
Related links
BookWalker (English emanga)
BookWalker (Japanese emanga)
Amazon (Kindle and paperback)
Crunchyroll (anime)
Labels: anime, bookwalker, crunchyroll, ebooks, japanese culture, kindle, manga, manga reviews, movies, religion, shinto
September 18, 2024
Yokohama Shopping Log
Happily, a few years later, the English translation has been published and the Japanese edition is available as an ebook.
Imagine that life as we know it came to a screeching halt. When the apocalypse was over and the dust settled, what remained looked like northern Maine in the summer and Yokohama was reduced to the size of Bangor. The world as we know it is over and human civilization has entered its twilight years. But otherwise we all feel fine.
Alpha Hatsuseno is an android (indistinguishable from a human being). No, she and her robot allies are not hunting down the few stragglers left. When she's not exploring the Hudson River School landscapes on her scooter or during one of her walkabouts, she runs an off-the-beaten-track coffee shop on the coast.
Until the coffee shop gets wiped out by a typhoon. But, hey, that's life. A good excuse for another walkabout.
In some places amidst the crumbling infrastructure, the street lights still come on at night. In others, the street lights have evolved into trees that glow in the dark where the streets used to be. The planet finds a way forward, simultaneously disintegrating and remaking itself as it takes a leisurely stroll into oblivion.
I like to imagine Yokohama Shopping Log as the sequel to Girl's Last Tour, as if Chito and Yuuri and their halftrack fell through a wormhole and ended up in the bucolic countryside of Non Non Biyori or Super Cub or Laid-Back Camp.
In the English language, the ending of the world has been most famously memorialized by Robert Frost.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
But contrary to Dylan Thomas, there's something to be said for going "gentle into that good night." Yokohama Shopping Log exemplifies the iyashikei genre that portrays "characters living out peaceful lives in calming environments." As it turns out, the world will not end with fire or ice but with a long wistful sigh.
Written and illustrated by Hitoshi Ashinano, whose show-don't-tell pen and ink artwork is often devoid of text. Published in Japan by Kodansha and by Seven Seas in the United States.
Related links
BookWalker (English emanga)
BookWalker (Japanese emanga)
Amazon (Kindle and paperback)
Labels: anime, anime lists, apocalyptic fiction, bookwalker, ebooks, japanese culture, manga, manga reviews, technology
August 28, 2024
BookWalker
When printing a book on paper, publishers in Japan typically pay royalties at the time of the print run. So a publisher isn't about to order a run of 100,000 books, churn out a press release boasting "100,000 books in print!" And end up shredding three-quarters of them.
Because the publisher would still be out of pocket for the royalties on those 100,000 books.
As a result, as illustrated in Sleeper Hit, a cautious publisher starts small, tracks the weekly sales numbers, and only prints a second edition when demand significantly outstrips the supply (the Japanese title of the series translates as "Print the Second Edition").
The typical long-tail manga (that didn't generate a ton of online buzz during first-run syndication) starts out with small print run. Unless brought back to life by an anime series or a live-action adaptation (or as in Sleeper Hit, a grass roots marketing push), that'll be it.
As a result, most tankoubon (paperback manga published in book format) do not stay in print for long.
But with ebooks, no published title should ever go out of print. As long as the files were archived, any manga published since the advent of digital typesetting can be easily converted to ebook format (the process is a bit tougher with text).
For Japanese emanga, BookWalker has become my online retailer of choice. You can access the English and Japanese sites with a single account and view your digital libraries in a browser or via the Android and iOS apps. (BookWalker no longer supports a desktop app.)
On the Japanese site, you can switch to the English site by clicking Global Store at the top right. On the English site, the button is labeled 日本ストア(Japan Store). One neat feature is that when you search for a manga in a series, it will return a link to the series as well.
Amazon is still worth checking out. Its prices are competitive, the Japanese Kindle store will keep growing, and it has a decent desktop app. Then again, BookWalker is no slacker when it comes to sales and specials too. All the more so given the current exchange rates.
Because the publisher would still be out of pocket for the royalties on those 100,000 books.
As a result, as illustrated in Sleeper Hit, a cautious publisher starts small, tracks the weekly sales numbers, and only prints a second edition when demand significantly outstrips the supply (the Japanese title of the series translates as "Print the Second Edition").
The typical long-tail manga (that didn't generate a ton of online buzz during first-run syndication) starts out with small print run. Unless brought back to life by an anime series or a live-action adaptation (or as in Sleeper Hit, a grass roots marketing push), that'll be it.
As a result, most tankoubon (paperback manga published in book format) do not stay in print for long.
For Japanese emanga, BookWalker has become my online retailer of choice. You can access the English and Japanese sites with a single account and view your digital libraries in a browser or via the Android and iOS apps. (BookWalker no longer supports a desktop app.)
On the Japanese site, you can switch to the English site by clicking Global Store at the top right. On the English site, the button is labeled 日本ストア(Japan Store). One neat feature is that when you search for a manga in a series, it will return a link to the series as well.
Amazon is still worth checking out. Its prices are competitive, the Japanese Kindle store will keep growing, and it has a decent desktop app. Then again, BookWalker is no slacker when it comes to sales and specials too. All the more so given the current exchange rates.
Related links
BookWalker (Japanese)
BookWalker (English)
Kindle Store
Yes Asia
Labels: books, bookwalker, business, ebooks, manga, publishing
August 07, 2024
Tear down this e-wall!
In Japan, copyrighted works like music, movies, and books are exempt from price fixing laws that prohibit the imposition of resale price maintenance rules on resellers. That means a Japanese publisher can enforce the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) on intellectual property published and sold in Japan.
Even so, the reimportation of Japanese books has never been part of the debate. Piracy has since become a bigger problem. But, if anything, walled gardens exacerbate the piracy problem.
And yet those walled gardens persist.
When you publish a Kindle ebook on Amazon's KDP platform, you can make it available on all Amazon platforms. In a sane world, every digital title in the Amazon catalog would be listed in every Amazon store worldwide. But purchasing Japanese Kindle ebooks on Amazon outside of Japan requires jumping through a bunch of hoops.
Precisely the sort of thing the World Wide Web was supposed to eliminate by being, you know, World Wide. Some progress has finally been made on that front, with legal Japanese IP finding purchase outside the walls.
Amazon US breaks out Japanese as its own category in the Foreign Language section of the Kindle store. Given the great appeal of manga, the e-walls there are crumbling the fastest. The Japanese edition of Ascendance of a Bookworm can be purchased from Amazon US in both the ebook and paperback formats.
Those walled gardens still exist. Companies like Apple and Amazon are basically tossing titles over the walls rather than breaking them down and creating an all-inclusive catalog in the cloud.
This makes sense for paperbacks, as warehousing and shipping traditionally printed books is expensive. It shouldn't be an issue with ebooks.
Except it is. For the customer, even in the digital realm, Amazon Japan is treated as a completely separate entity from Amazon US. For example, Amazon Japan carries the Japanese and English editions of Yokohama Shopping Log. Amazon US only has only the English edition.
By contrast, you can access both the Kadokawa BookWalker English and Japanese catalogs from a single account. And with yen exchange rates hitting lows not seen in forty years, Japanese ebooks are a bargain abroad. You can read BookWalker ebooks in a browser or by using their apps, which work like the Kindle Reader apps.
BookWalker has the English and Japanese ebooks for Yokohama Shopping Log on its respective websites. Granted, BookWalker is the storefront for a single publisher. But the only obstacle here is scale.
Amazon Web Services is the biggest cloud computing platform in the universe. Scale isn't a problem. Amazon could merge their ebook catalogs or take the single-login approach. Either way, "Mr. Bezos, tear down this e-wall!" (Yeah, I know, he's not really in charge anymore, but I couldn't resist the reference.)
Related links
BookWalker (English)
BookWalker (Japanese)
Kindle Store
Yes Asia
Labels: books, bookwalker, business, ebooks, kadokawa, kindle, manga, publishing, streaming, technology
May 11, 2024
Japanese language links
My main online dictionary is Weblio. I also reference Eijirou and Word Bank.
NHK World Japan is NHK's English language service. The live feed can be viewed online, along with an extensive VOD library and OTA in some areas (9.4 in Northern Utah). There are apps for most streaming platforms.
The previous 24 hours of NHK Radio newscasts can be streamed online.
For now, my primary sources for anime and Jdrama are Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Tubi. Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja. I purchase emanga at BookWalker.
A Japanese tutoring YouTube channel I watch on a regular basis is Kaname Naito.
Related links
Weblio
Eijirou
Word Bank
Word Hippo
NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
News from Japan
NHK Radio News
Crunchyroll
Tubi
Netflix
Samurai vs Ninja
BookWalker (Japanese)
BookWalker (English)
Kindle Store
Yes Asia
Labels: anime, bookwalker, crunchyroll, ebooks, hidive, japanese, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, kindle, language, netflix, nhk, nhk world, samurai vs ninja