Opinion

Between a rock and a hard place

By Matthew A. Thorn

When it seems the planet is inundated with Japanese manga, it's only natural to assume that manga publishers are at the peak of their profits, but the truth is that they are caught in a decade-long pinch. True, Japan remains the Hollywood of comic art, and any comics publisher anywhere else in the world would envy the readership and profits enjoyed by even a mid-sized manga publisher here. Even so, the manga industry is being steadily squeezed by new media on one side, and by what is euphemistically called "book recycling" on the other.

Manga have accounted for a huge slice of the publishing pie - about a third of all unit sales - ever since the late 1980s. But while manga retains its unrivaled place in the Japanese publishing world, sales of all print publications have been gradually declining since 1995. Why?

Ten years ago, you could step into a train car in Japan and expect to see no fewer than five or six people reading manga, and many more reading some other kind of book or magazine. Today you step into a train car, and while you still see some readers, what strikes you is the number of people who are using their cellphones to send and receive mail, or to surf the Internet. Advances in cellphone

and video-game technology, as well as the gradual spread of broad-band and the growing ubiquity of the Internet have dulled the shine that was once enjoyed by the medium of manga.

At the same time, the once benign field of used-book sales has transformed into a monster that threatens the very existence of the print publishing industry. Used-book shops traditionally specialized in the rare, obscure, and out-of-print, but today huge chains, such as BookOff, buy newly released books from early buyers who have finished reading them, and then re-sell them at a sizable discount to those who were willing to wait a few weeks. What could have been four sales of a new book is reduced to just one, which means both publisher and creator get a quarter of the profit.

With book "recyclers" unwilling to compromise (for example, by not selling books until six months after their original release date), it seems that nothing short of a change in copyright law can stop the flow of blood from this wound inflicted on the publishing industry.

On the other hand, even some manga artists and editors concede that part of the problem of declining sales may be internal. "If we would make manga that people want to keep on their shelves," says artist Takemiya Keiko, "maybe they wouldn't sell them to the recycling shops."

Shukan ST: Oct. 29, 2004

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