Why Manga Publishing Is Dying (And How It Could Get Better)

[lexissexist]

If in 2007, manga was like a foreign movie star who had arrived on American shores to make it big, the last four years have been like watching that star run out of roles, run out of money, sell their house, go into rehab, and end up barely limping along in infomercials.
Dropping Sales
Manga sales in America have dropped 43% since 2007, an even bigger

Comments

[izabera]

Very long but interesting, I like the "legitimazing the bootleggers" approach.
I lost most of my manga collection through water damage and I would love to replace it with the digital equivalent, but most of it isn't for sale :(

The author missed out something that concerns all non-Japanese readers: the very poor quality of "official" translations. Scanlation teams often provided better translations than the licensed version and better knowledge of the cultural context.

[sunleth]

This. And I don't like how they put SFX and the "cultural context" information at the very back in one section. I'm used to reading small print like in the Taiwanese editions and scanlations where they're right at the bottom of the page.

[cherrycoloured]

I'm the opposite. I hate when the translation notes are on the page itself, since it covers up part of the artwork and is too small for my eyes. I guess it's a cultural thing, since I'm used to reading English editions!

[izabera]

That's disappointing and yet not really surprising :(

[fallblau_129]

true!

[yilei]

This.

And not just the "poor quality", but there's a certain amount of censorship that happens too that I'm just not okay with. I want to be able to read my manga with the original meanings and stuff in tact, but due to some of the content in some of the titles, that gets edited out and toned down. I can read Japanese myself and not have to bother with it, which is why I never buy manga in English, but I have a lot of friends who don't know Japanese that rely on translations of say "Yu Yu Hakusho" and we've made comparisons between my Japanese volumes and their English volumes. In the end, they're happy that they're at least able to get the basic story, but they're also disappointed that they don't get the same "feeling" from the page as they would if they knew Japanese or if the publisher didn't have to censor the English version.