Manga in the West

[conglomerate_]

Author's Note: Just an essay I wrote for uni, the first one that got a H1, which is equivalent to a high-distinction (80%&up). This pretty much the whole essay and reference list, minus the footnotes.

Subject written for: Contemporary Publishing Industry
Wordcount: around 4000

Topic

Comments

[sinnatious]

Followed your links here (plugging does work! :O), an excellent read! I especially enjoyed reading some more on the history - something you pick snippets up of every now and again but not very often do you find such a concise yet thorough account. Well, it is a university essay I suppose. I kind of feel like I stepped back in time reading this, even though the subject matter is so contemporary. ^__^

It's pretty awesome that in a lot of the specialist bookstores now the lag for manga is only a week or so behind that of our American counterparts. And then you take what Amazon has done for importing - the aspect of internet shopping making importing so much easier was maybe the only aspect of spread distribution you didn't cover. I'm curious as to what percentage of the market imports from overseas retailers direct. Probably not a statistic easily acquired outside of the dubious 'survey method' though.

The digital manga aspect remains a curiosity - it doesn't seem to have taken off, are companies still shilling it now? So much can change in the six months since this was posted.

Oops, sorry, sort of waffled on there - all I wanted to do was comment and express what an awesome essay it was, though I guess the mark it received was already plenty of proof of that. ;)