DMG

[telophase]

Article in the Publishers' Weekly e-newsletter about the Digital Manga Guild.

Digital Manga Publishing is already living up to its name with a robust publishing program on its eManga.com site, which features online manga from its June, Dokidoki, and 801 manga imprints, as well as manga from Yaoi Press and from Tokyopop's Blu line. Almost all of these are yaoi manga, romances between two males, but eManga also features Harlequin manga, which are Japanese adaptations of English-language romance novels. Dark Horse published some of the Harlequin manga in 2005 but stopped after a few volumes, but DMP seems to be having more success online. In fact, Sasahara said, they are among the top sellers on the site. "I have been going to Barnes & Noble bookstores every now and then to see their manga, and obviously in every Barnes & Noble they allocate a huge space for the romance novel section," he said. "I looked at those people who flock around the romance novel area. They are middle aged women. Then I went to Yaoi-Con, and looked at those people coming to our booth, and they all look the same. And I said maybe they cross over, the romance novel and yaoi manga. I was right."

Comments

[movingfinger]

Do you think the growing availability of tablets such as iPad is pushing this trend? I know a lot of people who read manga and the sheer volume of volumes they accumulate is daunting to see. Digitial seems like the ideal form for most. (In fact, are there manga that play with the form of the book, as such?)

[telophase]

Ereaders and other tablet-type devices, probably so. The Japanese digital manga movement didn't get off the ground until they noticed that consumers were using their phones on trains and started putting out manga designed to be read on phones.*

With digital downloads, you don't have to face the store clerks to buy it, you can impulse-shop and buy it instantly, just about anywhere, and you can take it places without hauling the book itself around.

I suspect there are manga out there which play with the form of the book, but I also suspect very few of them get translated into English. :)



* In 2007, when Rachel and I went to Japan, we met a Japanese woman who showed us a yaoi manga on her phone - the phone vibrated when you paged to the bondage scene!

[movingfinger]

* In 2007, when Rachel and I went to Japan, we met a Japanese woman who showed us a yaoi manga on her phone - the phone vibrated when you paged to the bondage scene!

Oh, that's good. I consider that "playing with the form of the book," indeed!

[franzeska]

(In fact, are there manga that play with the form of the book, as such?)

Do you mean the printed form or the digital one? There are some manga that have weird color inserts and things, but most aren't very physically interesting, so a digital copy would be just as good (assuming the e-reader didn't cause eyestrain, yadda yadda).

The only manga that could lose a lot, IMO, are the ones I suspect people would buy physical copies of anyway--the weird collector's edition type ones that are already printed in large sizes on nice paper. Aoi Kiku by Hatoyama Ikuko is a good example. It's not just that it uses color: it's the whole experience of the texture of the paper and the sudden bits of color and how they interact with the color of the paper and the physical feel of the volume. Most of Okano Reiko's work is like that too. I can't remember whether either of them does this, but some wide-ban manga do have things like thin sheets of that tracing paper stuff books sometimes put next to color plates. Occasionally, the color art inserts fold out and are quite large. Some particularly unusual volumes will have those ribbon bookmarks sewn into the spine.

Most manga, however, are exactly like mass market paperbacks: the physical format is just what's cheap and expedient for delivering a story to a customer.