Small-screen manga big in Japan
Prose novels are not the only works to move toward e-book form. They may also not be the most successful. According to the New York Times, the popularity in Japan of cell phone e-manga has been growing by leaps and bounds, and may account for as much as 10% of the manga industry’s total income. (Business Week also looked at this phenomenon two years ago, when it was not yet as developed.)
The cell phone platform makes purchasing and payment convenient (as with cell phone games and ringtones in America, the purchase price is simply added to the customer’s phone bill). Another big selling point is the familiar benefit of title privacy:
“It’s a bit hard commenting publicly on this, but the most popular comics on the mobile are adult-oriented ones for women,” including love stories with sexually explicit content, [Yusuke Nakabayashi, a media consultant at Nomura Research Institute, a unit of Nomura Securities,] said. Translation: Women who do not want to be seen reading these titles in public places like the train helped create the market for manga on the cellphone, which accords them privacy in ways that magazines and books do not.
This is an interesting parallel to e-book sales in the west. As has been noted before, adult-content erotica titles have been among the biggest sellers at e-book stores—probably for precisely the same reason.
The desire not to be seen reading a guilty pleasure in public is a powerful driver for book and e-book sales at both ends of the kid-friendliness spectrum: Bloomsbury, Harry Potter’s UK publisher, famously came out with a line of Potter books with prosaic covers for adults to be seen reading on the train—and American Potter readers have been observed to pull the dust jacket off before getting on the subway.
It is amusing how much the rest of the discussion of cell phone manga in the Times article parallels the discussions of prose e-books that have been going on for years. One commenter mentions the decline of paper distribution; others complain that the small screen view is more restrictive and does not show the work as the artist originally intended. (This latter complaint at least does have more legitimacy for a visual medium than the oft-heard e-book complaint about reading small chunks of text at a time.)
But one way in which cell phone manga does not parallel e-books is the relative adoption rate. In a market that has declined by 30% over the last decade, the big jump in cell phone manga sales is seen by many as the potential savior of a dying industry. Compare this to e-books in the west, which account for less than 1% of the total book market and seem to be considered an object of more distaste than desire by publishers at present.
For American readers interested in checking out cell phone manga titles, the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo has a number of untranslated manga titles, including Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed, available in the iPhone app stores.
TeleRead has mentioned manga coming to e-book devices a number of times, including here and here—and we looked at a couple of articles wondering if the Kindle and iPhone could “kill” or “save [American] comic books” here.
August 4th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Before there were comic books, there were comic pages, just like in the Sunday paper… those transformed to the more restricted strips of the daily paper, and later, the daily and Sunday strips were repackaged into comic books.
Sequential art has undergone transformations before, to best fit the most easily-distributed medium, and it can do so again. Cell-phone manga is the perfect example of that, and American comics can take exactly the same path if they choose to (or with larger-screen devices, or dedicated readers, or PCs and laptops).
Each time, they’ve also had to undergo a financial transformation to make it profitable, which is always painful, and shakes out the tree of publishers significantly. But it can be done, and if they want to stay in business, the comics publishers need to get on the stick.
FYI, if more graphic novels were available for my laptop or PDA, I’d be reading a lot more of them now.