Mobile Manga Sales Jump

Could mobile comics be a saviour for manga? While print comic sales in Japan are far from in freefall like some in the west they have dropped over the past decade. Now, the New York Times reports that direct-to-cell sales of manga have jumped up 43-per cent from last year -- a significant jump in and of itself, but even more impressive given the cell phone manga market's typical slow yearly growth.

For a variety of reasons, the mobile version has manga booming again, the Times reports. In the year ending in March, Japanese manga publishers raked in ¥32.9 billion in revenue, up 43 per cent from the previous year and from next to nothing in 2003, when manga first became available by cellphone, according to Impress R&D, a research company in Tokyo, which published the data at the annual Tokyo International Book Fair in July.

Mobile comics have are popular in Japan for a number of reasons, not least of which being fast cellular networks, good prices and convenient payment processes plus a range of great mobile devices to view comics on.

Like manga comic creators, many of these new manga readers are also women, who are devouring female-skewed shojo manga with its themes of love, romance, and, sometimes, explicit sexual content with relish.

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, the Times claims. (Of course, reading manga on a Japanese commuter train often isn't easy, either: as this 2007 article notes, fans sometimes have to read their comic with it perched over their head, they often get so crowded, so you can see the appeal of reading on a mobile!)

Men, on the other hand, have overall been sticking with paper manga due to the lost formatting and panel design when shrinking a manga page onto a phone's screen.

Publishers would not reveal publicly what percentage of their revenue came from mobile manga, but privately, many said about 10 per cent, with mobile sales fast gaining on paper sales. So far, it is unclear whether the mobile sales will make up for lost revenue from print sales, down to ¥448 billion in 2008 from the peak of ¥586 billion in 1995, according to the Research Institute for Publication in Tokyo.