Digital Sales of Manga Volumes Surpass Print Edition Sales

isekai said:
weekly/yearly manga rankings should include digital sales already too, or its included already and im wrong?

ImperfectBlue said:


Digital sales are included in the rankings. The significance here is that, for individual volumes (tankobon), digital sales exceeded print sales for the first time. Ever.

ImperfectBlue said:


Digital sales are included in the rankings. The significance here is that, for individual volumes (tankobon), digital sales exceeded print sales for the first time. Ever.

nemya said:
so we already reached this point, I thought it's going to take several more years for that to happen.

and wow...so the weekly and yearly manga sales rankings from Oricon includes the digital sales too?! I always thought It only reports the physical sales and that's why every series seems to be declining in sales, but I guess both digital and physical are declining.

Some manga with consistent tankobon print releases Haikyuu!!, saw plummeting sales that could be attributed to neither series having an anime adaptation air in 2017.

ImperfectBlue said:


Digital sales are NOT* included in the rankings. I'm dumb. But still, the significance here is that, for individual volumes (tankobon), digital sales exceeded print sales for the first time. Ever. Overall print sales are still ahead of digital sales with magazines included, something a couple other articles failed to mention.

_Ako_ said:
Anyway congrats being a News Mod! Aside from that the pics are in Japanese... Sadly, I cannot understand that. Anyway, on the bright side, will Japan move to digital copy or not?

Kuma said:


no, he mean news teams should report digital sales of manga too, not only rely on oricon physical manga sales report for each particular series and volume each time (either, weekly, monthly, or yearly)... but honestly i doubt it since pretty sure no one already done that?

keragamming said:

Digital sales are not counted with physical, and that is what we all want.

kuuderes_shadow said:


There are digital sales rankings but I don't know of any that put actual figures to them. There also aren't any regular rankings that could give us weekly/monthly sales ranks which capture a large number of retailers in the way that Oricon does with physical sales, and most are specific to a single retailer

Kuma said:
can you give example from those? look interesting...

kuuderes_shadow said:


Generally just retailer rankings like those on bookwalker or honto or amazon or whatever. Someone posted a collated ranking on refugee-chan a couple of times a year or so back but not since and it was never regular (and it was for light novels anyway - I'd be surprised if something like that existed on a regular basis for manga and I hadn't stumbled across it by accident though).

orkuncan said:
For some dudes who couldnt figure out conclusion:
Probably in 15 years magazines will be dead, not only manga.
İn 40 years, everything print will be dead.
This is just a replacement.

Edit: Much funny thing is that those products didnt start with internet sites and smart phones, for anybody who has interest in both cogs of modern bussiness administration and history of printed press and entertainment, those times are gold, dig as much as you can. No print, no magazine at all but you see books in phones, damn. So regards sales numbers we not gonna see that much print later. Have image of a printed press in your mind grandchildren are gonna ask bros and sis :D

kuuderes_shadow said:


E-books reached 50% of the adult fiction market (by volume, not by value) in the US in late 2012, and the internet was awash with cconfident predictions that e-books would overtake the print market by value as a whole in either 2017 or 2018, and that physical books' days were numbered.

Now here we are in 2018, and print's share of both the fiction market (where it has returned to being a minority, although a very large one) and overall market has increased for 3 years in a row. E-book's share of the total book market by value last year was only around 20% - and among traditional publishers it had dropped from a little over a quarter at its peak to a little over a sixth last year, with physical books taking up most of this drop.

Some sections of the physical publishing industry may cease to exist, and magazines are one of the more likely ones - but the drop in the value of adverts is a bigger threat than the loss of circulation (indeed certain sectors of the magazine market have seen their circulation go up in recent years, although the overall trend is downwards).

A new technology may come along which eliminates the print book entirely, but that technology is very definitely not the e-book.

orkuncan said:

So you tell me financially it may seem equal but taste of print is different and people will always search for that? İ really couldnt understand your point

kuuderes_shadow said:


I wasn't giving any reasons why things have happened as they have - these are myriad, can be read up on elsewhere, and are not particularly important to the topic at hand anyway.

An industry whose market share stopped increasing several years ago whilst still remaining a minority is not one on course to dominate it to such an extent that the industry that still makes up a considerable and increasing majority of the market is about to be wiped out by it.

Japan has so far followed several years behind the English-speaking world. In the US or UK this sort of news article would have come out 5 years ago - and such articles did come out in large numbers. But then the rapid growth in ebooks stopped and even seems to be going backwards slightly. Will Japan follow the same trend? I don't know. But it isn't going to kill off the physical book any time soon.

Those are the points I was making.