Manga Apps Grow Amid Declining Magazine Sales

by tsubasalover
Feb 10, 2015 10:07 PM | 63 Comments

According to recent findings by the Research Institute for Publications (RIP), an arm of the All Japan Magazine and Book Publisher's and Editor's Association (AJPEA), the electronic manga market expanded to 57.4 billion yen in 2012, an increase of 11.7 percent from the previous year. This figure is nearly 17 times the size of the e-manga market in 2005, when the RIP began tracking e-manga sales.

On the other hand, sales of manga magazines have dropped by more than half in the 15-year period between 1998 and 2013. The most recent figure stands at 143.8 billion yen in sales for manga magazines. In 1998, this figure stood at 320.7 billion yen.

[Diagram: Sales of manga magazines (gray) and digital manga (blue), 1998–2013. Magazine sales are plotted against the left y-axis, while digital sales are plotted against the right y-axis. Unit of measurement for both axes is 100 million (1 oku) yen.]

This pattern indicates that reading manga on digital platforms instead of in printed magazines is becoming more commonplace. There are currently 21 Japanese companies offering 35 different services for reading digital manga. The largest is LINE Manga, a spin-off of the LINE messaging app, which topped 10 million downloads and 4.9 billion yen in sales as of January 2015 after 22 months in service.

Source: NewsPicks

News submitted by arsonal

Magazines Companies

20 of 63 Comments Recent Comments

It can't be helped........I am fucking poor, man.
Can't buy shit, let alone Anime and Manga.

Feb 12, 2015 11:14 PM by Tengai

'readers betray their authors'-bungaku shoujo

the disadvantage with technology is blackouts and radiation..every1 knows it

Feb 12, 2015 8:51 PM by Llumi

And water is wet.

Feb 12, 2015 8:48 PM by dankzel

Seriously, just try to storage all One Piece chapters for example...

Feb 12, 2015 5:19 PM by Frezlaj

Not surprising to see sadly

I prefer physical copies for anything but it's just too much of a hassle/expensive to get them all, while digital is so convenient

Feb 12, 2015 3:17 PM by Sacred

Lolicon said:
Screw that. I love digital stuff a lot, but I will ALWAYS prefer physical copies of anime, manga, and doujinshi over digital copies. Nothing beats the sight of said material sitting on your bookshelf. You'll all regret going digital if/when a powerful solar flare kicks the fuck out of the power grid and you are unable to see your crap.

this raw anger may keep this industry afloat :P

Feb 12, 2015 3:15 PM by KoSparrows

Well, I prefer before physical sleeves

Feb 12, 2015 1:18 PM by Yakamin

j0x said:

Paulo27 said:

Die and replace them with what? Streaming? Lol.

digital downloads too and ye streaming as well

Also quality. A 50GB download for the full possible contents of a blu ray disk would take ages.

Feb 12, 2015 12:26 PM by black1blade

Who are all these people downloading digital copies? We need to smack them across the face.

Feb 12, 2015 12:15 PM by Star-Blazer

No surprise, why would you buy a magazine, if you can read it online !?

Feb 12, 2015 11:35 AM by crazymonkey00

Takei_Hisa said:

We're all going to become the people in Wall-E

I've considered that too.

Veronin said:
Not surprising. Print is dying. Newspapers, magazines, books, even handwriting-- it's all being replaced by computers.

The part of handwriting is the one that really saddens me. Also books, but I see how if you're not to buy the volumes, reading the chapters with an app is in various ways easier than through weekly magazines, which don't contain only what you're interested in either.

Feb 12, 2015 8:25 AM by KuroMayKami

I do feel guilty of not actually buying the work. On the other hand, there's no other choice when said work doesn't even publish in your country. Even shipping charges are skyrocketing high.

Feb 12, 2015 6:51 AM by ZenithKun

WarriorAngel said:
I read manga on internet because where I live there is no shop here that sells manga. I know I can buy manga on internet but the shipping is very expensive to my country.

^ Pretty much the same for me, if only they'd increase the availability of manga, I wouldn't mind purchasing regularly, if it's not too expensive, you know. I am pretty sure many people too, will not mind buying the physical copies if it's cheap.

Feb 12, 2015 5:52 AM by ToG25thBaam

Sad, but not for the worse. I remember having to throw away stacks and stacks of manga magazines just because they eventually took up so much space. And I certainly don't mind reading manga that isn't printed on pink paper lol.

That said, physical copies, as most people have mentioned already, do feel better for reasons I won't repeat from other posts.

Feb 11, 2015 9:13 PM by Utsune

Ew digital copies. Jk, I just like my physical copies better. Nothing beats the feeling of turning that page in your hands. Plus, I already use the computer too much anyways and I would like to rest my eyes from the screen if there is the option, but of course for us non-Japanese speakers/readers, we have to resort to reading online because not everything we like is being licensed into our language. One good thing about digital anything is that in case of a disaster, you'll at least still have it...I can't be the only who worries about possible random emergency happening and my manga collection gets destroyed lol. But yeah, digital copies are always more convenient, and in the age of instant gratification (and maybe little space if you don't live in a big place), it's what people may start to prefer. They're cheaper too. Anyways, is the implication of this news that there may be less physical copies being printed in the future? I mean it's interesting but pretty intuitive given how much we rely on electronics these days...

Feb 11, 2015 7:28 PM by tingy

Thats a shame I prefer to read my manga on paper. I hate reading on my tablet.

Feb 11, 2015 1:31 PM by Star-Blazer

I don*t and wont ever buy a digital manga. Most important reason being that the quality of the images is not as good. For a proper quality parity between the book and the digital release you would need something like 1mb + per page, which wont happen due to bandwidth constraints.

Reading a physical and book of the same manga side by side, the book gives a better feeling of the overall composition of the work, how it hits your eye and is processed by your brain as a coherent work.

Also I dont know if its always the artist*s intent but often times contrasts and depictions of light and dark are not equivalent between the book and the digital, its big enough to look like an entirely different release.

Its harder for me feel like digital manga is a *real* manga considering the history of the medium.

Feb 11, 2015 11:46 AM by VyseLegendaire

Hoppy said:

Would you download if it was DRM free?

I personally would not. It is just way more satisfying to have it on my shelf than it is to just have a list of files on my computer.

Feb 11, 2015 10:51 AM by jojovonjo

I love reading manga on my phone, but i also love having physical copies of manga to read and have on my bookshelf.

Feb 11, 2015 10:43 AM by Chibi-Alice

Hoppy said:

ichii_1 said:
JUMP sells about 250K copies a week, so shounen is doing great it's the other demographics that are going down.

Once One Piece ends, it will go down as well.

Until the next big hit happens, dbz > one piece > ?
And maybe oda will write another manga.

Feb 11, 2015 10:39 AM by ichii_1

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