![]() ![]() With a huge sales boost in half of its demographics and steady performance in the others, it’s safe to say the initiative was a success. Meanwhile, sales of shonen and seinen manga (oriented towards boys and men) stayed about the same, with no significant losses stemming from the relaxed tachiyomi policy. 36 stores participated in the test program, and when they tallied their sales for the period, they found that sales for shojo and josei manga (manga targeted towards girls and women) had jumped 20 percent for the period. ▼ Though stores still draw the line at laying down on their floors and eating snacks.īetween March and May, Shagakkan requested that shrink-wrapping not be placed on either the first or most recent collected volumes of 35 titles it publishes. But recently Shogakukan, one of Japan’s biggest manga publishers, has reversed its stance and begun asking retailers to not shrink-wrap certain manga. Publishers and retailers want to prevent what’s called tachiyomi, literally “standing reading,” where potential customers read through the content they’re interested in, then put it back on the shelf and walk out of the store without buying anything. ![]() The reason for the shrink-wrapping is pretty obvious. Sometimes, there might be a single booklet printed on cheap paper with a half-dozen preview pages of one high-profile release, but aside from that, if you want to see what’s inside manga volumes in Japan, you’re going to have to buy the book before you even crack open the cover (and even some used manga shops have a similar policy). See, Japanese bookstores almost universally shrink-wrap their collected manga volumes. Row after row of collected volumes, covering decades’ worth of content, all waiting for you to pick them up, leaf through their pages, and discover a new series to follow…oh, wait, scratch that last part. If you’re a fan of Japanese comics, a stroll into the extensive manga section of bookstores in Japan can feel like heaven. Turns out even physical media benefits from a free trial, one of Japan’s largest manga publishers learns.
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