Noticed that the manga publishers have been publishing compilations that finally hit my magic $5 per volume price point. (The one that I'm finding most interesting is Dark Horse's four-volume
Clover compilation, a steal at twenty bucks.)
But I already have
Clover, in Japanese, and I'm coming to the realization that price isn't the most important thing at this level. The difference between five and ten dollars, to many fans, doesn't even seem to be noticeable, and the real issue is that you can easily read a volume of manga in a half hour and emerge unchanged. Some of them are great --
Clover is one of my favorite works in any medium -- but I'm not sure that there's anything in that twilight realm, so good that I'm willing to pay five dollars to own it, yet not good enough to be worth ten.
But then, I read this stuff standing up in the bookstore and reserve purchases for things that I really, really like. If I weren't able to do that -- if I had no way to read manga without buying it first -- I might feel very differently about the price's dropping by half. It might, in fact, encourage me to buy twice as much manga.
But if any bookstore actually started doing that, I would probably never enter it again. I'm willing to put up with it from Japanese bookstores for some reason, but not from Borders. (And I've probably spent several hundred dollars there this year, so I feel justified in setting some conditions for my continued patronage.)
It must be hard, being a manga publisher. I admire their work, but I don't envy them.
words from chris, 2009-10-26 02:19:32, los angeles
