Quote:
Originally Posted by igorsk
I know it's just one datapoint, but:
From what I hear, the circulation of pretty much all manga magazines is going down and they're closing left and right, while digital manga is growing very fast. |
And this sort of thing is precisely what I alluded to...
... but manga are essentially comic books.
Is the lessening popularity of comic books really a harbinger of the death of the publishing industry and paper books?
And if it is, does the recent increase in North American interest in comic books and manga an indicator of just the opposite? Surely not.
It should also be pointed out that Manga is easy to digitize... due to its inflexible formatting, people do not delude themselves into thinking that it may be ad-hoc reformatted to accommodate the short-comings of eBook reading devices. In other words, if you have a big enough screen, or you have artists use relatively uncomplicated and sequential (non-interacting) "boxes" (don't know the technical term), they can easily be the same quality on an eBook reading device as on printed paper.
I agree that paper books will one day all but disappear... but I am not certain I will live to see that day. The most I expect in my lifetime is that eBook readers become broadly and widely used in the West (and probably not globally), but without the downright demise of either the publishing industry or paper books.
- Ahi