Manga Should manga be shrink-wrapped?

[Dagger]

My answer: yes. Whenever I go a bookstore and take a look at the manga section, I [i]always[/i] find at least two or three people hunkered down in the aisles, busily reading volume after volume of various series. Reading a manga and then walking out of the store without buying it is no different from downloading fansubs of licensed anime and rationalizing it by subsequently deleting the files.

If you like the book enough to read it, surely it must be worth at least $9.99 (give or take a few dollars). This isn't a problem with regular novels, due to the fact that most people don't sit in bookstores for hours or days on end. Manga, however, can be finished quite quickly.

Cover artwork is usually all you need to determine whether or not you like a manga's character designs. Blurbs and summaries, while sometimes inaccurate (thanks, Tokyopop) almost always indicate the genre and basic premise. The average person should be perfectly capable of making purchasing decisions based on those two pieces of information.

It's just not fair to the companies who translate and publish this stuff that people can enjoy their products without having to pay a single cent. I wouldn't be against retailers displaying sample volumes from popular manga, but shrink-wrapping would stop fans from working their way through entire series without ever leaving the store.

~Dagger~

[outlawstar69]

I agree with you Dagger. A couple of years ago, when I didn't know any better, I'd read the magazines or books at the store... then my mom told me that it was kind of like stealing, not buying them... so, there's another life's lesson imprinted on me. I'm the type who reads (and re-reads) manga or manwa many times over, to get the whole feel when you have a couple of volumes bought. So.. I think they should be shrink wrapped. Plus, then it would allow for extras to be packaged in as well :) .

[DeathBug]

[color=indigo][size=1][font=comic sans ms]I work in a bookstore, and manga isn't the only book that's read in the store.

Novels, actually, are about the [i]only[/i] types of books not usually read in the store, and even then, it's usually only large novels that freeloading (in my opinion) customers skip over. Magazines are the worst, followed by reference books, newspapers, manga and comics.

However, the bookstore manager explained it to me like this: nine times out of ten, a customer will park in the cafe to read their unpurchased books. In the cafe, they buy things. So, we got a cafe purchase from them we wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and we can still sell the book they read. It's win-win for the bookstore; that's why they let it happen.

Granted, I still don't like it, because even though the bookstore makes out okay, the book publishers still take it in the shorts. I wouldn't mind manga being wrapped.[/color][/size][/font]

[Semjaza]

The only reason I don't like that these stores let people read the books is that I'm not getting something new. I hate paying full price for a book that people have read through already. It's even worse when the only copy left has bent pages and finger prints all over it... that's what you get when people are allowed to bring unpurchased books into an eating area.

[Monkey_Orange]

[COLOR=DarkOrange]And while we're at it, there are still people who download mp3s. Additionally, it doesn't matter whether or not the Anime has been licensed, fansubs are not totally legal [being, that they are licensed in their country of origin]. Seriously, for those who are currently watching fansubs like Naruto, Kyou Kara Maou, and Monster--are you seriously gonna stop once licensing has been annouced? Most likely not. I'm not. KKM and Monster has already been licensed, AND their fansubs haven't even been out that long.

Back to the topic. Yes. It's annoying how some people just sit there and read through the manga. But that's just life. I've done it before too, BUT that doesn't mean that I am a total freeloader. I like to sample my purchases, that way I know what I'm getting for my monies worth.

Cover art and summary are just not enough. If you don't want to purchase and beat-up manga volume, then rummage through the back. If the only one that is left is crappy, then wait for the next shipment or make a special order. I, personally, don't care if my volume has been flipped through. Shrink-wrapped? No.[/COLOR]

[eleanor]

[color=firebrick] Freeloading off of mangas is like downloading fansubs, so I don't why so many people here are against it, lol. I don't see why you should even do it. It's like...let's go to Waldenbooks and hide in the corners reading manga! :O

But I do read about two pages to see it's worth my money.[/color]

[Semjaza]

[quote name='maladjusted][color=firebrick'] But I do read about two pages to see it's worth my money.[/color][/quote]

Yeah, I think that's a good thing to say. When I buy a comic book (I admittedly don't buy much manga anymore), at the most I read a couple of pages and quickly flip through the rest to see if I'm even interested.

I don't physically sit down and read these books for hours at a time like many people seem to. It's always the most crowded section of the book stores I go to and most of the people in it literally just camp there. You can hardly get by to actually get things you'd purchase.

It's a book [I]store[/I], not a library.

[Falkon]

I have to say that when i go to buy manga in a store that shrink wraps them, it bothers me. The reason is this. I am no expert in manga, and i dont like certain drawing styles. I like to go through the book, not thoroughly, but enough to determine if i like the art and the plot. It bothers me when manga has a really cool cover, and i get home and the story sucks and/or the art is bad, and the cover misled me. Sure people sit down and read them in the bookstore if theyre not wrapped, but most people buy them after reading it.

[Dagger]

[quote name='Monkey_Orange][COLOR=DarkOrange']Seriously, for those who are currently watching fansubs like Naruto, Kyou Kara Maou, and Monster--are you seriously gonna stop once licensing has been annouced? Most likely not. I'm not. KKM and Monster has already been licensed, AND their fansubs haven't even been out that long.[/color][/quote]

Monster is licensed? o_O It's still listed at AnimeSuki...

I don't plan on trying to take the moral high ground here, because that's not really possible. The thing is, though, I don't watch subs of licensed series unless I absolutely plan on buying them. However, I stopped downloading Kyou Kara Maou because I love the show--I find watching series on DVD much more enjoyable than watching them on my computer. As a result, I don't have a problem with waiting for Geneon to start dubbing and releasing KKM.

Fansubs are a nice way to discover series that you might never otherwise have touched, but there's just no excuse for downloading something that's already physically available in one's region. Some fansub sites pretty much list all of the anime you might find at a local Best Buy, and it pisses me off.

Ethically, downloading fansubs--licensed or unlicensed--is wrong. However, if you buy every single one of the series that you've watched (via fansub) to completion, at least none of the companies involved will lose money.


[quote][color=darkorange]Cover art and summary are just not enough. If you don't want to purchase and beat-up manga volume, then rummage through the back. If the only one that is left is crappy, then wait for the next shipment or make a special order. I, personally, don't care if my volume has been flipped through. Shrink-wrapped? No.[/COLOR][/QUOTE]

Here's the way I see it. If you're willing to wait for the [i]next shipment[/i], which could take weeks to arrive, the manga in question obviously isn't going to be an impulse buy. Assuming that cover art and a blurb aren't enough to convince you one way or the other, ten or twenty minutes' worth of research online should produce a wealth of scans, official artwork, reviews, fansites, etc.

Maybe we differ in our purchasing habits, but I usually look up titles I'm interested in before heading to the store. It saves time, if nothing else. Because there's so much information about every manga imaginable available on the Internet, I don't think shrink-wrapping would be horribly inconvenient in terms of preventing access to artwork or whatever.

Tony-- Blech, I hate campers. They end up blocking enormous chunks of the shelves and are nearly impossible to navigate around, much less avoid stepping on.

~Dagger~

[KarmaOfChaos]

[color=deeppink][size=1]I'd have to say no. Just like any other book in the book store, I want to be able to fully examine what I'm buying before I buy it. If you're antsy about other people touching something before you buy it, then you might as well stop buying all your books, clothing, food, etc, from stores right now because just about everything you buy has probably been touched by somebody else first.

I understand the argument that it's not fair to the companies making it that people just sit there and read through the whole series and then not purchase a thing, but in my opinion, when you just read something in a book store and don't own it, you don't really get all the pleasure out of actually having it at your disposal 24/7, unless you spend your entire life at the book store. So, in the end, a manga that someone reads through at the book store and truly enjoys, they will end up buying because they want to be able to have it for themselves. I think if mangas were shrink-wrapped sales might actually go down, because people wouldn't know what they were buying and subsequently wouldn't buy it, or, they might impulsively buy something they thought was good but it wasn't. Therefore wouldn't be able to invest in another manga that they actually would have liked had they seen it beforehand.

As for learning all about a series on the internet - no thank you. I have way too many series ruined by spoilers that way, plus, I just don't have the time to research every interesting anime or manga that I happen upon. It's much easier for me to go to the store, read through the first volume to decide if I like it or not and then go from there.

Plus, shrink-wrap just turns me off. ;)

-Karma[/size][/color]

[Okita]

Personally I never buy shrink wrapped books, comic or magazine, why? because I've found out the hard way that covers and blurb are misleading and inprecise. I will usually sit down to read the first few page of a book before I pass judgement, and even then I may not be overly impressed, It took two volume before I decided Hana Yori Dango, and I've avidly collecting the series now.

Bookshop owners recognise this somewhat, because while 9 out of 10 freeloading only freeload, there will always be someone that like the manga so much that they will purchase it. I read the GTO manga up to it's seventh volume at my local bookshop and was totally engrossed, I purchase the from eight onward straight away to the final volume they had at store (16 at the time) and went back a week later and bought the earlier series.

If you had shrink-wrapped the product I would have most likely passed it on....

[Semjaza]

[quote name='KarmaOfChaos][color=deeppink][size=1] If you're antsy about other people touching something before you buy it, then you might as well stop buying all your books, clothing, food, etc, from stores right now because just about everything you buy has probably been touched by somebody else first.[/size'][/color][/quote]

But I don't buy half eaten food or used clothing for [i]full[/i] price (or at all in the case of the food lol). I really don't think I should be stuck paying full price for a book that's been passed through the hands of a bunch of greasy manga fans that are too cheap to buy the same issues they apparently have no problem reading through in their entirety at the shop.

For me, this isn't really didn't seem to be about people who rifle through a few pages and check out the covers so they can inform their decisions for purchase. I read this as more or less being about people who read entire volumes in the store and don't spend a penny. If you did that at the comic shop, they'd kick you out. I think that's how it should be.

I know a lot of comics and such I buy have several page previews online. I know that some manga has this, but I'm not sure if all do. I suppose at some point they could shrink wrap the manga and set up little scanning machines that show you previews and a synopsis. That'd be nice.

[Dagger]

[quote name='KarmaOfChaos][color=deeppink][size=1]As for learning all about a series on the internet - no thank you. I have way too many series ruined by spoilers that way, plus, I just don't have the time to research every interesting anime or manga that I happen upon. It's much easier for me to go to the store, read through the first volume to decide if I like it or not and then go from there.[/size'][/color][/quote]

It does take considerably less time to visit Amazon and glance over a few editorials and reader reviews (which rarely, if ever, contain spoilers) than to visit a store and read a 200-page manga. I can definitely understand your desire to see the product before purchasing it, but I doubt time is a consideration for the people who choose to hulk between shelves, consuming volume after volume.

Tony-- Yeah, it's not that hard to find previews online. Amazon has a lot of manga samples in their "search inside this book" feature (usually for the more established series like Gravitation and X/1999), as do the websites of Tokyopop and other manga companies. The number of pages provided on these sites is pretty much the equivalent of what you'd get by briefly opening a single book... Tokyopop in particular has a wealth of previews.

EDIT: I just noticed that Tokyopop's site also includes samples of manga which haven't yet been released, such as CLAMP's Legal Drug.

~Dagger~

[James]

[quote name='Semjaza Azazel]But I don't buy half eaten food or used clothing for [i]full[/i'] price (or at all in the case of the food lol). I really don't think I should be stuck paying full price for a book that's been passed through the hands of a bunch of greasy manga fans that are too cheap to buy the same issues they apparently have no problem reading through in their entirety at the shop.[/quote]

[color=#707875]I agree with this.

One of my pet peeves, is if I go to buy something (a DVD, a magazine, a CD or whatever) and the packaging is slightly different/damaged as a result of someone fiddling with it.

One of the great things about buying a book/manga/comic is that when you first open it, it's very fresh and crisp. Having dog ears or something like that is really unacceptable, for me at least (and obviously for others too).

You could go through the mangas at the back, but why should you have to?[/color]

[eh luu]

i am quite impartial to this,
at mitsuwa, where i buy most of my manga, and its all in japanese because it is a japanese market place, they have it shrink wrapped so that you cant see in it and mess around with it. In a way that could be overall good because the product you are buying is gonna be fresh and have that overall crisp feeling to it.
Also, there is the part that i hate, since everything is in japanese, and some of the manga you havent heard of because it hasnt been translated yet, so you kind of want to see if it is good before you go and buy it, usually when i am there i have to buy off of cover looks, but that can be somewhat misleading to the buyer, a friend of mine bought a manga and she was mostly looking for something clean but ended up with a manga with a lot of sex scenes *chuckles* it was amuseing to see her face though, i must admit, but also you kind of have that feeling where you'd like to know what you are buying before you buy it. It could turn out to be something totally different from what you wanted and you just wasted money that you could of spent on something else more of what you were looking for.

perhaps a solution to this is to have atleast one book not wrapped [could be like said a synopsis], so that people can look through it and see if they like it or not, then if they do, they can buy a wrapped book that hasnt been messed around with?

this is a hard issue to go on about, i mean when i hang out with some of my friends, we spend time looking at art books and just flipping through them and sometimes we will look at manga and be disappointed how they are translateing some manga and probably screwing it all up ;_;
i guess for me personally, i like being able to see what i get before i buy it, but i am not the kind of person to sit there and actually read the whole manga o_o; and then just put it back and take another manga and spend another while to read that..
to me its too much time wasted when you can flip through, if it is to your taste and buy it, then spending hours on end reading the whole friggin series there, when you can be in the comforts of your own home reading it.
but enough of me rambling on.

[James]

[QUOTE=eh luu]
perhaps a solution to this is to have atleast one book not wrapped [could be like said a synopsis], so that people can look through it and see if they like it or not, then if they do, they can buy a wrapped book that hasnt been messed around with?

[/QUOTE]

[color=#707875]I actually think that is an awesome solution.

That way, you eliminate two problems: 1) multiple mangas with bent pages and tears and 2) a huge number of people reading mangas without buying them.

If only one copy is free to flip through, people can take a moment to get a quick impression of it and then they can buy a shrink-wrapped version.

So yeah, I think I like the idea of having one raw display version. I think that could satisfy people on both sides of the fence.[/color]

[BlueYoshi]

[color=teal]Even still, that would make it seem as if the copy is there to be messed with, and though it comes from a very small proportion of the book store's revenue, that copy will still cost them money.

I personally feel that there's no way around it. The way I see it, customers don't like to be restricted and enforcing regulations as such would slightly complicate things for them. I mean, you could always place a special order or something for your brand spanking new copy of whatever it is.[/color]

[Camlaren]

Some manga are now are wrapped in plastic, I think they should have a few copies of volume one and two of the manga out of plastic wrapper so people can get a real idea for what the series is about. I myself like to flip through a a book before I buy it if I've never read the series before and am hesitant to buy a manga wrapped in plastic if I can't look inside and see the art artwork, language, etc. I really like the idea over all, getting a manga that no one had touched or been able to bend the cover on (I'm a freak who can't stand bent covers on my books :P) It also prevents people from going around reading the books in the store and not spending money on them ^_^

[natetron46]

This definitely sounds like a good idea. I know of people who simply read as much of the manga they can in the store and never buy. I don't like it, I've done before but I've never read a lot of it, usually just random excerpts so I can see whether or not I want to buy,I guess im on the same boat as Camlaren.

[Kei]

[color=darkblue]A very interesting topic, Dagger. Kudos.

There are several points that have been made that I agree with.

[b]1) Shrink-wrapping is good.[/b]

I think that shrink-wrapping manga would be a great idea. Many times, I've come across manga that have had dog ears and other such bookmarking atrocities in them and I've been pretty miffed to see them. I so happened to purchase Eerie Queerie! Vol. 1, only to find that it had pen marks all up and down the pages in the middle of the books. Needless to say, I was not a hapy individual. As Tony said, it's a store, not a library. Unless you're going to buy it, you have no business marking anything in it. And even with library books, you're not supposed to mark in them in that way. That's what bookmarks and scrap pieces of paper are made for.

[b]2) Campers are the spawn of Satan.[/b]

It seems as if every time I walk into B. Dalton (my bookstore of choice), there are at least 5-8 people forming a nearly impenetrable wall around the graphic novel section, each with a manga or an SJ in hands. Many times I have wanted to kick them neatly in the thigh. Repeatedly. One, they're blocking the way for other customers, most of whom are actually going to pay for something, to get to what they want, and two, most of them would rather give you an attempt at a death glare rather than just scoot out of the way and let someone pass by. Bastards.

[b]3) Testers[/b]

I agree that eh luu's suggestion of having a "manga tester" (like they do with perfumes/cologne/lotion in stores) is a great idea. At least that way you know that only one copy of the manga would have something (if anything) wrong with it, and people can't take away from the purchaseable merchadise by taking all the copies of one manga off the shelf (as has happened to me many times, to my chagrin). Although it may cost the store the price of one manga, it helps them in that they won't have a return of another of the same manga being returned due to some major mark/flaw found by a customer from camper-viewing.

[b]4) The In-Store Database[/b]

Interestingly enough, on my trip to D.C., I walked into a Borders in Pentagon City that had this system. there were several terminals with access to all the books/DVDs/CDs the store had or has had in inventory with cover art, summary, the whole nine. It was set up similar to a library search system, so it was easy to use, and in my opinion, extremely helpful. It would be great if all the stores could implement this type of thing, since it might cut down on the camper population and help more people out in general. So, it's something to try and push for, if there's any way of going about it. ^^;

So, yeah. Overall, I think shrink-wrappng is a great idea. I'm sure there are manga readers around the world who would agree, but as far as it becoming commonplace, it night take some convincing with certain publishers/distributors/what-have-you.[/color]