Editorial: Everyone Has It Wrong on Mobile Manga in the US.

Lately, I’ve been seeing posts all over the anime blogosphere touting the advantages and disadvantages of having mobile and electronic manga in a similar manner as the Japanese market.

What all of these posts fail to address is the vagaries of this market and the fanbase as a while ignoring key points in infrastructure that make mobile and e-manga a non-starter in this market unless key changes are made to accomodate content.

The main reason that mobile and electronic manga will not take off in the US will be the same reason its relegated to the same niche status in Japan:

Because it’s not popular in the conventional sense.

Unlike what has been written and made in the Visual Culture and mainstream media about the explosive popularity of mobile and electronic manga in Japan, the truth is much more surprising.

While sales revenues have been steadily increasing year after year, from $38.5 million in 2006 to a projected $731 million in 2012, it should be noted that most of that revenue is calculated not just on the sale of manga at an average of $0.30-$0.40 a chapter, that figure also includes sales of cellular data service by the major carriers in Softbank, KDDI AU, and the largest carrier in NTT DoCoMo.

Japanese carriers make it a point to push whatever new service they have available in order to draw customers to the shop and get them on lucrative service plans which include unlimited data access which is growing in popularity along with creating content specifically for mobile phones.

Another reason why mobile manga is considered popular in Japan is due to device selection.

The typical Japanese cellphone from NTTDoCoMo, Softbank or KDDI AU features a large widescreen display that begins at 3 inches and tops out at 4 inches with a resolution of 800×480 or WVGA.

The aforementioned specifications make it an ideal display for mobile manga when viewed in portait mode, making the viewable area taller than it is wide as well as offering enough resolution for minute detail without zooming or panning, as the devices are designed to be used for long periods of time.

To clarify further, Japan does have its own version of the iPhone which is carried by Softbank, the problem is that it is extremely unpopular to the point that the carrier is offering it for free with a new service contract on select plans.

The above brings me to my second point, whereas Japanese carriers directly control the distribution of product and content sold for use on cellphones, the US market does things the same but differently.

For one, US carriers take the same walled garden approach to services and applications on cellphones, but they do not directly create content for those phones, relying instead on a network of trusted third-party vendors for various products such as music stores, video content, and other services.

Another key point in the adoption of mobile manga in the US is device selection.

While Japan features devices with high-resolution large format displays and large internal memory for nominal prices after new agreement, the US marketplace is dominated by low resolution displays tailored to occasional use for free, with a growing lineup of large format devices with large touchscreen displays that are expensive for most consumers even after signing a new service agreement.

The iPhone and the iPhone 3G displays top out at 320×480 which is not a high resolution and rather low for a high-end device, as it requires current mobile comics and manga to be formatted outside of the standard paper sizes leading to readability and detail issues.

Also speaking from former experience as a wireless dealer, a majority of the fanbase for anime and manga isn’t really very concerned with having the most advanced cellphone out there, preferring to make do with (insert free phone here) unless they’ve taken a vested interest in what features they are looking for and are willing to pay for them.

The only carrier subsidized device that could effectively display mobile manga at a sufficient level of detail without adjustments available in the US is the T-Mobile Sidekick LX (2009) and it won’t even officially launch until May 13th, as it features the same display type as the above linked Japanese cellphone, but much like the Apple App Store, content is tightly regulated by the carrier and would need to be approved before sale.

Getting to my last point on mobile manga, is price and ownership. The fanbase in general is peculiar in that it simultaneously embraces physical and digital mediums according to price structures.

The current crop of mobile manga available across the iTunes App Store suffers from the same issues as books available for purchase on the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader, being that the print and digital versions are identically priced, and that there is no concrete form of ownership, something which many manga consumers value among all else.

You can’t sell what people don’t want and expect to get anywhere if the product is unappealing and requires too many (expensive) steps to purchase and enjoy, especially when the target market is the most affected by the current recession.

Another factor is the seeming disinterest in mobile manga among the most vocal of the fanbase, echoing the above ownership and content availability concerns, readability, and other concerns which have reverberated across the blogosphere.

Ultimately, mobile manga is a crapshoot in this market unless Amazon, Sony, US carriers, and phone manufacturers step up to provide better devices, and the fanbase decides that it wants mobile manga and is willing to pay for it, not the other way around.