Comment Re:The thing with ASCII (Score 1) 728
I think that his sales figures are far too high - and perhaps are driven by the ludicrous cost. All you need to do is look at the Kodansha thing last week to see that a lot of stuff isn't on sale digitally, and won't be, because they're offering stupidly low rates. I don't know about novels, but original keitai comics are entirely done by amateurs - if there's one thing that Japan is not lacking in, it's wannabe mangaka - because the small ventures that are publishing them are basically expecting free work (rates of 1 to 10 yen per page) - if you're counting that, then the web-comic industry is part of the western publishing industry too (I expect it's not currently counted as being such.) The stuff that's available on phones is from a tiny pool of stories - Softbank have something like 200 different comic publishers on their comics menu, but they are all selling from the same pool of 100 or so titles from only one or two publishers, and they all want 1.5x to 2x the price that buying a tankobon would cost, even for comics that are pushing 30 years old.