Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

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> Yet Japanese manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons. Last year the manga print market shrank by 2.3% to ¥265bn ($1.9bn). The size of the global webtoons market was meanwhile valued at $3.7bn—and projected to reach $56bn by 2030.

Manga market is valued at 4.5bn USD (613 bn JPY)[0] so we’re not there yet.

On the format part, it’s interesting to see manga publishers adapting to smartphones and sometimes have two versions published: one vertically scrollable “decomposed” stream of the story, and a “recomposed” book format version sold as comic book in the traditional way. Line manga does that, and I’d expect a bunch more companies to have made the move.

All in all, good ideas spread fast in those spheres, and the article’s “The industry’s business model has hardly changed since the 1960s” tagline is I think misleading regarding the industry’s ability to adapt.

https://www.statista.com/topics/7559/manga-industry-in-japan...

> The size of the global webtoons market was meanwhile valued at $3.7bn—and projected to reach $56bn by 2030.

This is called wishful thinking. The research was ordered by webtoons producers.

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S08E11/289555.jpg?b64lines=SUYgVEh...

Hoping before I click that this is Disco Stu's "if these trends continue... ayyy" line.

edit: ayyy

These are incredibly agressive growth estimates, but many competitors in the manga/comics space are rushing to grab their proverbial pieces of pie - disclaimer: this is anecdotal from experience working in the field

Those growth estimates are assuming there is more pie.

We've seen this over and over again, from telenovelas to anime to k-drama - the pie is never that large.

How well does this work in practice? I'd imagine it works better for stuff like 4koma style where the panels have a consistent size/emphasis and stick rigidly inside the confines of the panel but what happens for big dramatic panels? Are they just avoided? Do they have parts of the overlapped panels duplicated? Do they need to produce an entirely different version of a panel for being a book page vs a scrolling format?

The best case I've seen is Clevatess [0].

With absolutely no internal knowledge, I assume the author cuts the panels in traditional book style and specifies colors and background etc., and from there basically two teams running in parallel, one producing the vertical stream from the digital assets, and the other executing on the panel format.

This makes the vertical stream very readable, well balance and optimized, with none of the clunky artifacts that appear on manga that have been 'converted' for mobile format.

Looking at how there's actually three (!) versions of the series released in parallel, I'd assume they're just throwing money where it matters to cover the most ground.

[0] https://manga.line.me/product/periodic?id=Z0000841

There's a lot of variation in how the vertical scrolling format is used. Some just use it as "one panel at a time" but with a worse UX, while others lean hard into the scrolling format with things like sprawling panels longer than the length of the screen meant to be read while scrolling, among other things.

(It's a bit like asking "how well does putting comics on pages work?" Different comics use the medium very differently.)

So, to be a jerk and not give an answer, I'm going to instead suggest picking up V1 of the official Solo Leveling translation. It's under $10, and you can do a side-by-side comparison.

It's also a great manhwa, and supporting the authors and English translations can't be a wrong thing to do. :)

https://books.apple.com/us/book/solo-leveling-vol-1-comic/id...

Isn't that in the other direction? Created for vertical and then later published on paper?

Yes, that's what I meant; sorry if I mucked it up. :)

> have two versions published

Solo Leveling (a Korean Manhwa) is doing exactly that with their ebook publishing - so it'd definitely an industry thing, not limited to any one country.

I'm not sure I like it, but if I want it as an ebook (at least in part to support the authors and keep getting manga/manhwa in the US), there's not a lot of choice either.

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