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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

polls

Manga Bookshelf Survey Results

June 20, 2013 by MJ 11 Comments

A number of readers have expressed interest in seeing the full results of our recent reader survey, so here we are! We’ll talk a bit about what it all means in a moment, but first, the results:

mb-survey-results

Enough with the graphics! What does it all mean?

A general overview of the survey paints the following picture of the average Manga Bookshelf reader:

You’re most likely to be an adult woman: 90% of our readership is adults over the age of 22 (past college undergraduate age), and 48% are over 30. 65% are women and girls—that’s nearly twice the amount of our male readership.

You buy a lot of manga: Over 75% of our readers report buying between 1-20 volumes of manga a month, with 16% buying more, and just a few reporting that they don’t buy any at all in a typical month. Some readers reported that they borrow most of their manga from the library, or that they tend to buy sporadically, in binges, or mainly at conventions. One reader admitted to reading scanlations because manga isn’t available to buy in her home country (Pakistan).

You’re not yet sold on digital: Digital manga is a sadder tale, with over 60% reporting that none of their purchases is likely to be digital, though the number of digital buyers is still at 35%. Some “other” responses included readers who mainly buy their manga in print but go digital for other comics, and some who said that they don’t buy any now, but had JManga accounts before the site closed. Some are waiting for their favorite out of print manga to turn up digitally.

You’re probably not buying Naruto: In terms of manga demographic categories, shoujo and seinen are readers’ top choices, both beating out shounen manga, which tends to include the mainstream powerhouses (Naruto, Bleach), while categories like josei, boys’ love, and yuri all make strong showings as well. “Other” responses included classic manga, gekiga, “fifth column” and manhwa.

You probably are buying from Vertical: Publisher preferences skew pretty closely to the number of releases, with prolific companies like Viz Media and Yen Press coming out on top. Though it’s notable that Vertical, a relatively small publisher, is heavily patronized by our readership (and actually ranked above Kodansha Comics for quite a while over the course of the poll). One major omission on our part was Drawn & Quarterly, which received a number of “other” mentions, along with a few mentions of companies like PictureBox and Udon, some defunct North American publishers, European publishers like Carlsen and Tokyopop Deutschland, and imports straight from Japan.

It’s probably not surprising that our readership differs significantly from that seen in the recent poll at Comics Should Be Good, at least in terms of gender demographics, given our manga-specific focus and our female-heavy roster of contributors. It perhaps naturally follows that our readers are less hooked on the most mainstream manga series (shounen) than CBR/CSBG’s readers are on the closest western comics equivalent (superheroes), though clearly we’re all slow to take to digital distribution.


Did you miss out on participating in our reader survey? Do you have thoughts about the results? Leave your comments below!

Filed Under: UNSHELVED Tagged With: polls

Poll: Manga Bookshelf Front Page Experience

October 30, 2012 by MJ 11 Comments

Hello Manga Bookshelf readers!

We watch our page stats pretty closely, and one of the main reasons for this is to try to learn something about how people get to Manga Bookshelf and how easy it is for them to find the content they want once they get here. Historically, the vast majority of our site traffic has come from links accessed offsite, on Twitter, Facebook, and other blogs, or from search engine results—links that usually go directly to an article the individual wants to read. Lately, however, a growing number of readers have been entering the site from the Manga Bookshelf front page. But where they go from that point on has been a little surprising.

As a result, the questions most on my mind are, “Are people finding the content they’re looking for?” and “Have we made that content easy to find?”

You can help me answer these questions by participating in the poll below! Please feel free to use the comment section to elaborate on your experience or what you’d like to see on the Manga Bookshelf front page. I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to adjust the site to please everyone (certainly an impossible task!) but we will take everyone’s comments into consideration while contemplating our front page layout!

[poll id=”5″]

[poll id=”6″]

[poll id=”7″]

Elaboration strongly encouraged. (If you don’t tell me what you’re missing, I can’t fix it!)

If there’s anything else you’d like to share, I’d love to hear it! What regular columns are the first ones you look for? Do you come to read a particular writer? What kind of content would you like to see more of?

Thanks for your feedback!

Edited to add: I’ve already made some changes based on comments here, so keep the feedback coming!

Filed Under: UNSHELVED Tagged With: polls

Links! And a poll!

August 24, 2012 by MJ 7 Comments

Oh, readers, it’s been fairly chaotic behind the scenes at Manga Bookshelf lately, and we’ve fallen behind in so many ways. In the interest of catching up ever so slightly, here are a few links that have piled up over the past few weeks:

To my great delight, ANN recently reported that Kazuya Minekura’s action-packed BL epic Wild Adapter, which has been rerunning from the beginning in Ichijinsha’s Monthly Comic Zero-Sum since sometime last year will be resuming fresh serialization next spring, now that Minekura’s health is back on track. This is particularly big news here at Manga Bookshelf, where some of us (as you may recall) are very big fans.

Moving on from BL to Yuri, JManga is going all out for its new series YuruYuri. From their press release:

In celebration of the release, JManga has released a special “YuruYuri” feature including a character introduction and relationship chart, famous scenes, as well as a special article on Yuri manga by Erica Freidman (Yuricon, ALC Publishing). Additionally, JManga is holding a special quiz contest for YuruYuri fans from August 23rd to 29th (PST). Fans simply need to take the 4 question quiz, and get all the answer right, to be automatically entered into a special drawing for YuruYuri merchandise straight from Japan!

Don’t miss that contest!

At CNN’s “Geek Out!” blog, Danica Davidson discusses why female readers are drawn to manga (spoiler: FEMALE CREATORS), including quotes from people like VIZ’s VP of Publishing, Leyla Aker, and super-librarian Robin Brenner. Definitely a must-read!

Lastly, a quick poll! A while back I’d talked to my fellow Manga Bookshelf bloggers about the possibility of opening up a discussion forum on the site. At the time, everyone agreed that limiting discussion to comment threads on our individual posts helped keep things focused and easy to manage, so I shelved the idea. Just recently, however, I’ve had a request from a reader that we open up a forum here, so I thought I’d bring it to the rest of you for discussion as well. Please note that in any scenario, we would be leaving our posts’ comment threads exactly as-is, rather than moving comments into the forum space, so the forum would exist as a separate entity for discussion.

[poll id=”4″]

My current ideas for what might happen in the forums include: reader reviews (best get promoted to the MB main page), demographic/genre-specific threads, tips for buying manga on the cheap, featured weekly topics, sharing your picspam, ‘shipper’s forums, fanfic recs, and more!

Note: Any discussion forum at Manga Bookshelf would be both fandom-friendly and highly moderated. We are, as always, dedicated to creating a safe space for all.

Please feel free to elaborate or share suggestions in comments! And please vote!

Filed Under: UNSHELVED Tagged With: polls

Comics Poll. List. Thing.

August 8, 2011 by MJ 14 Comments

If you’re a regular reader of comics blogs, I’m sure you’ve heard the news!

According to a consensus of 0.000003 % of the world’s population (no, really, I looked it up) these 115 titles are the best (or perhaps most universally favored) comics. That’s 211 of the 6,954,167,299 estimated people in the world, who of course don’t actually even agree with each other, since no single comic received more than 50 votes. Whether any one person who voted has read every comic that was nominated between all 211 people (or even every single comic in the top 115) let alone every comic ever published in the world is anyone’s guess, but I’m going to go with “probably not.”

So what we really have here is an extremely tiny subset of the world’s population reporting that, of the comics they’ve read, these are the ones that no more than a quarter of them agree might be the best.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to ridicule this process, by any means. I am one of the 0.000003 %, after all! I’m just offering my perspective, and perhaps some insight on why I don’t personally place a lot of value on lists like these, at least as a tool for evaluating art. Lists like these can be interesting and even revealing (I think this one is both), but ultimately they tell us more about the people who voted than they do about whatever it is that’s being voted on. And though I’m all for creating opportunities for people to discuss their favorite or most admired comics, I will say outright that I don’t believe that it is actually possible to determine the 10 (or 100 or 1000) best comics, or the best anything that must be subject to human opinion alone. There are no scientific benchmarks by which to measure creative work—no speed tests to run or performance goals to reach. Just as each person who creates comics brings his or her individual passions and values to the work, each person who considers comics does the same, which is why even among a minuscule 211 people, no more than 50 can agree on the relative value of a single work, or probably even what “value” means in the first place.

So, let’s clarify again. What this poll represents is an extremely tiny subset of the world’s population reporting that, of the comics they’ve read, these are the ones that no more than a quarter of them agree might be the best, based on their individual backgrounds, values, artistic sensibilities, ages, genders, philosophical mindsets, and personal standards for the medium.

Personally, I think this is great. For me, this lack of agreement is meaningful in itself, and goes a long way towards illustrating why I think art, in all its forms, is so valuable in the first place. But it also illustrates why I value individual opinion more than group consensus, both personally and as a tool for posterity, as difficult as those may be to retain over time. While it’s interesting to note the results of a poll like this, and I’ll probably take a look at a few of the recommended works I’ve missed, as a whole, I can’t help feeling that this list has very little to do with me. That’s not a reflection on this list (I’m quite enjoying the discussion around this list), but rather on all lists of this kind. Because when it comes to art, in the end, I’m interested in pursuing the threads most meaningful to me, which I’m more likely to discover with the help of like-minded individuals than I am through majority opinion, even when that majority consists of only fifty or so people.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that my real interest in this poll is in the individual results, which have begun to be published today! Check out the first group of individual lists at the Hooded Utilitarian here—a group which, thanks to the power of alphabetical order, happens to include mine.

Given my relatively narrow background in comics (almost exclusively manga & manhwa, and even then just what I’ve been able to read over the course of a few years), it would have been ludicrous for me to attempt a list of “best” comics, so I went for “favorite” (as allowed by the poll’s rules). And since “favorite” is an incredibly fluid thing with me, based on an ever-shifting multitude of factors, I must also qualify this as “favorites in the moment.”

Here was my list (including attached notes):

A fairly arbitrary list of ten of my favorite comics, subject to change at any particular moment, and in no particular order:

Hikaru no Go by Yumi Hotta & Takeshi Obata
Please Save My Earth by Saki Hiwatari
Banana Fish by Akimi Yoshida
Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa
Flower of Life by Fumi Yoshinaga
Ode to Kirihito by Osamu Tezuka
Wild Adapter by Kazuya Minekura
Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa
Tokyo Babylon by CLAMP
Maison Ikkoku by Rumiko Takahashi

With one major exception, I restricted this list to completed series (or, at least, completed in Japan, and very nearly completed here).

I might also note that, with one and a half exceptions, my choices were all created by women. Make of that what you will. Possible twinge of regret: not including Bloom County.

Whatever you think about “best of” polls, comics, or any of this at all, the conversation is lively at The Hooded Utilitarian, so do check it out! And keep an eye out at HU over the next week or so, for more essays (look, Shaenon Garrity’s posted one about female cartoonists just today!) and individual results!

Edited to add: In the event anyone’s interested, here’s where I talk (sometimes with others) about some of the comics on my list: Hikaru no Go, Please Save My Earth, Banana Fish, Paradise Kiss, Flower of Life, Ode to Kirihito, Wild Adapter, Fullmetal Alchemist, Tokyo Babylon. It’s interesting to note that the one series on the list I’ve never written anything substantial about (Maison Ikkoku) is the only one that made the top 115. I guess I’d better fix that!

Filed Under: UNSHELVED Tagged With: best comics, polls, the hooded utilitarian

Manhwa Monday: Mid-Season Poll

July 12, 2010 by MJ 13 Comments

Welcome to another Manhwa Monday!

It’s a slow week in the manhwa blogosphere, with only three reviews for me to pass along. First, at Good Comics for Kids, Lori Henderson reviews volume one of One Fine Day (Yen Press). At Manga Life, Charles Webb gives us a first-timer’s look at volume nine of Black God (Yen Press). Lastly, at TangognaT, Anna talks about the first four volumes of Goong (Yen Press).

With such a small bounty to share this week, it seems like a good time to check out the (nearly) equally short list of this year’s new manhwa series. Though we’ve seen quite a few new volumes of continuing series this year, new series have been scarce–just four by my count as of the end of June.

Yen Press is this year’s overachiever so far, with two (count ’em, two) new series since January began, One Fine Day and Laon. …

Read More

Filed Under: Manhwa Bookshelf, Manhwa Monday Tagged With: manhwa monday, polls

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