That’s definitely true. In fact, aiming for too much variety initially would cut into one’s reading speed. What I feel is usually a good approach is to focus on a single series and/or author until reading becomes “too easy” subjectively or objectively until the number of learned words drops and/or reading speed plateaus at X.
9 Likes
I’m constantly baffled by how a manga from 2016 can have such poor digital quality. I’d really love to read 魔王城でおやすみ, but not when it looks like this… but the weirdest thing is that I’ve checked volumes from 2020, and they are just as bad. It makes no sense!
Amazon (completely horrendous):
Bookwalker (passable, but not great):
If I lived in Japan I’d just buy them (or borrow them) physically, but I don’t like the idea of buying physically for a 20+ volume series that releases 3-4 volumes per year. It’s just too much of a hassle and requires too much shelf space.
EDIT: An Amazon review mentions this about the series quality:
18巻から画質が改善されましたが、1〜17巻はルビの文字が潰れて読めないくらい荒いままですので改善していただきたいです。
So read through 17 volumes of barely being able to see the text, then it will finally get better… (I just checked, and volume 18 is twice the file size of volume 17 and is indeed pretty good quality.)
Another series like this is かぐや様は告らせたい. It’s the same kind of length, but the digital quality is also not great. Certainly not as bad as 魔王城でおやすみ, but not nearly the quality it should be.
EDIT: An Amazon review mentions the resolution for the series, then at the end says:
集英社の電子コミックは2022年11月発売分より縦1920pxにフォーマット変更されおり、最終巻(28)のみ画質がいいです。
Too little too late publisher!
17 Likes
Yeah, got no idea how they manage that. Been reading it in English, and I went to start reading the next volume, only to discover I’d somehow completely missed six entire volumes. The last one I read was 10, the one I was holding was 17.
3 Likes
That reminds me, I’m just a few volumes away from Pokemon Special being legible!
I’m not there yet by volume 7, though.
But at least it’s not blurry!
(Okay, if I don’t rely on the furigana, it’s not that bad.)
7 Likes
Even JoJo (same publisher) has somewhat bad digital quality and the only digital version they do is the digital colored, which was specifically made for the purpose of reading it digitally as far as I can tell. It’s good to hear that they eventually improve though I guess…
1 Like
I think we’re on the same volume! I’ll need to get back to it as I got one chapter in and focused on novels… I’m reading the paperback version now so if you need clarification on anything, let me know! 
1 Like
The same is happening to me while reading 夏目友人長. I’m really struggling 
1 Like
Sorry to hear that… it’s one of those things where if you gain enough experience you can read text even as blurry as in the first image I posted. But it’s not pleasant!
5 Likes
At least books don’t suffer this fate, right?
Right? 
There are times when I would like to get more digital manga, because investing in a multi-volume series is both expensive and occupies tons of shelf real-estate. I have currently 1 shelf for Japanese manga so 
.
Aren’t publishers a little ashamed of the quality? Like, on paper it’s sometimes only a little better, but you can zoom in with your eyes at least.
4 Likes
Does anybody know where digital sits in the manga economics? The traditional approach was that the big “telephone directory” monthly magazines with one episode each of lots of series were printed really cheaply on lousy paper, and then the money was made on the collected volumes. Maybe some publishers think of digital as a similar “get people to buy the paper books” setup??
3 Likes
Judging by my latest physical manga magazine purchases, that is still the case for both weeklies and monthlies. When they say it’s a magazine, I didn’t quite anticipate a massive A4 book printed on ancient fax/xerox paper.
For goods bought outside Japan it’s still hella cheap, though!
4 Likes
Do they still use weird ink colours too?
2 Likes
I would say it’s more that they use mostly black(-ish?) ink, but the colors of the paper change every couple of pages. The overall quality of the print might actually be worse than phone directory books from the 90s, however.
EDIT: The funny thing, though, is that the front and back cover are high res, but the manga illustrations used for the cover are extremely blurry and noticeably upscaled.
3 Likes
I had some time this weekend, so I had finished reading through コンビニ人間. That takes care of last year’s backlog. I thought it was quite an interesting read.
I’ve no goals in mind for this year in particular, I just want to keep reading. It will be less frequently as energy levels are pretty low still, but I’ll find stuff I’d like. Probably gonna lean in more towards games.
15 Likes
Well, some do like to randomly make a kanji character an image for no good reason I can think of. Standard, basic kanji like 噂 for example.
9 Likes
A book I got recently had an image for 叱 or 𠮟 (as if I can remember which) because reasons.
(My computer can clearly render both variants, so I really don’t get why the ebooks don’t just include the actual character for whatever version they prefer.)
6 Likes
It depends on the magazine. I used to get one (1-2 years ago, i just don’t have space) that did a fun 3-5 color where a few chapters would be just in one color and other in another and so one. Looks beautiful from the side but trying to read stuff like pink ink is a massive pain…
2 Likes
I feel like we had a whole conversation about that exact pair of kanji here in some other context not too long ago, but I’ve clean forgotten what the outcome was…
Honestly, it’s such a pointlessly minor difference for going “ok this one is cannon, and that one isn’t”. It’s not like they even mean different things, like with 末 and 未.
3 Likes
It showed up in a book club once at least.
Also, I found the book I saw it in locally. Here’s how (stupid) it looks in my converted to HTML copy:
Searching through some other books, here’s another one:
Here is the “alt” version of the character in the HTML img tag: 迸. Which incidentally is the version shown on jisho as well as Goo’s monolingual dictionary.
But again, the variant they want certainly seems to exist: 逬. So I don’t get it.
6 Likes
