Why is physical media so popular in Japan compared to other countries?
bootlicking nation that worships their corporate overlords so much they think piracy is a grave and mortal sin.
Because Japan is a cucked company that doesn't believe in preservation. Even writing summaries online can get you thrown into prison.
>>287533459>>287533463Uh oh brown melty
Bot thread.
>>287533463>doesn't believe in preservationthat goes against buying physical, are you retarded? is this a bot?
>>287533440boomer nationthe same reason why they still use cash in 2026
>>287533541And fax.
>>287533440The case is fucking cool and nice to be put on shelvesCan't do that shit with your pirated games
>>287533541>the same reason why they still use cash in 2026cash is based though
Modern japs are basically luddites. Not that there's anything wrong with that, modern tech is cancer
>>287533644tech peaked in the 00s been downhill since
>>287533644tech peaked in the 70s been downhill since
>>287533440Japs tend to be autistic as a part of their nature, rather than it being a rare disorder.
>>287533684It peaked between the late 90s and early 2000s
>>287533440It's weird considering they have such small homes. There shouldn't be enough space for all their stuff
Japanese value objects. They've put up shrines for cool objects for centuries.
>>287533440Only physical media allows you to demonstrate true commitment, a concept foreign to western consoomers who just want to wolf down and then discard as much "content" as possible.
>>287533790why should I demonstrate my commitment to anyone
>>287533440Because owning something physically will always make it more special, rather than just sitting in my endless steam backlog
>>287533440For manga they purposefully make the image quality shit for digital versions
>>287533594The satisfaction of owning things is real.
Show another country where digital manga sales dominate so hard.I can't find full numbers for English but it's apparently only 20% digital over there.
>>287533440How much does all that cost, 200000 yen, or more?
>>287534143imagine purchasing some jpegs lmao
Japan has a culture of supporting things they like by spending money on it.America has a culture of stealing.
>>287533440I was one of the early adapters of digital media with streaming services and ebooks, but now that I'm no longer as naive as I was in my youth, it's obvious that media companies view the technology as a way for them to squeeze even more money out of their customers while being even more stingy with providing a good product in return. I've since switched back to purchasing physical media and only ever pirate digital media as a sort of online library to determine if I like something enough to buy a physical copy for myself.
>>287533459>>287533463Web manga and streaming media is infinitely more popular than 'physical' media in Japan right now. Why are neo-4chan posters so retarded that they automatically assume anything OP says is factually correct?
>>287534362we make up 25% of the world's consumer spending despite only being 5% of the population althoughbeitit's mostly third world countries that are the biggest leeches
I love having physical books but the sad truth is that those small ass pages with shitty paper stock is a vastly inferior experience to some high quality scans blown up on my moniter. Id love to purchase some large hardback manga anthology books with quality printing.
>>287534362Erm i think you mean america has a culture of winning
Strong 2nd hand market, they've got a thousand Book-offs and Hard-offs there reselling their junk for cheap. Why should I buy an online book for $5, when I could buy a real book for $5 and then resell it for $2.50 once I finish reading it? >>287533541it is also just more expensive to have a bank account in japan. Banks don't earn you shit for interest, and the japanese are all honoroaburu samurai who don't rely on loans or credit because failing to pay back a loan and being in debt would embarrass them, so banks don't get shit from loans and therefore can't add anything to account-holders interest, and they also charge holding and withdrawal fees. Also the japs actually care a little about their privacy and don't want a bank to record all their transactions, and the entire countryside refuses to update their tech to include card readers, so most people just deal in cash. It's kinda like a feedback loop. Nobody has credit cards, so you can't get interest on your account, so you don't make an account, so nobody has credit cards etc. etc.
>>287534447>Why should I buy an online book for $5, when I could buy a real book for $5 and then resell it for $2.50 once I finish reading it? Because you support the creators that way.
>>287534143A lot of this is due to paper magazines being bad value offering and limited in distribution. Collected volumes haven't seen much of a transition at all. That's strong commitment.
>>287534447also having that market mostly concentrated in tokyo and a few other urban centers instead of spread out over a larger country
>>287534424And you don't even get any color pages that were in the magazine.
>>287533459>>287533463>preservation = having everything on internet meme sites or trusting a database server that can go down any moment instead of physically having it yourselfThere are plenty of things that got uploaded and nowadays are lost media because the link is dead or has 0 seeds, your "muh preservation" point is a fucking meme when it only works for mainstream shit.
>>287534820>Collected volumes haven't seen much of a transition at all.>126 million down from 260 million
>>287534865That depends.
>>287533459>>287533463Jarvis, pull up nyaa visits statistics
>>287534833There's still a lot of people living outside of the Tokyo metropolitan area and Keihanshin.People in Aichi don't want to drive an hour to the nearest Aeon mall in hopes of them having some volume in stock.
>>287534990with digital re-ups can be found on many a site, with physical a common scenario is some collector holding a physical copy of something extremely rare that he refuses to dump anywhere
>>287535155Most manga aren't uploaded anywhere outside of official stores.
>>287534992Somewhat bad wording I admit. The market was trending down regardless, the biggest series all dropping in numbers, even now. Also consider that the start of digital availability also expanded the market so physical numbers were being held up by new customers during the early implementation period instead of following what could've been expected, most observable during the covid years. Factoring those in with the benefits digital distribution offers comparatively, new series being digital exclusive and maybe other minor things, it's held up well and there's a strong core customer segment still.The transition is significant, but not to the point of a majority (of the existing physical base), and not a near complete replacement like with magazines.What I want to highlight whenever I see this chart is that % of physical is lower, but that's mainly from the significantly bigger new customer base, physical is itself quite resilience and not anywhere close to invalid.
>>287535269resilient*
Piracy is very illegal over there
>>287535269I see a lot of older long-running series in female oriented magazines switching to digital only.
>>287535312A lot of those magazines probably went bust and had to switch. Not really familiar with them personally, but maybe digital magazine issues, few choice series get physical prints like other magazines.
>>287534990lost media, more like shit
>>287533440Because unlike DRM'd digital media, nobody can take away your physical media.>>287533459>>287533463Where do you dumb children come from?
>>287535582so your "muh preservation" shit is just a meme, got it.
>>287535647that was my first post in this thread, dont know what you're on about
>>287533541I live in the boonies in Japan and I can use my debit card for almost everything. Cash is only a thing in small locally owned shops/restaurants and recently, even in places like that, the owners have gotten card readers.>>287535298People get in trouble more often for uploading pirated media than downloading it. Actually, for torrents, the companies that try going after people the most for downloading are AV companies because they think they can embarrass you into paying some massive fine more easily. Though I don't know how many people actually bother with it. VPNs should make it a non-issue, though. Some companies are just massive copyright jews and monitor torrents so they can record the ip addresses and legally threaten people through their ISPs.
>>287534424I wish ebooks came with the physical copy in all cases. I like my LN paperback but I want to see and save all the illustrations on my pc without having to find some epub uploaded somewhere
>>287533541>>goes to Japan>>tries to enter a JR station>>a single electronic gate has the option of paying with a JR ticket, paying with IC card, paying with credit and, and paying with QR codeIt honestly looks pretty cool, like something out of a sci-fi movie, but when you know it's just a gate it feels so needlessly bloated.
>>287533440Because you can actually buy it there. You can casually go into a bunch of stores and pick up a 30+ year old video game console and a bunch of games. And if you live in Tokyo you can go to all these pop up merch shops, and other events. It's all made for you.
>>287535510The magazines themselves still have a print release. Print magazines switching to an ebook format sold across the standard stores only really worked for Valkyrie and even they stopped last year. In most cases the publication stops within a year and the series are released in a per-chapter model. The successful digital magazines were launched that way.
>>287535938Buying digital is even easier, you don't even have to live in Japan.
>>287535977Yeah but at that point you might as well just pirate it. Imagine paying for a jpeg. There's something very visceral and emotional about having it on your shelf and holding it in your own hands.
>>287536011Have you actually tried pirating manga? Most titles aren't available at all and what is available has lower quality than the official releases.You pay for the hard work the creators put into it, not your own vanity.
>>287533440Boy when you see how many vinyls are still being bought and sold, your mind will be blown
>>287536127I was super salty looking up a doujin CD with no rips on Mercari not long ago and the only copy ever posted was sold a month before
>>287534990You can have digital backups, including offsite copies. Paper isn't going to help in case of an earthquake or flood and it takes a ton of room.
>>287533472Why do weebs think brown people hate japan? they keep having record breaking numbers for tourism every month and this year the biggest increase comes from middle east countries lol
>>287533440Didn't digital manga sales recently reached 70% of total manga sales?
For the same reason they don't record concerts with their smartphones like the rest of the world. They are a higher race. Germans and Japanese are the peak of humanity.
>>287536045>Most titles aren't available at allhey, there's a good amount of manga available to read for free online. Specially retro titles like Haruhi and Elfen Lied.
>>287535155>wah give me free shitThe "Internet Archive" is a piracy site and deserves to get ground into the dust by people who actually make things
>>287537755Do publishing industry lobbyists at least pay you?Or are you doing ti for free?
>>287537633I don't wanna go to far with that, but.. with all these "harassing" topic lately about author and shit, I've never heard a Japs harassing, causing a ruccus on a foreign artist, author or any western/overseas media on twitter. I've seen their fellow Asians like Koreans, Chinese and SEAS like Philippines etc. but neve them despite probably having the 2nd largest userbase. They're definitely harsher to their kin though.
>>287533790so what is the difference between japanese otaku and booktok girls buying ya slop?
>>287534447>the japanese are all honoroaburu samurai who don't rely on loans or credit because failing to pay back a loan and being in debt would embarrass themThis is a boomer myth that was never true. Japanese people take on loans for consumer goods like in every other developed economy. Paying a handbag in installments is still a loan.
>>287534374Companies wins more money from physical media than streaming. Streaming service is a money-sink. The problem is more phylosophical than it's about money.
>>287537843This is true, Japanese men only stalk women and torture them to death and then they make hentai out.>>287537633The mark of a higher race is making guro eyesocket fucking porn as we all know and drawing a hentai manga of Junko Furuta.
>>287533500Le hecking discerino is gonna die one day>>287534990You're not meant to rely on the site being up retard, DOWNLOAD locally, and ensure you have more than one copy because drives can die too>>287535635>Recognizes that the real issue is DRM>Still falls for le hecking discerino meme
>>287538378>>>/pol/
>>287538391>The real issue is DRM, if you wanna actually preserve shit, you'll need the ability to make copies because your OG one is gonna die one day >Hurr durr, fuck off back to /pol/
>>287538432I only called you our for your newfag tourist speak.
>>287537843Yeah, they prefer to send death threats to their fellow Japanese artists instead
>>287537843Westoids don't make art. How could you harass nothing?
>>287537691On official sites. Haruhi or Elfen Lied are pretty mainstream titles, it gets a lot more obscure than that.
>>287536127>>287536195There is 100000s of doujin media that is not ripped and can only be imported physically from Japan, it is very fascinating. I own some doujins with 0 scans. Some of them are pretty good. I would say the language barrier and lack of accessibility is why these things die physically.
The Japanese love artificial scarcity.
>>287533440Costs less.
>>287538184Some bad apples don't change that, everywhere has bad apples just some places have much more of them like American or the third world.
>>287538856literal isolation policy for centuries
>>287538638>Westoids don't make art.You will never be Japanese.
>>287533541>cashCash is great, though, because it doesn't help companies monetize the minutia of your life.
>>287539043>look again>still no artyes, I'm noticing
>>287538118physical books overheads and profit margins are much worse than digital, books in particular, its a joke, selling ebooks is almost free money compared to hiring a production company, doing a custom formatting+editing of the text and chapters to fit a specific book-size, haggling over price, finding a new production factory if the book sells well and doing it all over again because the contract with the existing factory expired, transport costs and logistics etc.Vs just plonking the ebook on an amazon web services server and people pay you directly for data.
>>287533541>cash is le bad, guiselol fuck off big govt glowie/corpo shill/usurer
>>287539171>just plonking the ebook on an amazon web servicesYou still need editors and proofreaders, anon. They're less expensive than printing presses, but they're not free, not yet anyway.
>>287538638I love a couple specific western artists. They don't get much attention, so that may be why they aren't harassed nor talked about online much. The bigger ones seem to get substantially more attention, yet popularity =/= better artistry. Most of the western artists I love were all gone before my time. I wish I could have met Frank Frazetta and Frank R. Paul.I also love a couple Japanese artists too. Thankfully I haven't seen them complain about harassment. If there ever is 'controversy' about them online they ignore, and therefore the controversy goes away quickly. I think thats usually the best way to handle fake outrage: ignore it until people forget about it and move on to something else to be mad at.
What is better: physical that's hard to replicate and track but exists or digital that's relatively easy to share but vanishes from a powercut?
>>287542252Digital doesn't vanish from a power cut.
Most anti japan comments are by sour grape faggots, the simple truth its that they have cool things in the physical medium. As shrimple as that
>>287542425art sold album
>>287542338bit rot? failed drives? obsolescence?
>>287542338DRM garbage.
>>287542589Multiple backups. You're about as likely to lose your manga volumes in a house fire or to moths as you are to lose your digital shit if you have double backups like any sane archivist of animu and mango.I like physical but when it's so overpriced and generally of shitty quality I'd rather have good digital that I own, no DRM shit. I hate low quality books printed on toilet paper and bound as cheaply as they could and that's 90% of manga available in English physical.
>>287542895DRM is a thing on both physical and digital, try getting a Blu-Ray released in 2026 to work in a player from 2009
>>287542972Indeed. Blu-ray doesn't count as physical media.
>>287542972What the utter fuck?
>destroys your digital archiveheh, nothing personal kid
>>287543042Yeah, instead of using the same key for all discs like on DVD, they use one key per disc, this means that if a Blu-Ray player releases with keys for the first 1000 titles, it won't be able to play title 1001 without a firmware update. This would already be annoying, but it's rare for a Blu-Ray player to get over 10 years of firmware updates. Unironically the only ones I can think of are the PS3, PS4, and Xbox One
>>287542252I prefer owning physical, if possible and pricing isn't absurd. It's much nicer to hold the items in my hand than look at them on a screen. I like that tactile feeling.>>287543155That's nuts. I watch all my movies on my PS4, so now I'm curious if I bought a separate player if it would have issues.
>>287543244>if I bought a separate player if it would have issues.Eventually you would.
>>287543244Depends on how old the player is and what brand, but 10 years post-release is the standard for major brands (Even for Sony standalone players), keep in mind that the player doesn't stop working outright, it just won't play titles made after a certain date, so your issues depend on when your discs released and how old the standalone player is. 99.99% chance that anything currently sold by Amazon or Walmart is new enough to play all your (current) discs
>>287543155Haven't had any problems like that. I got a BD player from 2011 and never updated it.
>>287533440Physical media is better.
>>287533440I like it
>>287533809So you say, yet your tax money and the lives of your children are firmly committed to Israel. Why is that?
Japan believes in pride of ownership and likes showing off their possessions.
>>287546715>[thing everybody does]>achtuaklly it's uniquely Japanese xd
>>287533541>wanting the government to know how you spend all your moneylol, how do you even lie to pay less taxes ?
>>287546824Well, more than others, that is. One of those cultural differences.
>>287544399You made me look into it and I misremembered how it works: They don't issue keys in sets, they issue a new key for players whenever the old ones are too widespread, so a player released in 2011 will only have older keys, but it will not fuck up every new release, just ones where the publisher is anal enough to say the disc must ask for the newest one at the time of release. You probably lucked into not buying discs like that
Sometimes I think about ordering full manga series from japan. I can get the full series of dorohedoro in japan for the price of like 5 volumes of it in english.Its actually kind of insane. I don't know how they've kept their secondary market so under control.
>>287546862>Why yes, I just said heckerino capitalism is *ahem* uniquely Japanese and very cultural. I'm so smart. Plz upvote.
>>287533459>they think piracy is a grave and mortal siisn't piracy extremely criminalized there? no wonder they think it's a sin
>>287546924I mean, from what I've read they do. Its why the used video game industry is way bigger in Japan and why Steam is still niche over there.
>>287546930>any person who infringes a copyright etc. by downloading illegally uploaded works of sound recordings or visual recordings, which are being provided or presented for a fee, while being aware they have been uploaded illegally shall be punished with imprisonment for a term up to two years or a fine of up to two million yen
>>287534446Best joke I heard all day
>>287535710>Cash is only a thing in small locally owned shopsTell that to the Ooarai train station. ASK ME HOW I KNOW
