Hey! This ain’t a library!

Posted on June 21, 2005 by Brigid Alverson

Back when I was a kid, we used to stop off on our way home from school at Gene’s Market. Gene was old and cranky and hated kids with a passion, especially kids that stopped off at his store after school to buy candy and comics. Glancing through your issue of Little Lulu before putting your 35 cents on the counter was sure to earn you a sharp reprimand.
All that came rushing back when I read David Welsh’s latest Flipped column at Comic World News. Apparently publishers are getting all bent out of shape over people who read manga in bookstores
without buying them.
Can this really be that big an issue? Who has time to stand around in a bookstore and read an entire manga?
Someone is taking this seriously, as Welsh reports (referencing this article in ICV2) that a Borders bookstore in San Francisco has taken to shrink-wrapping all its manga.
To which I say: Boo!
My kids spend hundreds of dollars a year on manga. No way am I going to let them buy anything in a store without flipping through it first.
We put up with Gene’s misanthropic attitude because he had the only store on our mile-and-a-half route home. But where there’s a Borders, there’s usually a Barnes & Noble not far away. Take note, grouchy booksellers!
(Thanks to Love Manga for alerting me to this Burning Issue of the Day!)

About Brigid Alverson

Brigid Alverson has been reading comics since she was 4. After earning an MFA in printmaking, she headed to New York to become a famous artist but ended up working with words instead of pictures, first as a book editor and later as a newspaper reporter. She started MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters’ reading habits and now covers manga, comics and graphic novels as a freelancer for School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Comic Book Resources, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and Robot 6. She also edits the Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Now settled in the outskirts of Boston, Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters.
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3 Responses to Hey! This ain’t a library!

  1. Pingback: Love Manga»Blog Archive »

  2. Kate says:
    June 30, 2005 at 10:57 pm

    As an employee of Border’s I have to say…that’s a HUGE problem.
    There are plenty of tweens and pre-teens that will acutally grab a stack full of volumes, sit there for three hours, read them, and then just leave.
    Two major problems are:
    1. Most manga volumes are paperbacks. Paperbacks don’t stand reading well, and if they are read even once it is obvious. The spine will crack, covers bend, and pages may be creased or even torn. No one wants to buy a new book in that condition! The chances that a read copy will be purchased decrease dramatically with each reading. If the copies aren’t purchased, it means a loss for the company.
    2. These readers are essentially stealing. They are reading the product, completely, without paying for it. And that makes retailers very sad.

    As for the shrinkwrapping issue, most Border’s employees will be happy to remove the shrinkwrap from an item so you can page through it. Or perhaps sample volumes would be available. At least that way only ONE copy is getting that ‘read’ look instead of multiple copies.

  3. i love manga says:
    May 8, 2006 at 5:53 pm

    i wanna a website with all manga so you read online and no buying

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