(4 Dec 2024) Japan is planning to implement artificial intelligence to police anime and manga pirating websites that the pop-culture powerhouse accuses of costing it billions of dollars in lost revenue every year. There are at least 1,000 websites illegally offering free downloads of Japanese content, mostly its globally renowned manga graphic novels, a group…
(7 Nov 2024) Manga Library Z announced it is going to bring to an end its online operations on November 26, 2024; the website SiliconEra reported. The company said they were having issues with credit card companies, so it decided to cease its entire online business. They have been providing old and often rare manga series, with…
(Aug 2024) A dedicated manga library operated by a university sits in a district of Chiyoda City, central Tokyo. It boasts a comprehensive collection of manga volumes and valuable resources for researching Japanese manga, with a collection numbering approximately 410,000, one of the largest in the country. We spoke with a member of the library’s…
(7 Mar 2024) In a major push towards making manga more accessible internationally, several manga publishers along with the Japanese government’s Japan Industrial Innovation Investment Corporation have come together to translate manga titles to English using AI resources. As Nikkei reported, this is going to be accomplished by a start-up named Orange which has been provided an…
(18 Dec 2023) The global popularity of Japanese manga has prompted a unique initiative by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese government. In a move to bolster awareness and accessibility of manga worldwide, the agency is collaborating with critics from various countries to curate specialized lists for overseas libraries. Good e-Reader has…
(25 Jun 2023) “Barefoot Gen,” which first appeared in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1973, was adopted by libraries across Japan and became a library staple along with other study-related manga and Osamu Tezuka’s works, according to Emiko Takahashi, director of the Japan Library Association. School libraries began introducing manga in earnest in the 2000s. It…
(16 Dec 2021) Meiji University began integrating services at its two manga libraries this spring in an effort to preserve Japan’s world- renowned manga culture. The Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subcultures, which has a total of about 410,000 items, boasts one of the largest collections of comic books in Japan. In…
(9 Jun 2020) Japan has just passed a new law that criminalizes manga piracy and also to the websites that link to it. The parliament passed new copyright amendments last Friday that ban the unlicensed downloading of manga, magazines and academic texts from the Internet. The new law will take effect on January 1, 2021. The…
(11 April 2018) Digital manga sales are on the rise in Japan. For the first time ever the digital format has overtaken print, but there is a looming crisis when it comes to piracy. One of the most notorious manga pirate websites in Japan drew a whopping 174 million visitors in the month of March, making…
(23 May 2017) Electronic book company Media Do president Yasushi Fujita (43) is cooperating with his home town of Naka, Tokushima to open a manga library on the site of a former grade school. The library will have more than 300,000 manga books, making it the world’s largest manga library, larger than the Kyoto International…