Mobile Manga - Read Comic Books on your Cellphone

A friend of mine who is in an Illustrator and Inker for several comic books told me a while back that comic books will soon be available on mobile devices for people to download on their notebooks, PDAs, and even cell phones. I didn’t believe him back then because I still loved physically turning pages. To prove his point, he has sent me entire comic books of his that he had scanned in via flatbed scanner (for his own archival purposes and to show others) scaled down for PDA viewing and I was truly amazed at how much I enjoyed them. He said he is working on finding digital distributors as well as traditional comic book publishing houses to continue with this idea.

Japan, a country with a long-time love affair with the comic book medium, and which is always ahead of the technological curve, is thinking along the same lines. Japan’s new 3G networks currently enable the use of new types of high-bandwidth mobile content that weren’t viable under 2G for either economic or technical reasons just a short time ago. One of the coolest is Mobile Manga, delivering full-color comic book magazines to cell phones. One of the most popular modern pastimes in Japan is Manga, in both the written comic book form and the popular film form known here in the states as Anime. On Japan’s crowded subways you will generally find Manga stuffed in every Japanese commuter’s back pocket, along with a cell phone. I found out when I talked to the folks at NTT DoCoMo that about two-thirds of the population experience the Internet solely through their mobile phones. So porting Manga to keitai could make an awful lot of money for content producers, since ARPU is the most profitable form of revenue for wireless providers like NTT DoCoMo, which recently rolled out its fast 2.4GB/s flat rate service for its 3G network. If this movement experiences a high adoption rate it will also save a bunch of trees.

Wireless Watch Japan was at Mobidec 2004, recently held in Tokyo, and was able to make a video preview from Digital Garage Mobile’s booth. You can watch the video by heading to Wireless Watch Japan.