I couldn’t even check my e-mail today without tripping over the announcement:
Via PW and also via icv2,
and Anime News Network reprinted the original press release:
Tokyopop spilts into two: Tokyopop Inc. for publishing, and Tokyopop Media for “new media,” digital applications, & a to-be-hoped-for-but-still-unrealized comics-to-film business. Both companies will be part of the Tokyopop […]

So no online sales rankings yet. Yep. Sorry; working on it.
What’s up?
Have I complained recently about Amazon? No?
First, let me just point out that Amazon uses a flexible system of keywords derived from publisher-provided info, along with previous customer search criteria (apparently; though this is just a guess on my part) instead […]

Bullet Points:

Japanese manga sales slip another 2.3% in 2007, but
the medium is gaining currency as a tool of Soft Power diplomacy
…and increased academic and scholarly attention.

Numbers first–
We’ll begin with My Usual Complaint: sources are hard to come by. It’s not that market research isn’t being done; oh no, it’s that if you want it you’ll […]

Bob hasn’t posted in a coon’s age but he’s still active (in an odd definition of the term…)
–here’s an excerpt from a recent email (me to Bob)
You’re watching Eva right now: that’s a 12 year old anime but it’s a classic — evergreen, always of note; combine it with gundam, macross, and patlabor and you […]

Six things that might happen to Borders:
##
1. Nothing
An Immediate Economic Recovery solves all the problems — Not that a sudden uptick in the economy would suddenly solve Border’s problems but “a rising tide raises all ships”
2. Nothing ver. 2
Even in a bad economy, Borders new merchandising schemes might just work — well enough to […]

[a follow-up in spirit to this post]
An aside: Hiatus
You might have noticed, the heretofore-weekly manga bestsellers are late. (really late)
I didn’t post the online bestsellers yesterday — and I’m not posting anything today either, in keeping with my new year’s resolution to post nothing to the blog.
…but I’ve got a lot to say […]

This blog, in recent months, has become something of a one-trick pony. Granted, the manga charts are a pretty good trick, but there is much more to comics than obsessing over a top 10 list. Due to the time I invest in the online charts, though — time I had to borrow from […]

While the blog as a whole can be enjoyed by just about everyone, if you plan to follow the discussion in one of my columns (http://comicsnob.com/category/5by8/) then you should be forewarned:

This result came from a handy utility provided by criticsrant.com: Click the image or this link to check your own site’s reading level.
(via Neatorama)
(apparently Simon […]

How far down into this week’s list did I have to read before I knew my pick of the week? First item, alphabetically:
Pick of the week

The Azumanga Daioh Omnibus
by Kiyohiko Azuma. Published by ADV Manga, imprint of both hope, and promise –and a past history of crushing disappointment.
Azumanga Daioh is (perhaps due to […]

Prologue: This event is now 3 weeks past. In fact I wrote my field report the same weekend, but never posted it. After doing the writeup and going back to edit, well, nothing here seemed news-worthy. In fact, it sounds a little whiny, lacks a lot of details and facts, and is really just an […]

Before we get into today’s topic, an extended aside: Why no column for 3 months?
Those who have been following the site (I think there are three of you now) know that I used to do a weekly column, titled “5by8,” and while in the beginning it was mostly filler — an easy one-off (usually […]

I’m in the middle of typing up a fairly long column (yep: the dough for 5by8 #26 is proofing now, it’ll be baked and ready for consumption soon. Believe it!) but I thought this bit here was worth pulling out of the larger discussion and suitable for a post all it’s own:
Our business is books: […]