I have an idea, maybe on series pages, there could be ISBN numbers for each volume and each country there in. Or just Original country. For people who wish to buy the books.

Last edited by ZinnKid at 10:35 pm, Feb 14 2007

Wow... that'd be quite an undertaking.. I wonder how many people would really use (or update) something like this...

Mmm.. I don't know, but the first problem I see is that there is a different number for each version of the book. Maybe it should be only the Country of Origin version.

But doesn't Japan have multiple versions of the same manga? Like for Astroboy, there's the classic one, probably the nicely finished one (like I saw with Black Cat, I think, and what's done with Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles), and also the re-drawn version.

But if the manga is old and isn't popular enough to be reprinted then the book will go out of print. I don't know how much luck people actually have finding specific manga, especially with knowing no Japanese... I went to Book Off, and they catergorize it by publisher, probably by sub-publisher, and then name (it sounds easier than it looks when ones surrounded by several spines with shelves of them). That's assuming you know the order of the Japanese alphabet... ^^;

Probably the people that would make best use of it would be the die-hard fan of the manga listed because the person would have the books and maybe want to help others get to it too. (And also the die-hard fan that wishes to look for the original manga, maybe to also support the mangaka, or that the manga is cheaper raw or to have the "untouched" version.) Shoujomagic went to the trouble of it on their page. My brother who's been living Japan saw the kanji that the titles were in because I wanted to search for manga and he was impressed. I even heard the translator on IRC has gone to extra grief to put in the Romanji and the kanji (and of course a non-Asian person who's attempt to learn Japanese understands how much work this is). Boy, the stuff we do for our hobbies, huh?

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