Wait, lambchopsil, you've read The Wheel of Time but not One Piece?? It takes way longer to read the former from start to finish than the current volumes of One Piece.

One Piece is closing in on 100 volumes in a couple years. Let's say generously that each volume has 200 pages (it's closer to 180 pages of actual content). That's 20,000 pages total at 100 volumes.

According to https://sites.google.com/site/batuhanswebsitecom/wheel-of -time, the Wheel of Time has over 11,000 pages.

So, more than half the pages, but now compare the text on one page of each series. I think we can easily say that the most dense possible page of One Piece has less than 1/4 the text of a page of The Wheel of Time (and yes, I know that it's one of the denser shounen battle manga... but it's still a shounen battle manga).

So it should literally take less than half the time to catch up on One Piece than to read The Wheel of Time.

Read One Piece already 😛

Most of my reading nowadays is through audiobooks though. Gotta make that commute more productive instead of only listening to music

________________
A just ruler amongst tyrants

Ah, fair enough. Just listening to One Piece definitely wouldn't be enough 😛

As I've implied before:
Your opinion on this matter, is completely invalid.

The topic here is long series. You talked about long series.
At no point, was there a requirement that series get long, because authors are pushed to make it longer than they intended.

...
Aside from residentgrigo's excellent response, and setting aside how you're utterly wrong:
Couldn't you, given that logic, say the exact same for manga?
Just that we're still in this fads heyday? (manga has not existed for anywhere near as long, after all, so...)

...and you're seriously saying that, that isn't the exact same reasons, for why manga is released chapter by chapter?
Seriously?
Are you kidding me?

Non-novel books, are nowhere near long enough to be relevant to this discussion, so your argument here is pure nonsense.

...says the guy that complained about how "novel" is too specific?
Fanfiction is literature. Literature is literature.

He wasn't claiming that it did (quite the contrary!), nor does it need to, for what he was arguing, there.

I would have had more to say in reply to you, but what with residentgrigo's replies...

Last edited by zarlan at 7:03 am, Oct 29 2019

First off:
Excellent comments. You made a lot of things I wanted to say in response to hkanz redundant, and responded far better and with more knowledge and depth than I would have ...and then some.

Not necessarily and most certainly not originally
...but, yeah, in a great many cases, nowadays, that is fairly obviously the purpose/goal. Sadly.

Man, that's depressing.

🤣

The poll doesn't state 'if you've sampled a wide array of different genres of long manga, what is your opinion...' and my initial post you responded to is only commentary on what I've read - i.e. the level of quality is more predictable in a novel and that opinion is based on the fact that I *have* seen manga nosedive and I *haven't* seen the same decline in quality in an novel. I'm not saying that *every long manga* is trash, which appears to be your interpretation. I'm not claiming to have read everything and neither is anyone here.


I never said that was a requirement. That's a potential explanation for why a series is long.


1. Not wrong, books have always been published as standalone entities, even during the period when serialization was popular in some countries. 2. What's the point of speculation about the future of the manga industry? Sure, it's conceivable that methods of publication could change and the structure of your average long manga could shift to become more like the structure of your average novel. It's also conceivable that the entire industry could be decimated. Zero point in discussing this.


I didn't say anything about why manga is released chapter by chapter. But my (very vague) notion about the history of manga is that it's always been released in serial form.


FACEPALM. The comment that I was responding to was specifically about the publication of 'books'. 'Book' is different from 'novel'. Given that they were 'invented' at different times, and the issue at hand was the history of publication, it's absurd to claim that distinguishing the two doesn't matter. You've also obviously never read some of the ridiculously long history books out there.


1. Woman 2. Where did I complain about how novel is too specific? I've generally only been referring to novels. I only mentioned 'books' in response to the aforementioned discussion about the history of publication.

Last edited by hkanz at 11:11 am, Oct 29 2019

Again, why are you guys comparing the sale of Japanese comic books to the sales of novels worldwide? Why not compare how how Japanese comics are structured and sold in comparison to American comics, European comics, Korean comics, and Chinese comics?


________________

True. Fair enough. I take back my statement that your statement was invalid.
It is valid for stating your opinion, based on your experience. (but not on stating if it's correct)
Thanks for the correction.

You very clearly implied it.
You did not state it as a potential explanation, but rather as the reason for why series become long.

No. Serialized literature is (note that I use present tense) published chapter per chapter. These are later collected together, and sold as a full book or books.
Technically yes, that later collected entity can be said to be the book being published as a stand-alone entity, but only in the same sense that manga volumes, are published as stand-alone entities.
...but how you can refer to the Dune/TwoT/ASOIAF/Harry Potter/Whatever book series as being published as a stand-alone entity, is beyond me.

Clearly invalidating your argument ...which is invalidated in other ways as well, as has been explained to you.

Yes you did.
You were contrasting books with manga, by saying "The serial form was just a fad in certain countries during a certain time period and was based on factors like price and availability, not a belief that it was the ideal way to read a novel."
Hence you stated that:
1. Serial literature only occurred in a limited time (false) and only in some countries (false) and isn't used anymore (false)
2. It was used due to factors such as price and availability, in the case of literature, as opposed to manga. (false)
3. Manga is published in chapter by chapter, because it is believed to be the ideal way to read manga. (so obviously false, it hurts)

None of that, explains why the distinction has any relevance to this discussion.
Novels are a type of book ...and any mention of "book", in this discussion, is obviously understood to be novels (or, rather, novel series), given the context (i.e. very lengthy narratives)
Any talk of shorter works, is completely irrelevant, and has no place in this discussion.

Ah. Terribly sorry.
I know one shouldn't assume a persons gender ...and yet I still often just assume that a random person on the internet is male, for some reason...
Thanks for the correction.

You said, and I quote:
"Nor was I talking about novels in particular, I was responding to your comment about 'books'. If you mean novels, say novels, the words aren't interchangeable"

I so agree. And well, maybe the poll should have been done with volumes, chapters can be really diverse in page length.

Also, adding to your list: sometimes you've got manga you want to finish, but they are taking decades to complete! Just see Skip Beat and Onepiece.
I'm sure I'll be around long enough in the manga scene for the first one to finish, but the second??

You seem to be misunderstanding many of the things I've said, so here is my attempt to clarify them:

1. I don't and will not assume that when someone says 'book', they mean 'novel'. Doing that is bizarre IMO, they're words, they have meaning. If you're going to use them interchangeably, don't @ me, because I'm going to take them for what they are.

2. I understand what serialized literature is. What I was saying was that throughout the period when serialization was popular in newspapers etc., separate works were being published as volumes. My previous comments on this topic have been about books because that was the term initially used, note comment above, but the same goes for the category of novels. To name a well-known one: Wuthering Heights.

3. Maybe my post regarding the reasons for serialization was badly worded. What I was trying to say was that novels were originally published as volumes - if you take Don Quixote as the first novel, that was published 200+ years before serialization became popular - and serialization became a trend for so-and-so reason, not because the structure of novels was suited to serialization. To my (limited) knowledge, manga has always been published in serialized form, so 'why did the industry switch from publishing volumes to serialization' isn't a question that can even be asked. You could ask 'why does the industry not switch from serialization to solely volumes' and that's an issue that I with no inside knowledge of the industry have no information on.

There is a thing called "context"...
For example:
In the statement "he reached for his weapon", in regards to a policeman, "weapon" is understood to mean his service handgun ...or, in the case of a swashbuckling swordsman, his sword. (or a jedi, his lightsabre)
A term can refer to a more specific sub-type of what the word, strictly speaking, refers to, depending on the context.
This is a basic linguistic fact, that even little children tend to grasp, quite automatically.
(and sometimes also the opposite. There are also many other similar/related phenomena, that are equally basic, and equally intuitively understood at a kindergarten level)

Your statements, in regards to this "book" vs "novel" issue, make no sense.
You don't appear to understand what the terms mean, or even the very most basic fundamentals, of how language works.

That may be so, but... How is that, at all, relevant? Serialized books are still published chapter by chapter, are they not? (also, are there no examples, at all, of a manga volume that was published as a complete volume, rather than chapter by chapter?)

Furthermore:
Book series are published, book by book.
As I've said.

No, it was simply wrong. In severally different ways.

Your credibility in this regard, especially given how you repeated and clarified your points, and still said what you said, which is completely different from what you now claim you tried to say. (but expressed badly, so that you said something else)

...or you could just ask: Why do they publish through serialization?
A question that you answered
You did not state that you did not know, but that you knew.
That you knew that it wasn't for the reasons that books were serialized.

Also, to deal with the issues you've chosen to ignore:
You did say that manga series only get long, because the authors are pushed to continue them, because they are profitable. This is clear, if one reads the relevant comment.

You contrasted books with manga, by saying "The serial form was just a fad in certain countries during a certain time period and was based on factors like price and availability, not a belief that it was the ideal way to read a novel."
That was a clear statement that:
1. Serial literature only occurred in a limited time (false. Something that went on for centuries, is hardly a fad ...and it still continues today) and only in some countries (false. It may [and I'm not sure about that] have mainly been in "the West" [all of it!], at first, but it later went world wide) and isn't used any more (false)
2. It was used due to factors such as price and availability, in the case of literature, as opposed to manga. (false. That is always the reasons. Well, on free online sites, it may partially/exclusively be because readers get to read stuff more often, which may keep them more motivated to continue, but that would be the one exception, and only applicable for that kind of situation. Not counting mere comic strips, of course, which are built on being published strip by strip, and which are not relevant to this discussion)
3. Manga is published in chapter by chapter, because it is believed to be the ideal way to read manga. (so obviously false, it hurts)

Edit: also, what was the point of including a quote-block, of my whole complete comment? It neither communicates, nor contributes anything. Citing a specific bit, to indicate what specific thing the following text is replying to, helps in making sense of ones comment, but that...?

Last edited by zarlan at 7:44 am, Oct 31 2019

I suggest that we agree to disagree ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For multiple reasons, but ultimately we just seem to be on different wavelengths in how we see things, and continuing this exchange is unlikely to be fruitful.

Yeah, I guess trying to argue with someone far too stupid and/or dishonest (I can't possibly tell) to make anything resembling a coherent point, is fairly pointless.