If you’ve been collecting any manga recently, you are very likely to have bought an omnibus or two. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the term, an omnibus is a single book “containing several books previously published separately.” Since so much of manga is now released in this format, I thought it might be worth discussing why manga is released like this and what to watch out for.
The benefits of omnibuses for the consumer are rather easy to see. As mentioned in “The Joy of One-Shot Manga“, a common issue that people have with collecting manga is the length of many series. By compiling volumes into omnibuses, the costs of collecting these series are lowered, thus making it easier for people to afford manga.
Quite often, these omnibuses will also contain benefits not found in their single volume forms. Many of these collections will feature a larger trim size, allowing the art to be more clear and visible. They may also contain extras such as additional short stories, short essays discussing the impact of the series and full-colour pages in contrast to the monochromatic pages found in the singles.
These benefits are relatively well-known but what you may not know is that omnibuses are often more beneficial to publishers than single volume releases! A large part of manga sales are still made from bookstores and comic shops. With limited shelf space, they must pick and choose the series that they stock and long running series can occupy a lot of that shelf space with little variety. They may also have difficulty selling volumes if a few people bought some volumes out of order. I cannot tell you the amount of times that I have not bought a series because there was a missing volume or two.
Instead, by stocking omnibus releases, stores can free up more of their shelf space for more series and reduce the chance of consumers neglecting to buy volumes based on a few missing volumes. Since this results in more bookstores ordering and selling manga series, this results in omnibus releases being surprisingly beneficial for publishers. For more information about this, check out Deb Aoki’s “What’s With All The Omnibus Releases?“
Having discussed the numerous benefits of omnibus releases, I feel it is pertinent to discuss some of the downsides. While not common, it is important to realize that some omnibuses may choose to reduce the quality of their paper in order to keep books cheap and of thinner width. A famous example of this are Viz Media’s 3-in-1 releases which feature pages so thin that you can often see the art on the other side. While I do stress that this is an uncommon practice, it is important to check paper quality before ordering or buying omnibuses.
On that note, omnibuses that do contain high quality paper can be quite heavy and might make holding the book for a period of time a strain on the hands and arms. While one can place the book on a surface so that you don’t have to strain yourself, if the omnibus is paperback, it might cause the spine of the book to crack and become damaged. If you want to reduce the chances of your omnibuses being damaged, you may end up having to read them in shorter bursts.
Despite these disadvantages, there are so many advantages to both consumers and publishers to purchase and release omnibuses that they are now commonplace in the market with many series being released purely in omnibus form instead of singles. That is why it is important now that consumers become more aware of this format and why it has become so common.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use bookdepository.com for all of your needs!