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The death of the manga industry?

While the growing popularity of digital manga has indeed intensified competition, Hosono said now is the chance for publishing firms as well, since it is possible to reach tens of millions of readers with smartphones.

“I think this is the best time for the manga industry. There has never been this many readers, not even when the Jump magazine was at its peak, selling 6 million copies (a week),” said Hosono.

Back in the 90s Japan produced 6 billion books and magazines per year of which 2.3 billion were manga. Now they are cutting down on all that paper.

But they repcycled most of the manga. Recycled manga used to be one of the main sources for toilet paper in Japan actually. There was even a joke that hentai manga was consumed first as pornography and then it was recycled in the toilet paper used clean up the mess afterward.

Some people have said that manga is a dying medium. It some ways it looks like it's true: physical magazine sales are now 1/3 of the level they were in the peak sales of 1995. However, that ignores the facts that sales of comic books when taking into account physical and digital sales have increased 40% from 1995 to 2016. Manga publishers usually make https://ovo.fyi/fmovies/ profits out of the books and not the magazines because the magazines are sold at dirty cheap prices to promote sales of books and merchandising. Hence the decrease in physical magazine sales doesn't represent a decrease in actual income for the publishers since the physical magazine production costs are nearly equal to it's sale price.

This image from Japan times shows how the manga industry evolved over the past two decades:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/08/02/business/manga-goes-digital-via-smartphone-apps-paper-comics-still-place/#.Whc_xjdryUk

While physical manga book sales were 20% smaller in 2016 than in 1995 the sales of digital manga of nearly 150 billion yen, which I note are sales whose physical production cost is zero, hence meaning https://ovo.fyi/yesmovies https://ovo.fyi/solarmovie the publishers get the full return on that money, meant that the industry today is relatively healthy.

And this quote:

Japan Times wrote:

While the growing popularity of digital manga has indeed intensified competition, Hosono said now is the chance for publishing firms as well, since it is possible to reach tens of millions of readers with smartphones. “I think this is the best time for the manga industry. There has never been this many readers, not even when the Jump magazine was at its peak, selling 6 million copies (a week),” said Hosono.

So despite the fact Japan's population is aging fast it's dwindling young population is apparently consuming manga more than ever before.