Forum - View topicNEWS: Diamond to No Longer Restock 1,018 Viz Items
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Patachu
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 1325 Location: San Diego |
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That's what I was going to say 
Just another reason why the Direct Market needs to hurry up and keel over like frickin' WaMu. |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14761 |
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Kinda like Akihabara then.
What about those channels' consumers it is servicing? |
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The Xenos
 Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
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Diamond has constantly been a pain in retailer's sides. At least with manga, there are other distributors. One local comic store in Boston, one with a fantastic manga selection, actually gave up on Diamond and switched to a general bookstore distributor. Diamond was running weeks late on books. Local Barnes and Noble would have the books weeks earlier and the store would lose readers to them because they simply couldn't deliver the product due to Diamond. Now Diamond is playing even more games.
Of course, among American comics publishers and retailers, this new cut off amount is a bigger issue. There is no other distributor for American comics. Diamond is a monopoly. I've heard retailers at concs complain about it for years. Now the despot distributor is making things even worse for retailers and publishers. Rumor blog Lying in the Gutters says there might be some new upstart distributors to pick up some of the books Diamond is letting slip through the cracks. Here's hoping that happens and we don't have this bad monopoly anymore. |
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bglassbrook
 Posts: 1243 Location: Gaithersburg, MD |
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Was kinda surprised to see Utena v.5 on the list. I figured it had not come out yet, given how it never seemed to be available. Though a quick search on Amazon shows it did come out, and there are companies more than willing to charge over 7x list price for the privilege. Off to the wilder parts of the internet I guess.
Also somewhat surprised by some of the newer titles getting cleaned out with the older volumes in their series. Glad to be mostly keeping up with the sales. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4575 |
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So, to those of us who aren't familiar with the comic book industry, this Diamond is essentially a third-party distributor for the vast majority of domestic graphic-novel releases? And they managed to garner just about a monopoly, at least on the American side of things?
...weird. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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There was a really messy situation back in the nineties that left Diamond as the only major distributor for the direct market of U.S. comics. |
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AnimeCornerStore
Accredited Retailer
 Posts: 119 Location: Winchester, VA USA |
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Perhaps they should have though. There are a couple small Manga lines that must be ordered through Diamond Comics as they have exclusive distribution relationships. While almost no one goes to Diamond for the front end of any major Manga line (I think must of us go to Simon and Shuster for Viz, Hachette for Yen Press, etc.), deep back issues can be very problematic. Most manga releases that have been on the street for 6 months or more have sold through 85 to 90% of their lifetime volume, however, a few fans are picking up older titles all the time, requiring that a small supply of back issues be kept in stock, sometimes for years. A series like Boys Over Flowers is up to Vol #34, but someone just deciding to start on it today will initially be buying volumes that were released 4 or 5 years ago and can be difficult for retailers to get in small quantities no matter how big or small you are. In order for a retailer (like us) to carry (in stock) a full line of manga including very low selling backissues that are several years old, you can only do it economically by finding ways to keep your inventory of those issues "a mile wide and an inch deep". This is where an aggregator like Diamond has always been useful in the past because they are the only types of companies that are setup to accommodate recurring orders for very small quantities of obscure back issues. It's hard to buy a 30 count case of a really old manga from a bookstore distributor when you can only expect to sell 4 or 5 copies of that volume in a year, and many stores won't. This is why so many catalogers like RightStuf always seem to be out of stock of so many of these older back issues (we know, we pick through Stuf’s site and database all the time to see how they are doing). Even big stores like Amazon have the same problem, and in many cases just delist a book that they are having trouble getting restocked in a timely manner. Stuf has delisted plenty of out-of-print manga in the past that have still been readily available from other sources like Diamond, but that’s just a symptom of their inventory management. As another example, Amazon has never really wanted to stock a full catalog of manga, so they tend to fill the bottom 30 or 40% from third party partners anyway - this is why so many of their listings say the volume "will require an extra 1-2 days for shipping", even if you are a Prime customer. They are drop shipping those items from a book distributors warehouse under a special agreement. This is their method of keeping older volumes available, by using an aggregator to fill very low velocity items. Not Diamond, but it's the same methodology and we all need these sorts of companies to help us 'fill in the gaps' so the speak. We have always maintained a goal of keeping every manga volume from every series in stock all the time if possible (and it’s not, but it’s good goal) – unless it’s totally out of print and unavailable anywhere. So many manga have been published over the past 5 years (maybe around 8,000) that we are finally entering a time when older manga volumes have to start falling out of print as they reach their end of life. Diamond’s new policies just make our job a little harder as there will be one less place to go for small qnties of these older titles. And I know you fans don't care about any of this 'business' crap anyway. 
Bob (aka Robert) The Anime Corner Store |
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stevek504
 Posts: 216 |
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It sounded bad when I first read it, but now not so much. I don’t know about all 1,018 titles but I am suspicious that some of these titles may not have been available for quite a while now (and should have been taken off the list a year or two ago). Try finding a Saikano v.7, which is on the list, still in the shrink wrap! (If I am wrong, and someone knows of a online store I can buy a copy at a reasonable price please PM me).
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strider175
Posts: 28 |
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it's just business economics. Diamond as a book distributors needs to weed out the under performing titles to make way to newer series. The sad part is as a fan, not everything you like sells well. A lot of what DVD listed were novels or old series. Also this probably has minor affect on new releases unless they significantly under perform. Items that take up a fixed space whether they order 1 or 100 units, so it just needs to be weeced out. If anything this really only effects customers that currently buy their mangas from COMIC BOOK SHOPS supplied by Diamond. They will have to look for alternative sources to get back list for Viz Mangas. As mentioned AAA Anime Distribution has been supplying retailers with the back list of books that have already been phased out by Diamond for some time.
Also there are other e-tailers like Rightstuf.com, Animecorner.com and Justmanga.com that focus on "anime" and most likely do not get most of their mangas from Diamond. Viz made sure that their products can be easily distributed through many channels, unlike Tokyopop, Digital Manga and a few other publishers which signed a deal to be exclusively distributed by Diamond Comics for hobby/specialty markets which does not included retailers like B&N and Amazon. So if see Diamond phasing those publishers out, then chances are you are going to see them in fewer and fewer comic shops, anime shops and etailers outside of mass market companies such as Amazon. So this isn't the end of the world, just the changing of times. Times are bad so they are minimizing the damage. you sometimes have to make the decisions that people are not going to like so I can't blame them if they do not want to lose money and remain profitable. |
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