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Answerman - Why Are Later Volumes Of Anime and Manga So Hard To Find?

There is always that line between waiting for a sale or price decrease, and getting something while you still can. Fortunately, the switch to the 12-13 episode sets that some companies did made it a lot easier because oftentimes there are only ever one or two volumes to get.

The volume in shortest supply will be the volume that everybody needs to complete their sets, and at the demand-levels we're talking about it doesn't take a huge amount of variation in absolute terms for one or another volume to become clearly in shorter supply than the others. I mean, there's not that many people who want complete sets of PSME, so a couple of dozen copies less of v13, or basara v7, a level that can just happen pretty much randomly, will make a visible difference. And once that happens that volume becomes the one that everybody's chasing: all the others can be had from incomplete sets.

So, yeah. The rarest volume becomes much more expensive than the others.

What I wonder about, however is why in some series, it's difficult to find the middle releases. And I don't mean the entire middle portion or anything, but stuff like Excel Saga's infamous seemingly random volumes here and there no one can find anywhere. Did the publisher just not make a lot of copies, then made MORE copies of the following volumes? Or did these volumes become unexpectedly high in demand and the publisher, through contract or whatever, was unable to produce more of them?

Does this mean if I just go out and buy maybe 50 copies of a particular anime DVD or manga volume, I can cause that too? And then I can sell them off for these big inflated prices and make a bunch of money doing so?

Dark Horse is the absolute worse when it comes to this. Multiple volumes of Berserk are OOP,the recent Lone Wolf and Cub omnibus is apparently OOP despite being out for only a few months. They really dropped the ball on the whole manga division the last few years.

It is quite a vicious phenomenon when a middle volume becomes notoriously expensive and hard to find. It turns into an almost insurmountable obstacle, particularly with trying to reach the end of a series you genuinely want to finish.

And then there was the Gunsmith Cats DVD I bought (advertised as 'second hand like new) which, at £20, seemed like a bargain, but arrived damaged and unplayable. And reeking of cigarette smoke.

A more likely explanation is that they made the same numbers and the final volumes hardly sold at all. This could be either because the show lost interest before the final volumes came out, or the OOP status of the middle volumes killed any incentive to buy the final volumes. Back when they broke 24 episode shows into eight volumes it took a long time for the series to be complete.

You can argue 'supply and demand' or say that 'the worth of the item is determined by the consumer.' But to be blunt, there seem to be a lot of folks holding onto these hard to find items who seem to have listed them for the sake of listing them as opposed to a genuine desire to sell them.

Case in point: I came into a bit of cash recently and decided I'd use some of it to pick up some older, hard to find anime I'd wanted for ages. I had some moderate success. But in my searching for these items, I saw some JOKE prices. Somebody on Amazon UK advertised the Toward the Terra complete collection for knocking on £400! Even for an out of print show, I find it HIGHLY unlikely that seller will find someone in the UK willing to pay that amount. And then there was the Gunsmith Cats DVD I bought (advertised as 'second hand like new) which, at £20, seemed like a bargain, but arrived damaged and unplayable. And reeking of cigarette smoke.

Perhaps the seller assumed that the description "like new" applied to the item when originally purchased, as opposed to when sold. Alas, there are many sellers who are apt to take advantage of our natural inhibitions against complaining or otherwise creating a scene...

Hmm, in cases like these, I would expect the later volumes to have an even smaller run than before.