From the Wall Street Journal The light weight iPad reader has added fuel to Japan's budding e-book industry even though Apple's digital bookstore iBookstore is not yet open for business in Japan. Still, the healthy stable of iPad and iPhone applications on offer via the Japanese iTunes store allows users to pick through a well-stocked library of choice reads . . . Sandwiched between two comics at number 38 in the rankings for the most downloaded book for the iPhone at Apple's App Store in Japan is Japan's surprise runaway bestseller this year, "What If the Female Manager of a High...

Anime News Network is reporting this award for manga available on mobile phones which will be the result of a poll running from June 11 to July 12. Here are the 20 nominations. Those marked with an * are available in the US in English: *Aa Megami-sama (Oh My Goddess!) by Kousuke Fujishima Ao no Fuuin by Chie Shinohara Boku no Hatsukoi wo Kimi ni Sasagu by Kotomi Aoki *Fushigi Yûgi by Yuu Watase Godhand Teru by Kazuki Yamamoto *Gokuraku Seishun Hockey Bu (My Heavenly Hockey Club) by Ai Morinaga *GS Mikami Gokuraku Daisakusen!! (Ghost Sweeper Mikami) by Takashi Shiina *Itazura na Kiss by Kaoru Tada Hotaru no Hikari by Satoru Hiura Kami no Shizuku by Tadashi Agi *Kare...

Publishers Weekly has a piece on Japanese and American manga publishers banding together to oppose “scanlations”—the manga equivalent of animé fansubs, where fans translate and repost manga for the benefit of non-Japanese readers. What they are objecting to is not so much the process itself (which they say has been going on since the ‘70s—have scanners even been around that long?) but a number of “scanlation aggregator” sites that gather together scanlations from all over. They are threatening legal action against 30 scanlation-aggregation sites. According to a spokesperson, these sites are among the most...

From Resource Shelf: Manga is the Japanese word for “comic book,” and a type of graphic novel. Traditionally rendered in black and white, printed on coarse paper, and designed to be portable, manga is an art form for the masses, accessible to a wide spectrum of people from all walks of life. Manga genres range from horror to romance, science fiction to family dramas, military epics to sports stories, and everything in between. “Anime” is the word used to describe the film equivalent to manga. The guide is done in a manga style. The guide was co-authored by OverDrive and TOKYOPOP, the manga...

BusinessWeek reports that Amazon is in talks with Japan’s largest publisher, Kodansha Ltd., to publish electronic versions of its books for a Japanese launch of the Kindle Reader. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, the Japanese e-book market has been a tough nut for dedicated e-book reader vendors to crack—even Sony, whose name is synonymous with the Japanese electronics industry, no longer tries to sell its Sony Reader within its native shores. Whereas in America reading on PDAs and cell phones was largely an early adopters’ sideline while it took a really good book-sized reader...

If you thought that the iPad kicked over an anthill of American publishers with its introduction, its effect on Japan may take things to an entirely different level. BusinessWeek has an article about the possible impact of the iPad on the Japanese publishing industry. Unlike in America, Japanese publishers wield total control over the pricing of their books in bookstores, setting pricing and preventing discounting—like agency pricing for e-books, but extending to print as well. In Japan, the keitai denwa, or cell phone, has historically been the reading device of choice. Japanese phones have considerably more...

You may recall how Data the android read books in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the robot Johnny Five in Short Circuit—by riffling through the pages and absorbing the information in the time it took to go from the front to back cover. Now researchers in Tokyo have come up with a system that can scan paper books into electronic form just as fast. The video (embedded below the jump) shows University of Tokyo assistant professor Yoshihiro Watanabe literally holding a book under the camera and riffling through the pages. The monitor captures the images...