Analyses & reviews

The manga market, read and discussed

The figures from the observatory say nothing on their own. Here we read the market two ways: quarterly, annual and decade reviews anchored to the open dataset; and interviews and reviews — the voices of those who make the market, alongside our readings of the works themselves. Each one with its limits written before its conclusions.

01The latest review
02All analyses

03Why this section

Counting is not understanding. A single figure says neither whether it is high, nor whether it is low, nor what it foretells.

Two regimes of evidence coexist here: the reviews are verified in the data; the interviews are verified in the quoted words and their recording — sourced differently, but sourced, and with the consent of the people interviewed.

The observatory publishes the raw data; this section offers a reading of it. The reviews appear at regular intervals, they compare each period with the same period of the previous year (the only comparison that means anything) and they are recomputed on every import: no figure is hard-coded here, so none can silently go out of date.

Everything rests on the open dataset under the CC BY 4.0 licence, verifiable and reproducible. When data is missing, it is shown as missing. When an error is found, it is corrected and told.

Explore it yourself

These analyses are just one reading among others. The dashboard and the full dataset are open: you can redo the calculations, and prove me wrong.