Remember last month I reported about the declining sales of manga in Japan, seems it the drop is actually due to the increase in spending on electronic manga instead.

According to a media research firm’s report, Japanese spent about 10.6 billion yen (US$95.7 million) on electronic comics or manga in 2006.

In the previous year, 2005, Japan had only spent 3.4 billion yen (US$31 million) on electronic comics in 2005.

This is actually about a 300% increase!

About 2.4 billion yen (US$22 million) was spent via personal computers, while about 8.2 billion yen (US$74 million) was spent via mobile devices such as phones.
Seems like the manga industry is booming instead of declining, just that the channel of distribution is becoming wider now. Looks like the manga publication companies will have to compete with the internet distributors.