My complicated feelings on collecting manga

I have enjoyed manga, web comics and Western comics for years. They’ve contained some fantastic art, entrancing stories and fantastic moments throughout. However my enjoyment of this medium has been marred by a major problem, the storage of it all!

Between just three different series ( Komi-san Cannot Communicate, One Punch Man and Fly Me to the Moon) they represent approximately 75 volumes of manga. This isn’t even to mention the smaller series and deluxe editions in my collection. I would love to own the Berserk grimoire edition but that is £400+ and about 14 tomes that I’d struggle to find a home for! Trying to find a nice home for all this which is easily accessible and puts the volumes on display has not been easy. The immediate thought would be some sort of bookshelf or shelving system. While I have done this there is only so much room one can dedicate to this. Bookshelves are not small and more annoyingly, they’re usually fairly deep meaning you have to find a way to display multiple rows in order to use the full depth of the bookshelf. Then there is the concern of weight, a shelf full of books is going to weigh a considerable amount. But I wont deny that having the actual book in your hand as you are reading the series is enjoyable.

A while ago I was looking to get into more manga series and I discovered that the Amazon Kindle has an entire catalogue. I love the fact that I’m able to have tens or even hundreds of volumes readily available on my device at any time. There has been a couple of misfires where whoever was laying out how to display the pages on the device got some things wrong or didn’t include a table of contents. But most of these were minor issues. The biggest issue that I have is that I don’t own any of this. I enjoy these series very much at the whim of Amazon and should they change their service or something happens to my device, I would lose my collection. I don’t have that problem with the books sitting on my shelves.

I want to buy these series so I’m able to support the authors, encourage more series to be made and for my favourite series to be continued to completion. But between knowing that Amazon takes a considerable cut and the storage issues that I’m faced with, I’m really not sure what the best way forward is.