Confession: I’m Jealous of Manga Collectors
Serious question: Do you need to be a millionaire?
Deep in the corner of my local bookstore, there’s a U-shaped nook lined with colorful, novella-sized books, each with a number on the spine. This is the manga section, and it’s home to some of the most awkward interactions you’re likely to find—even for a bookstore.
Teens arrive with unearned confidence, dragging along a less-interested friend as they loudly debate which series is “the best.” Meanwhile, millennials casually browse the covers, making sure to avoid eye contact or, worse, accidentally glancing at those titles while anyone is nearby.
As I savor the ambiance of books, coffee, and the occasional whiff of intellectualism, I start crunching numbers on my new hobby. At $5.99 a volume, manga doesn’t seem too expensive at first glance—until you realize how quickly you can burn through one. Manga pages read about five times faster than prose in a traditional book. That $5.99 suddenly feels steep when it gives you a fraction of the reading time.
Then there’s the sheer scale of it. Many of the most popular manga series are absolute behemoths, with dozens (or even hundreds) of volumes. A quick calculation will tell you: collecting one series could easily set you back $500 to $1,000. For fans of multiple series, the cost escalates fast. Is everyone who reads manga secretly an engineer with a side hustle?
But here’s the paradox: while manga is one of the priciest hobbies to collect, it also offers some of the cheapest access to content for readers who don’t mind going digital.
Enter the Shonen Jump app, a budget reader’s dream. For a mere $2.99 a month—less than the cost of a single volume—you get access to most of their massive catalog. That’s right, $2.99 for all the manga you can read, with the exception of the newest issues, which you’ll have to pay for separately. But if you have a little patience, you can devour entire series for the price of a pack of gum.
It’s fascinating: a medium that feels like a collector’s money pit can simultaneously offer one of the best deals in entertainment. It’s $3 in this economy, and I can’t even get a latte for that.
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