Join Tom and Scott as they discuss this: Japan is newspaper-crazy. Its biggest daily, Yomiuri Shimbun, has 10 times the circulation of The New York Times. For now, at least. Just as in the US, young people in Japan aren’t reading newspapers as often as their parents.
But the Japanese have a solution: Manga No Shimbun (Manga Newspaper), an online outfit that covers the week’s events in comic book form. These aren’t the funnies or political cartoons—they’re actual news articles about everything from foreign policy to pop culture to murder trials.
The site employs more than 100 manga artists to cover breaking stories, updating 10 or 15 times a day. Graphic style varies—some pieces are in color, others black-and-white; some are realistic, some exaggeratedly kawaii (cute). Manga News is also available via iPhone app and will come to Android and other mobile platforms later this year.
There’s even talk of international versions. Good idea, but what happens if Astro Boy gets elected to parliament?
For example, when two records contain the same ISBN this is a very strong (but not absolute) signal that they describe the same book, but if they contain different ISBNs, then they definitely describe different books. We trust OCLC and LCCN number similarity slightly less, both because of the inconsistencies noted above and because these numbers do not have checksums, so catalogers have a tendency to mistype them.”
After refining the data as much as they could, they estimated there are 129,864,880 different books in the world.
And, we get a great reader submission to boot!
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Hi Scott, Tom,
I am an American currently living outside of Tokyo in Saitama Japan.
I know that Japanese is a difficult language to pronounce if you are not too familiar with it’s constructs. Sorry, but the “a” vowel sound is pronounced like “ah” as in “father” not like “mangle”.
If you are familiar with Spanish then you are fairly close to the way Japanese is pronounced as well.
a=ah “father”
e=ay “may”
i=ee “see”
o=oh “oh”
u=ew “goo”
So manga is pronounced like “mah-n-gah”.
Tom, you were so close with Yomiuri it is “yoh-me-ew-ri” with a soft ‘r’ sound.
I enjoy the show.
Andrew
I wish I could read and speak Japanese. But I think it would take too long for me to learn.
What manga is that in the picture?
For news more interesting – nakednews.com
never seen it but I hear it is a different way to present the news