An Idea

Lj-tags: manga, blithering

Which occurred to me. Manga, when you buy it, is around $10-$15 per volume.
However, after you read it, unless its a truly earth-shattering manga, most
of it just takes up space until months later when you might want to read it
again. Which makes the library a truly nice thing when it comes to manga -
you can read it for free, which if it does turn out to be something
earth-shattering you can then go out & buy your own copy of it.

Sure, you could buy stuff & sell off the volumes you don't want to keep. But
what if you could get it on the computer? Takes up no space, just hard drive
space, and you could burn it off to CD if you wanted to make backups.
Problem with this is that scanning most manga is difficult, just because of
the binding method they use - you either crack the glue so badly that it
disintigrates, or you get scans that look really odd because you
<u>didn't</u> smush the book down to the glass to get a clean scan.

Idea? If you got enough otaku together, had them pitch in like $10/month,
you could buy the manga, razor the pages off the binding then scan them,
convert to pdf, & distribute them to your "manga club" members. And
possibly more, if you haunted half-price books or the library book sale
table or yard sales or suchlike. Hell, I have several volumes of random
manga i've aquired that way that I have no compunction against sacrificing
like that. Of course the hard part would be finding people who wanted to
participate in something along those lines, that had the money to spend &
didn't mind dismembering manga that way...

Might just do that anyway with the volumes I have. Just to save the space.