Blogs and Ends: Various Updates

FIRST

Mulan

Quite a few people wanted to know that if once Mulan is purchased on Disney Plus, it will be available on any other platform.

The answer is no. You will have to maintain a subscription to Disney Plus in order to access your copy of it.

I realize this seems more evil than stupid but trust me, this does indeed come from a place of stupidity. You have to remember it was originally announced as a rental and then became a purchase the next day after the internet blew up.

There was no planning involved in this hip-shoot decision. Disney Plus is in an uproar as the best of its senior executives have been fleeing the wounded Titanic that is Disney.

I suspect they will eventually offer it as an unlock on Hulu. Assuming that Disney can find anyone in their streaming subdivision whose head isn’t up his own ass.

NEXT

The Death of B&N

Unless someone buys out Barnes and Noble, it will be dead before New Year’s Day.

More likely before then.

They aren’t stocking new magazines. The ones on the racks are three months old in three of the stores I’ve looked in. Their book inventory isn’t in much better shape. Normally there would be a back. to school push in August. But this year, there might not even be school in the fall, so I suppose some restraint was in order. However, what little Fourth of July stuff they bought is still on the shelves.

Barnes and Noble was in bad shape to start with, but COVID has poured gasoline on that fire.

LAST

Comics Versus Manga

The upcoming mortality of Barnes and Noble raises the question of what will come next for bricks and mortar stores?

The lions share of the Best Seller over the counter market will go to stores like Walmart.

However, there will be opportunities for more specialty markets. Don’t look for there to be Science Fiction bookstores, however. That market isn’t viable due to the failure of publishers to find anyone worth reading. It would belong strictly to the Woke market and that is not a market worth having.

Their disability checks only go so far.

Two markets that I see making a go of it are both youth related.

A bookshop for girls age 11 to 14 will tear it up. Zoomer girls in that age bracket READ. Medium and Wattpad get huge numbers of page-reads. One Direction During the Purge got the kind of read-throughs I can only dream of for The Great Divide Game.

But I think the kind of specialty bookstore that would really clean up is one dedicated to Manga.

Viz Media was as worried as any entertainment company back in March. They were making their end-of-the-world plans. Cut-backs, lay-offs, reductions. Who gets a pay-cut and has to go home.

And then they had to take on people.

Manga sales have been through the roof during the shut-down. Box sets have been some of Viz Entertainment’s biggest sellers. This strongly indicates that kids are actually binge-reading, which isn’t supposed to be possible for anyone under the age of fifty.

I had maintained that comics were dying because between the internet, streaming videos, making videos, and of course video games, kids had too many other distractions to take an interest in comic books. Consequently, comics chose to serve the existing and dwindling market of thirty-five-year-olds and up.

Turns out, it wasn’t that at all. It was just basic math. According to my own kids, with ten dollars they can buy two, 24 page American comic books or they can buy one, 208 page Manga book. Also, the comic book won’t be a complete story but the Manga book will.

Work it out Dad. Which one would you buy if you were their age?

Okay, I’m done here.