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On October 6, Yamato of Comdot (4.3 million subscribers) appeared as a guest on bookstore chain Yurindo’s official YouTube channel ‘A World Only Yurindo Knows’ (580,000 subscribers), sharing frank opinions about structural problems in the bookstore industry. Yamato criticized the power-based book distribution practice of “stacking a ton of books whenever someone from that publisher puts out a book by that person,” calling it an “old-guard structure” and “collusion.” After yutura.net reported on the remarks, a thread on 5ch’s Entertainment & Sports News+ board saw clashing reactions: some argued that prominently stocking popular authors’ books is simply sound business judgment, not collusion, while others agreed they’d want to avoid bookstores where such power dynamics are visible.
October 8, 2026
On October 6, bookstore chain Yurindo’s official YouTube channel “A World Only Yurindo Knows” (580,000 subscribers) published an episode titled “Seriously Discussing Whether Bookstores Are Fine As They Are.” Guest Yamato of “Comdot” (4.3 million subscribers) frankly criticized problems facing the bookstore industry.
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Source: yutura.net / Original article here
What people said
but plenty of people do head to a big bookstore downtown figuring that's the only place that'll actually have what they want.
Dude's clearly not even a book lover.
Right.
He's probably just salty because his own book didn't sell and this is him taking it out on bookstores.
Is there really anything wrong with that?
That's just basic human consideration.
It's well within individual discretion.
A bookstore where that kind of thing is visible is exactly the kind I want to steer clear of.
That's not collusion in the slightest.
This is just dumb.
From the bookstore's (frontline) perspective, the fact is a huge pile of random books that don't look like they'll sell gets shipped in every month.
So they pick out the ones that seem likely to sell from that pile and display those.
His definitions for basically everything are off from mine across the board, so whatever.
Selection, quietness, how easy the shelves are to browse — stuff like that can make me go a bit further out of my way.
Well, that can't really be helped, can it.
So many books still come out every single day, one way or another.
There's no time to read every one of them and go 'this one's good, let's push this one.'
I can't imagine how they stay in business.
You mean the ones with a café attached, right?
The books are basically just decoration — it's really more like they're running a café with a bit of an 'intellectual' vibe.
And meanwhile bookstores just keep going under as usual.
If they stacked books that don't sell, the store would go under in no time.
are novels selling well as e-books too?
Isn't reading plain text on something like a phone rough on the eyes?
Since you can adjust brightness and font size, e-books are actually easier for me to read with my aging eyes.
I use text-to-speech and follow along with my eyes while listening, which might be heresy to real book lovers though.
Light novels are easy to read… Syosetu ('Narou,' the web-novel site) piles on so many ads it gets stressful.
With manga you can't read whispered-dialogue bits without zooming in, and two-page spreads make me cringe.
Honestly I just check the book in-store and then buy the e-book anyway.
Text is actually harder to read in manga, if anything.
Novels keep a consistent font size, but in manga the text can shrink way down depending on panel size and how much dialogue is crammed in.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Most books on bookstore shelves arrive through a system where distributors ship large batches from publishers, and it’s the on-the-ground bookstore staff who pick out the titles likely to sell and put them on face-out display. Many commenters in the thread pushed back against calling this “collusion” because prioritizing popular authors or major publishers is a rational call based on sales track records, with some element of individual discretion involved. At the same time, Yamato’s point — that business relationships may be shaping what gets stocked — does overlap with a distribution-bias issue the industry itself has flagged before. Later in the thread, the discussion drifted from the main topic into the broader hard realities facing publishing and bookselling, touching on how small independent bookstores survive, café-bookstore hybrids, and the differing readability of e-books versus print. Readers should note that judgments of Yamato personally and judgments of the industry’s structure itself are getting tangled together here.
*This article is composed as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Entertainment & Sports News+) thread “Book-loving Comdot’s Yamato criticizes bookstore industry’s ‘old-guard structure’: ‘Collusion, like stacking tons of books whenever that publisher’s author puts one out’.”
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