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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Anything Goes Live” board (Nandemo Jikkyo G), titled “Books are digital now — paper books are obsolete,” drew a wave of pushback from posters defending physical books. The flashpoint was a “buy-then-resell” reading style: selling a paper book on Mercari or BookOff right after finishing it, effectively reading it for a few hundred yen. E-book fans cited the hassle of storage and wear as reasons to avoid paper, but paper fans countered that once you factor in resale value, the per-book cost actually beats digital. Posters also split over what counts as a “specialist book” and over the limits of library request systems.
What people said
Buy a paper book, get it cheap secondhand, read it, then flip it on Mercari — basically free.
And even without a sale, secondhand copies are always cheap anyway.
There's only so many books you'd actually reread anyway.
The fact that you HAVE to sell it right away feels like a downside to me.
With e-books you don't have to sell anything at all.
I sell it before it gets dirty, so it doesn't get dirty.
Most books I never reread anyway, so I'm not storing anything long-term.
Plus you can resell it.
I love books, but I rarely reread them, which makes paper make even more sense for me.
Maybe it's server costs or something, but yeah, e-books are basically always pricier than they should be.
About the only place digital wins is something like Kindle Unlimited.
Though Unlimited doesn't even have that many good books, so I barely use it.
That one's useless too — it's always "only the first 3 volumes are free" or whatever.
Yeah, that's especially true for manga.
Specialist books and magazines are actually decent on there though.
No, it's actually genius — most manga gets boring partway through anyway, so by the time it'd start charging you, you've already quit reading. Might as well be free.
Why does a single manga volume cost almost 1,000 yen?
That's on you for buying at full price.
Buy from BookOff or Mercari instead.
Manga and novels are exactly the stuff I'd say default to paper — you usually only read them once, so being able to resell pays off.
Plus secondhand prices start cheap anyway.
Though I do buy digital on sale for the rare series I actually reread.
I read manga too, but I wasn't only talking about manga.
If anything, text-heavy specialist books hold their resale value better than manga, so they're even more suited to paper.
You were talking about manga though.
Fair enough.
Books are cheap per unit anyway, and there's shipping on top — not factoring in the labor and cost is very "paper diehard" of you.
The "labor" involved is like a tiny fraction of the effort it takes to earn money at a job.
Feeling annoyed or bothered while not working still beats actually working.
On the flip side, a book that doesn't sell means you effectively overpaid for it.
Not being able to recoup any money once you're done with it is rough — especially for expensive books.
I'd honestly like to know why you'd think that — I read text-heavy niche books way more than manga.
Some good ones I've read lately:
Japan's Bookstores
The Complete Guide to Nostalgic Japanese Soft Drinks
BookOff University: The Wandering Department
The Gold Guide to Non-Commercial Game Software
The Complete Famicom Disk System Guide
Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ Dissected
— stuff like that.
How is any of that a "specialist book"? Those are just mooks (magazine-book hybrids)!
After fees and shipping, that's roughly 1,600 yen back.
So I end up reading brand-new releases for basically 400 yen. I do this all the time.
You could just borrow it from the library for free though.
This is the real advantage of paper.
It's basically an exploit at this point.
Money books always say thinking about resale value when you shop is a trait of rich people, though.
Rich people don't bother thinking about anything that stingy.
Anyone still buying books nowadays is a paper diehard.
Reading's my main hobby, so I buy a ton every month.
It's a volume I could never afford without reselling.
For anything over 2,000 yen especially, reselling is basically mandatory.
Most people probably just see digital as "more convenient," that's it.
Really, 90% of it is that going out to sell the thing is just a hassle.
Fine if you're rich, but that's a bad attitude toward money for an average person to have.
You probably haven't even started NISA (Japan's tax-free investment account) either.
Libraries only stock so many books, and even the request system has limits.
I kept requesting pricey specialist books almost every month and eventually got scolded by a librarian.
Wait, the request system lets you ask the library to get books they don't even have yet?
Isn't a "specialist book" just one that covers something niche and hardcore?
Things like guides for non-commercial game software or Famicom stock-trading software that list exact model numbers and version differences — that's the kind of obsessive-detail book that gets me, exactly the passion-project specialist stuff I love.
Sounds like you've never read a money book.
I'd recommend starting with The Millionaire Next Door.
Background and key points of this debate
Against the e-book camp’s argument that paper books “take up space” and “deteriorate,” the thread kept circling back to a third option: reselling used copies. Anecdotes about selling a new release on BookOff or Mercari and, after fees and shipping, ending up paying only a few hundred yen net, work from a different baseline than the e-book side’s price comparisons, which tend to focus only on list price. Meanwhile, e-book prices are often close to paper prices, and posters pointed out that Kindle Unlimited — which offers “only the first few volumes free” — isn’t well suited to manga, meaning the assumed savings are often overestimated. The thread also split over the definition of a “specialist book,” clashing over whether magazine-style mooks like out-of-print game strategy guides count. It’s also easy to overlook that library request systems have caps — nobody can request unlimited books for free.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Anything Goes Live G board) thread “A mysterious faction claims: “Books are digital now! Paper books are obsolete!” — really?.”
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