Advance Reader’s Copies

After prowling about Sally After Words, I discovered something interesting…

…and that “something” was that you can get ARC manga.

I’d only heard of an ARC from the book bloggers I’d read posts from, but an ARC is an “advance(d?) reader’s copy”, given by the publishers (sometimes for free!) to produce hype for upcoming books. I know the book bloggers go gaga over this stuff, so why has no one ever told me this system exists for manga as well?

Well, I guess part of that problem is that there’s no particular system for “anime ARC”, such as it were. People who blog about manga are a lot less common than people who blog about anime and in my experience, anime posts consistently get more eyes than manga ones, which I suspect is highly likely to be why I haven’t heard of this until I decided to write this post. However, the closest one can get to “anime ARC” is subscribing to a streaming service as a paying member or going to a con to watch an anime before its release.

On the other hand, even though anime/manga/LN people tend to think alike due to the massive crossover in adaptions and suchlike, my experience with libraries has told me manga are often treated like graphic novels (because, to librarians and booksellers, manga is a subset of graphic novels and not an entirely separate entity) and LNs like standard novels. Thus, the ARC for manga (and I would assume LNs as well, although I haven’t seen an ARC LN) would be treated like standard books…I think that particular divide is also reflected in how some book bloggers review graphic novels and manga/anime as well.

Currently, I know I’m behind on my anime and manga as it stands – my simulcasts from previous years, my simulcasts from the current year, the manga from the library that’s sitting next to me as I type this, the stuff I bought (the manga volumes I announced a bit back, plus the Afro Samurai movie and first few episodes of Death Note, which I bought when I realised both are about 10 years old and would be pretty hard to find on disc at this point in time, although the latter is available for streaming and the former would need a subscription if it was available through legal streaming), the shows I said I’d watch to create posts or complete watching challenges. That’s why I haven’t opened up an account on a manga ARC service yet (i.e. as I type this – if future Aria reads this, the situation may have changed by then). However, should I ever clear away enough content to need it in the future…you know I will do it.

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Well, I wasn’t anticipating writing a post about this…but most of my posts are fairly unplanned anyway, so there’s no point in pointing that out. This topic – about how manga is treated like a book and is treated as such by the professionals, but maybe not the fans – is pretty interesting, so I might end up ruminating on that in the future again.

So for those who’ve seen the term “ARC” in this way before, where have you seen it being used and how? For those who haven’t, would doing this sort of thing interest you? Are you using this system already, for those who blog about the media I’ve discussed?