Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Tokyopop Goes Exclusive With Diamond
Geeze.. talk about dropping a bombshell! Tokyopop will now be distributed in comic shops only by Diamond (this doesn't apply to bookstores). From the sound of it, this could be really bad for a lot of the other distributers like Cold Cut, since Tokyopop has such a large amount of titles.
While in some ways this could be good for retailers (sounds like there will be higher discounts and Diamond is pledging to not ship to bookstores earlier as has happened in the past), and I'm thinking that this will cause the Diamond stats to better represent how the titles are doing in comic shops, but I hate the fact that this will once again kill off diversity. Manga had so far managed to work a bit outside the normal schemes, so it is disappointing that the biggest company would follow Marvel and DC to an exclusive Diamond contract...
Oh well, I guess we'll have to see how this all plays out. Keep an eye out on the April Diamond numbers to see if there is any change on that front...
While in some ways this could be good for retailers (sounds like there will be higher discounts and Diamond is pledging to not ship to bookstores earlier as has happened in the past), and I'm thinking that this will cause the Diamond stats to better represent how the titles are doing in comic shops, but I hate the fact that this will once again kill off diversity. Manga had so far managed to work a bit outside the normal schemes, so it is disappointing that the biggest company would follow Marvel and DC to an exclusive Diamond contract...
Oh well, I guess we'll have to see how this all plays out. Keep an eye out on the April Diamond numbers to see if there is any change on that front...
