Hi everyone! I’m really excited to finally launch the manga prices blog and officially welcome you here. If you happened to find this place without going through the main website, I’ll give you a brief introduction 🙂
Manga Prices (stylized as “manga prices”) is a passion project created to make it easier for anime and manga fans to find the best deals on new, used, and out-of-stock or out-of-print (OOP) manga. With manga's rising popularity, costs, and fewer print resources available, finding affordable prices is challenging.
This project started in early 2024 as a way for me to get better at programming. Like many people, I always have dozens of tabs open checking eBay, Amazon, Right Stuf (RIP), Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, etcc literally every single store for the best prices. But this idea specifically came to mind when the prices for my favorite manga, Natsume's Book of Friends, got so bad, it was frustrating finding a single volume for $75+ and not having an easy way to know what other stores had in stock.
What started as a small personal tool slowly grew into something I wanted to share, so my hope is that manga prices can become a go-to resource for those in the manga community. Whether you simply like to casually read manga, are just beginning their collections, or are veterans in the collector's spaces, this tool was made to help anyone.
For more information about the manga prices project, feel free to check out the About or FAQ pages on the site!
manga prices blog
This blog is something I’ve wanted to introduce for a while, and I’m happy it’s finally live. The goal of this space is to:
- Introduce new features as they’re released
- Share updates and behind-the-scenes development progress
- Talk about manga-related topics like collecting, pricing trends, reprints & stock news
- Open the door to more transparent communication around what’s happening with the project
Whether you’ve been using the price comparison tool for a while or this is your first time visiting, I’m really glad you’re here!
A Look Back at This Past Year
Late last year, the manga prices site design and frontend finally reached a place where I was able to launch it. Since then, the site has grown a lot, and we’ve partnered with many bookstores and retailers! I’m not sure if people realize, but being able to display search results and using retailers’ APIs is a really involved process that requires emailing their sales/partnership teams and waiting for a response. Sometimes this back and forth can take multiple months, while other times it can happen relatively quickly.
While web scraping is an option, writing a custom script to scrape product data is a bit of a gray zone that could cause legal trouble, so in the interest of longevity for this project, I’ve been formally getting permission to use retailer’s APIs. Some charge fees for using their APIs which means that every search or data request made by anyone using manga prices incurs a cost.
Regardless, it’s been an exciting year for manga prices as the site has grown from a simple search tool into a more powerful resource for collectors and manga fans. Since launching, the partnerships we gained this last year has made it easier to compare prices across multiple sources and track availability for both popular and hard-to-find volumes.
This last year, we’ve partnered with the following retailers/bookstores 🎉
- BuyAnime (currently offline due to their site maintenance)
In the early months, we introduced tag-based search filters, sorting options for price and alphabetical order, and filtering by format, condition, and grade. Mobile users saw improvements as well, with responsive design updates, sidebar overlays, and fixes to accessibility issues.
This year also brought some major new capabilities. Volume-specific searches were added, allowing you to narrow results to a particular installment, and dynamic URLs now let you share direct links to series or volumes with friends or on social media. On the visual side, I was thrilled to be able to work with Shiori Fujioka, featuring her beautiful header illustrations, adding a touch of artistry to the site.
Overall, this year has been about expansion, usability, and polish, and I hope that next year we can continue to partner with bookstores to make the tool even more accessible.
Looking Ahead
Going into next year, I have many things planned for manga prices. More blog updates, for one! I want this space to be a place to talk about new releases, industry stuff, and just manga in general (like why shoujo manga isn’t as popular anymore, or what happened to the magical girl genre to name a few article ideas!)
On the feature side of things, I’d like to add a way for users to give feedback and report bugs more easily, so if something’s broken or confusing, it can be addressed in a timelier manner. More stores are coming too: TikTok Shop, 2nd & Charles, Bookshop, to name a few. This will give users more options when searching for prices. On top of that, I’ve been thinking about an email alert feature so you can get notified about sales or new volumes without having to check the site constantly.
And on the team side, we have a new volunteer joining! I’ll introduce her properly soon! I but for now I just want to say: I am not a company, I'm just a girl. I'm flattered that the manga prices design looks professional enough for people to be asking me for job openings 🥺! Unfortunately, I don't make money off of this project to offer any kind of positions, but if you'd like to volunteer to help the project, please feel free to contact me at [email protected]. We’re still a small passion project, so everything here is really just driven by love for manga, and we’re excited to keep building and sharing it with everyone.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time 😊