tl;dr – I was accused of being a book pirate for returning a book. (Picture of email below.)

Throughout the past semester — the first in my five-year PhD program — I’ve been trying to build out my personal Internet-and-digital-media-centric book library (inspired in part by the dozens of books my mentor, danah boyd has in her massive collection at Microsoft Research). Like most academics, I prefer physical copies of what I read, for the purpose of taking notes. The process of searching-and-buying has boiled down to me coming across interesting, new titles or texts I know I need to own but don’t and then going to Amazon.com to purchase a used copy (or new, if it’s below fifteen dollars).

I’m trying to be as frugal as possible, since I’ll probably end up buying dozens and dozens of books over the next couple of years; at the same time, I prefer clean physical copies, so if the new book is too expensive, I’ll scour the Used section for “Very Good” markers, making sure to note if the text has any folds or notes or highlights.

About a month ago, I remembered that I did not own a copy of Paul du Gay’s seminal media text, Doing cultural studies: the story of the Sony Walkman. While searching around, I also happened upon another book by du Gay, entitled Production of culture/cultures of production. This jumped out at me, because I’m doing a project on “open-source culture” and the production of digital creative works (see 1 and 2), and I figured this text might be relevant.

Without any further research, I (ignorantly) purchased the book: a “Used – Like New” copy for $6.79 with $3.99 shipping from tomweberfilms (5-star, 100% rating).

Eventually Poc/cop arrived; I flipped through the pristine copy. But I realized: it’s an undergraduate textbook. Fail.

Not that these types of books are necessarily bad: they’re actually really helpful for the citations at the end of each chapter. But a textbook with the sole purpose of occupying a place on an undergraduate syllabus isn’t the kind of material I’m willing to keep on my bookshelf.

So I waited a few weeks to return the book, since I had a handful of other items to return as well (in addition to the honest fact that I was busy at the end of the semester, plus being a bit lazy going about it, since the Amazon return policy is 30 days). Usually returning items on Amazon is fairly simple: you fill out a very short form stating the reason for returning the item and then print out a shipping label. Done. For example, if you return a piece of clothing that you buy via Amazon (or an Amazon affiliate), the options are:

• Too small
• Too large
• Style not as expected
• Ordered wrong style/size/color
• Different from website description
• Damaged during shipping
• Different from what was ordered
• Defective/Does not work properly
• Arrived in addition to what was ordered
• Better price available
• Missed estimate delivery date
• Accidental order
• No longer needed/wanted

However, when you return an item to vendors that use Amazon to list and sell their items (but are not necessarily Amazon affiliates), you have to send them a message noting the reason for the return (literally “Submit for approval”) before they can endorse the transaction. When you select the reasons for a book, you get:

• Accidental order
• Better price available
• Damanged due to inappropriate packaging
• Missed estimated delivery date
• Missing parts of accessories
• Damaged during shipping
• Different from what was ordered
• Defective/Does not work properly
• Arrived in addition to what was ordered
• No longer needed/wanted
• Unauthorized purchase
• Different from website description

But none of these selections really fit the nuance of my situation: I simply realized after the purchase that I shouldn’t have ordered the book. Ultimately, I went with “No longer needed/wanted” and sent off the request for approval.

A day or two later, I received the following response:

Screenshot taken at 4:31pm PST, 18 December 2011

I got a refund… but if you didn’t catch it, let me cut out the important part:

Notes: You purchased this book three weeks ago and now you decide that you do not want/need the item. I believe you are taking advantage of the system. You had ample time to photocopy or scan the book at my expense. You may dispose of the book as you see fit.

… what? Was I just accused of being a book pirate? I was hilariously surprised, in response to this unexpected development (additionally unexpected because I still got the refund, including shipping), but also from a critical standpoint, with regard to the assumptions embedded in the response.

“I believe you are taking advantage of the system… at my expense.

Assumption: Users who purchase physical media on Amazon and return them (especially those who choose the “No longer needed/wanted” option) are clearly copying the object(s).
Assumption: The selection items in the return request accurately depict a motivation or intention of the consumer.
Assumption: The selection items over-empower the consumers and exploit the vendors.
Assumption: It takes three weeks to scan a 356-page book.

Perhaps the second point is the more interesting one to muse on: as a consumer, I don’t really think much about the option I choose as a reason for the return. But apparently, for the vendor, the reason provides a level of measurement regarding motivations and other unseen processes that elude Amazon’s merchant analytics dashboard.

The issue was resolved with a quick response email:

Me: Sorry about the lag in the return time. I understand the situation you described that the delay might imply. (Do you actually have a lot of experience with book piracy through Amazon? I wouldn’t have necessarily expected that, but I guess it makes sense…) I’d still like to return the book, if that’s an option.

Vendor: You sound like a good person and I’m sure you just didn’t get around to it. Sorry for the accusing tone of my e-mail, but I’m sure it happens that people buy books, scan them or make notes from them, and then return them. If you want to ship the book back to me, that would be appreciated. Whatever the lowest cost option is.

The piracy invocation still provoked a number of questions with regard to how unintended consequences can emerge from interactions in social media:

• Does the vendor have a personal bias against media piracy?
• Does the vendor have experience with book piracy through Amazon? If not, what is the motivation behind the accusation?
• Has the vendor made these accusations to other customers in the past?
• How does is the accusation situated in relation to the 5-star, 100% Amazon rating and (lack of negative) comments?
• What does the vendor mean by “You may dispose of the book as you see fit?”

The situation, at least, provides a unique thought experiment about the role of social media — particularly socially-mediated systems, like Amazon, or more vaguely like ratings systems and response forms.

It seems like the current context of rapid and easy content circulation and the impersonal business-to-consumer relationships masquerading as social media consumer “engagement” has led to a conflux of hyperaware metrics (consumer tracking) with the uncertainty of social ingenuity (what some might call lifehacking). This is a situation that perhaps The Cluetrain Manifesto could not have predicted.

And it’s not like consumers are the only ones with the agency and power to exploit these systems. You’ve probably heard about Amazons’ $23,698,655.93 book about flies. More recently, on an episode of the GeekNights podcast, the hosts suggested that some vendors on Amazon are listing items that they don’t actually own (under the premise that they’ll buy the item for cheaper elsewhere in time to resell when the item is purchased).

Plainly, this incident is awkward, but at least it gave me a chance to sit down and think more about the role that social systems play in the coordination of communication, particularly in impersonal situations. I wonder if there have been other instances of assumptions embedded in or emergent from the use of neutral (more like “vague”) tagging systems to mediate transactions with the purpose of categorization, management, and metrics but from which materialize other unintended consequences. A cool study to do might be investigating the responses that vendors have to the types of form responses they receive — for example, do most vendors tend to have negative opinions of return requests they receive marked “no longer need/want”? How would reactions vary between the various possible drop-down responses.

It’s also interesting to weigh reactions like this against the cultural value of the ratings system. For instance, when I’m looking for a used book on Amazon, I’m mainly paying attention to the quality of the book. A difference of 100% and 90% in the stars-ratings of the store itself doesn’t necessarily faze me. Though I assume for the vendor, one negative review completely offsets their reputation within the marketplace (and I know that many eBay vendors have been particularly meticulous, even petulant, about grooming their ratings).

Oh, and of course an answer: no, I didn’t copy the book. (Though I have to admit, it’d be a pretty ingenious scheme, even if I’d probably use the library instead of Amazon.)

Edited 19 December 2011 for clarity.

Alex Leavitt is a PhD student in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he studies the internet. While he has actually never copied an entire book (and though he frequently scans chapters from dozens), he does ideologically support projects like http://www.diybookscanner.org/ that help disseminate values of free culture. For more frequent updates, you can find him on Twitter at @alexleavitt.

Yotsuba&!, pronounced Yotsubato (よつばと, or “Four Leaves and… !”) in Japanese to include the ampersand, is a comedy-driven comic written by Kiyohiko Azuma. It was published beginning in March 2003 and still runs in Dengeki Daioh magazine.

Yotsuba&! was made available to English-speaking audiences by ADV Manga; however, Yen Press took over the license and republished the volumes in 2009. You can buy it through the 3rd-party sellers on Amazon for pretty cheap. In fact, you should buy it.

Yotsuba&! is a comic about a young girl named Yotsuba who moves to a new neighborhood with her father. The comic follows the eccentric, everyday trivialities of Yotsuba as she interacts with her father, neighbors, and town.

It’s a fairly simple story that requires barely any explanation. It’s a comic about a girl who does stuff, akin to how Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway basically boils down to a story about a lady as she goes around her daily routines. As strange as that sounds, Yotsuba&! is a comic about dealing with the hilarious things that occur in daily life (even if some of those things might be caused by a weird, little girl). With chapters titled “Yotsuba and Drawing,” “Yotsuba and the Culture Festival,” and “Yotsuba and Typhoons,” it’s really just a comic about everything and a girl. Basically, what the title says: Yotsuba & !.

There are three things that I wish this essay to achieve:

1) Explore where Yotsuba&! is situated in the Japanese comics industry and the minds of its (adult?) readers.
2) Look at how Kiyohiko Azuma has developed as an artist and how that is illustrated in Yotsuba&!.
3) Explain why Yotsuba&! (in relation to Azuma’s other works) says a lot about writing comic comics.

1

To begin, let’s look a bit more at Yotsuba&!‘s method of publication. As I said previously, Azuma’s comic is serialized in Dengeki Daioh (電撃大王, King of Electric Shocks) magazine, and has been running since March 2003. Azumanga Daioh, for which Azuma is most known, also ran in this comics magazine.

Before I continue, I feel the need to explain how magazines work in Japan. Somewhat similar to American television ratings, the Japanese comics industry targets its comics to demographics. In America, these tend to look like “Male 18-30″ or “Female 45+.” In Japan, comics demographics are similar but are categorized by name. Basically, they’re split into four categories: boys (少年, shounen), girls (少女, shoujo), young men (青年, seinen), and young women (女性, josei). Most comics are targeted to one of these four demographics, though the actual readership can vary wildly (eg., older men can read comics for girls).

So, with that in mind, Dengeki Daioh caters to a specific demographic. If you check the Wikipedia page, it notes that the magazine is aimed at boys (shonen). However, you’ll note in the History of edits that this was changed from young men (seinen) back in 2006, supposedly when the magazine shifted to a monthly schedule.

Based on the actual comics we see in Dengeki Daioh, we might posit the magazine to cater to somewhere between the shonen and seinen readerships (Zac Berteschy argues for the same interpretation in 2005). The cover images above illustrate that most of the stories found in these issues revolve around bishoujo (美少女, beautiful young girls) protagonists. The image below, which is a 2009 calendar celebrating Dengeki Daioh‘s popular female leads, highlights the same point.

I take a look at Dengeki Daioh‘s stories and readers because Yotsuba&! has been constantly criticized for being a story about a young girl in a men’s magazine, and then subsequently is defended as a suitable — and specifically innocent — comedy for guys (one good piece is by Jason Thompson on Moé: The Cult of the Child). The underlying tone in this criticism, of course, is that Yotsuba&! might be seen as a moé or bishoujo comic, which spontaneously taints it. I’m not going to argue for or against these demographic-genres, but Dengeki Daioh is certainly a magazine aimed at a younger audience than other seinen or adult magazines (such as Comic High! — which contains titles such as Chu-Bra!! and Kodomo no Jikan or Comic LO, which publishes erotic lolita titles).

Instead of situating Yotsuba&! in the context of bishoujo comics, instead I will argue that it is a comic for (young) adults. Which might be a little ironic, given that the Manga Moveable Feast is meant to shine the spotlight on comics for kids. And with the all ages rating for Yotsuba&!‘s release in the U.S., it would make sense as a satisfactory choice. However, I will argue against this notion, and instead uphold that Yotsuba&! is meant for the audience that it targets in Japan. It’s a story about a young girl, but the humor is in the relationships she maintains in an adult world. When she interacts with kids, (older teen and adult) readers laugh at the ridiculous situations, expressions, and reactions that emerge. When she interacts with adults, older readers laugh because they connect with the adults in the comic, who also see Yotsuba as pretty ridiculous. Of course, Yotsuba&! is also about “all the rest” (&!), and the short stories that we see of the adults in her world are just as funny because older readers can relate.

Yotsuba&! is a comic for adults. Not in the sense of perversion or ecchi perspectives. Instead, it’s a comic that older readers will understand, and with which younger readers — while they might enjoy it — will have a more difficult time associating.

2 + 3

If you know anything about Kiyohiko Azuma, you should recognize his name from the cover of Azumanga Daioh, which — as I previously mentioned — also ran in Dengeki Daioh starting in February 1999. If you do a quick scan of Azuma’s Wikipedia page, though, you’ll notice that he has done other earlier work. These include:

Inma no Ranbu (1997)
Try! Try! Try! (1998–2001)
Wallaby (1998–2000)

Try! Try! Try! is actually the predecessor to Yotsuba&!, and follows pretty much the same characters with Yotsuba as the protagonist. Wallaby is a story about a girl who sews a stuffed wallaby in memory of her recently-deceased classmate, Warabi. His soul comes to inhabit the toy animal, though the girl never understands that it is her friend (because the name Wallaby in Japanese, ワラビ, is the same as わらび, the boy’s name… if that wasn’t already obvious). And Inma no Ranbu (淫魔の乱舞, The Lust Demon’s Boisterous Dance) is an adult, erotic comic about female warriors getting sexed up, illustrated by Azuma (though he published under a pseudonym, for obvious reasons).

It’s interesting to look at the spectrum of Azuma’s titles and how they define his career. The character designs are fairly set in stone if we begin with Inma no Ranbu.

The backgrounds are nonexistent (what’s the point in an erotic comic, right?), and the facial expressions are fairly plain. The art style overall is minimal with strength in the line work, though it barely varies.

Wallaby shows improvement. Definitely not in the background art, as it barely exists in this comic as well, but Wallaby represents probably the primary space where Azuma practices his facial expressions. The character designs are still a bit wonky, but they improve going into Azumanga Daioh. The background art, however, improves dramatically, as Azuma makes distinct decisions to create a world for his characters to inhabit. Almost in complete contrast to Wallaby, Yotsuba&!‘s backgrounds and peripheral images (such as objects that characters interact with) are fine-tuned and extremely detailed.

The only copy of Try! Try! Try! I could look through was a one-shot from 2001. The style mirrors that of Yotsuba&! if you compare it to the original chapters, which is a bit interesting, since it seems that Azuma’s solidified his art style by 2001.

However, Yotsuba&! is an interesting case if we want to move away from talking about just “art style” and talk about “comic style.” And to do that, we actually have two things to work out: “comic style” as in 1) comics, and 2) comedy.

Azumanga Daioh, while popular perhaps because of its anime adaptation, ran in Dengeki Daioh as a 4-frame comic (四コマ漫画, 4-koma manga). The 4-koma has a long history in Japan before World War 2 (you can read more about it at Wikipedia). All of Azuma’s other comics are in ordinary format, including Yotsuba&!. So what does it matter that Yotsuba&! is not a 4-koma?

First, let me remark on Azuma’s other comics. Comic artists in Japan constantly have to battle to find the right balance between text (the words on the page), image (the drawings of characters and place), and structure (number and arrangement of panels). Azuma’s early works, such as Inma and Wallaby, suffer from having an imbalance between these three comic elements. Azumanga Daioh‘s 4-koma structure, on the other hand, enforces a balance between the elements that Azuma masters and through which he creates hilarious situations in every column.

Yotsuba&!, though, is not a 4-koma comic. It is structured like an ordinary comic. But for reasons to be explained, it finds an excellent balance between these text, images, and structure.

From here on, I will argue that Yotsuba&! secretly hides a 4-koma-like structure in how it organizes its humor.

The 4-frame comic is organized as kishoutenketsu (起承転結, or “intro, development, turn, and conclusion”). Each of the four “stages” of the narrative development in 4-koma represents one frame of the comic, and one full joke is complete at the end of each set of four.

Again, Yotsuba&! is not a 4-koma comic. However, while each chapter is set up as a distinct plot (eg., Yotsuba plays with her dad) with its own jokes, every page in itself contains a joke or funny moment. Now, I could list off the jokes on every page, but I feel like you’ll just get the point by going out and reading the comic! But I can, at least, explain what I mean about the “secret 4-koma structure.” By working on Azumanga Daioh, Azuma adjusted the way he told jokes to fit the 4-koma format, but in doing so he perfected telling jokes by aligning one frame with another. Reading Yotsuba&! feels like reading a 4-koma with varying numbers and sizes of frames. You can read Yotsuba&! and pick out different jokes, and for the most part they fit into 4-koma-like structures. However, the continual jokes do not hinder the narrative; instead, they help with character development, and each chapter of Yotsuba&! seems like a handful of 4-koma gently woven together into a more film-like form.

In fact, you can see Azuma doing a special rendition of Yotsuba&! in the 4-frame comic format between chapters 27 and 28. And the great revelation is that it doesn’t feel any different from reading the comic as regularly written and drawn.

Improving on Azuma’s earlier work, Yotsuba&! also illustrates that Azuma has figured out how to create impressionable comics. What I mean, basically, is that when Azuma wants to let his characters’ personalities shine, he can give each moment an impact. Usually these impacts consist of Yotsuba becoming really surprised…

… but these moments are constantly hilarious. These quick changes in emotion — spanning across two frames — are, I believe, a direct impact of Azuma’s work with 4-koma, as you’ll usually see that kind of comedic dichotomy between the 2nd and 3rd or 3rd and 4th frames of 4-koma. Yotsuba&!‘s humor is aided by Azuma’s love of sound effects, which actually pervade and dominate all of his works (eg., see the image from Inma above). I love how he uses them in a lot of Yotsuba&!‘s early scenes, especially ones where there’s not a lot of necessary noise (like waking up in the morning or working quietly), to emphasize the personalities of his characters.

Interestingly, the hard-hitting humor that pervades a lot of Yotsuba&!‘s early chapters begins to dissipate in Azuma’s later work on the series. It’s not that the humor disappears, but we get to see a lot more humble moments shared between the characters, particularly in collected silence. In my opinion, I think the reason for the change is that Azuma realized the popularity and worth of Yotsuba&! as a comic that represents more than just “a comic for guys,” that it reflects a lot about the relationships between the characters in the world he has created. And it’s moments like these…

… that I think define what Yotsuba&!‘s all about: loving daily life and the awesome moments that humor us.

Anime Expo was awesome, hands down. If I have panels accepted next year, I will make an effort to return, definitely. And there are many critical comments I can make about Anime Expo, such as the relationship between industry and fans, or the large size of the convention as justification for its importance (though in my opinion it shouldn’t have to be). Today, I’m going to focus on the Anime Expo dealers’ room.

Anime Expo’s dealers’ room is gigantic. If you’ve ever been limited to East Coast conventions, I would estimate its size to be slightly bigger than that of Otakon. For illustration, it took me a half-hour to browse through one-third of the floor, and I only stopped at two booths for a maximum of three minutes each.

Because Anime Expo is an industry convention (versus a “by fans for fans” convention), the dealers’ room also somewhat resembles Japanese industry conventions, such as Tokyo Game Show. A lot of booths exist just to advertise wares, such as this Astroy Boy movie booth. Still, while a small number of booths boasted walls of gigantic placards, Anime Expo’s room is littered with ordinary booths that hawk anime, manga, and cat ears.

I’m honestly not one of those junkies who stalk out the dealers’ room on the first day of the con, constantly returning to check up on discounted prices, lurking in the shadows to pounce on that ultra rare figure that I hid in the back corner to elude the price-sniffing of others. I buy a lot of my anime and manga online. In the past, I made minimal effort to visit Tokyo Kid, the anime store in Harvard Square. Usually, I know what I want, and I go online to find it cheaply.

Of course, nowadays with the price of DVDs and books on the decline (you can find videos on RightStuf.com for $10 or less, or books on Amazon for at least 25% off), dealer’s rooms are trying to keep up. On most Sundays the dealers scream at the top of their lungs to make sure every fan becomes aware of their “Buy 1 manga, get 5 free!” bargain. Still, after paying $50+ dollars for the convention (though I haven’t done that in a few years, due to panels), I honestly don’t want to waste a few hours in the dealer’s room only to realize that they don’t have what I want to read. Once in a while, I’ll find a great deal (like all twelve volumes of Tezuka’s “Phoenix” manga for $100 at Anime Boston), but otherwise, why can’t I just find things I want online? I’m not into serendipitous buying sprees after all.

At Anime Expo, I bought only one thing in the dealers’ room (besides an omiyage poster in the Artists’ Alley): a copy of Tezuka’s “Swallowing the Earth,” published recently by Digital Manga. Truthfully, I only grabbed it because I got an in-the-last-15-minutes discount of $20. Otherwise, I looked around at every booth, but bought nothing.

However, I came home with a lot of anime-related booty. The cause? Book Off.

I wrote in an article last week about my experiences at the Book Off in New York City and how it’s easy to find manga on the cheap, usually for $1 per volume. While at Anime Expo, I had the privilege of staying with the illustrious Deb Aoki, writer and reviewer of the About.com manga section. On Saturday afternoon, she drove me and a few writers over at Japanator.com to one of the Book Offs in Los Angeles. While not as large as the NY Book Off, I still picked up a number of intriguing items (all of them in Japanese).

First, I found two not-so-expensive “Groundwork of Evangelion” art books. As you can see from the scanned images, they were Volumes 2 and 3, and I’m not so sure where I should pick up Volume 1, but (again, looking at the scans) I only spent $12.50 and $15.00 respectively. Awesome! Especially when the MSRP of these two books is ¥2500 and ¥3000 (about $25 and $30, though these would easily sell in the dealer’s room for $45+). The books are practically new — only the edges are slightly rough — and the images inside (all production sketches with a few color illustrations in the front) will make any Eva fanboy cream his pants.

The rest of the books I picked up were only $1 each. Pretty awesome finds.

First, I picked up some manga. As I mentioned in that previous article, buying manga at Book Off is a bit difficult, not only because it’s hard to find the comics by their publisher, but also if you haven’t done any research into the comics, you’re not necessarily sure with what reading level you’re challenging yourself. However, browsing through the titles, I happened upon School Rumble, a series that I’ve never read or seen, but one that has been constantly pimped to me by a number of reliable friends. After examining the content, I decided to pick up the first four volumes (there were about a dozen there, but #5 was missing).

Next, hidden among the art book section, I found Katsuhiro Otomo’s early works Anthology. The 250-page, large-size book features about a half-dozen of Otomo’s shorter stories that were never published in English (and, according to Deb, never will be, because Otomo doesn’t like his works localized, apparently). The art is amazing, and while I’ve been looking for good copies of the English translations of the Akira manga for months, it’s certainly a nice supplement.

Finally, also among the art books, I found this $1 piece of curated information on the history and development of anime in Japan. The title reads, “The New Conquering the World Japanese Culture: Japan’s Anime.” This is pretty much the book that needs to be published in America, because it’s a really interesting primer (with hundreds of large, color images!) for any type of anime fan that doesn’t know the basic history of Japanese animation. The text covers a lot of the major players, including Miyazaki, Tezuka, Otomo, Oshii, and Anno, and also provides good context for the commercial markets of kids’ anime and toys. One chapter focuses dually on the evolution of robots and cute girls in anime. The section that convinced me to purchase the book (besides the $1 price tag), though, was the end of the compilation, which provides a lot of information on the history of anime from 1917 to 2003 (the publication date), the digital creation of anime, and particularly the relationship between anime and the television studios that produced them. The last few pages present a nice timeline of anime on television starting with Astro Boy in 1963. The opportunity to look at anime history graphically really hits home the fact that, OMG, there’s a lot of anime out there.

If I have the time in the near future, I’m going to upload a LOT of scans from this book and attempt to translate what I can.

In total, I spent less than $40 at Book Off. Of course, you need to know Japanese to purchase these and actually comprehend them, but still… $40 for 5 volumes of manga and 3 rather impressive texts. And so I return to the thought imposed on the beginning of this article: Is there a future for anime and manga in convention dealers’ rooms? Basically, the answer will always be Yes. But it may be true that the stronghold that dealers’ rooms had on fans in conventions from the 1990s has almost certainly weakened today. Some of this might be attributed to fans not purchasing series after they watch fansubs or read scanlations, but also, with Netflix, Amazon, and other cheap alternatives, fans can own media for much less than in the past. No wonder the American industry is slipping. And with streaming websites that provide free episodes to fans online… Really, how many fans are going to buy the DVDs after they watch it once? Perhaps the real question might be: What kind of value are fans assigning to the media the consume? Where does the line of rewatchability exist for modern anime fans that do not possess knowledge of “anime greats,” like Oshii and Kon, like Anno and Ishiguro? And what might the breakdown be between the consumption of anime and manga versus other things, like cat ears, figurines, and other merchandise being sold in modern exhibition halls?