Amazon To Start Selling Doujinshi

A few days after the American Amazon site began offering groceries, Amazon JP has started offering a consignment sales service. Called the 'e-Taku Sales Service' (e-Taku being a combination of the word 'itaku (consignment)' and the 'e-' prefix, favored by businesses around the globe in the heydays of the dot-com boom of the late 90's), it would allow individuals to consign products they own the rights to to Amazon, and in exchange for an annual membership fee of 9000 yen ($78.50 USD) and 40% of the price of the item (37% for games and software), Amazon would sell the item just like any other product, and offer 24/7 shipping.


Amazon is also planning on exploring options regarding self-published works which do not have ISBN or JAN codes (which currently cannot be sold on Amazon Marketplace), meaning that in the near future, it may be possible to buy doujinshi and original (non-commercial, fan-created) games on Amazon. Also, some people have speculated that this is a first step towards turning Amazon Marketplace into a consignment seller. If this does happen, it would no longer be necessary to pay shipping fees to individual sellers for each book, and books could be mass-ordered at once for free shipping.


The Moe Theory Blog notes that there are already download sales sites such as DLsite which sell downloads of original games and doujinshi in digital format with no annual fee and a lower margin (albeit for digital files with no packaging or shipping required)　as well as stores which handle doujinshi and have mail-order services, such as ToranoAna. However, there are probably people who will like the idea of letting Amazon handle the financial aspects of the sales, and probably give people more motivation to advertise their Amazon affiliate links, since the products are targeted at a very specific demographic. On the flip side, derivations of copyrighted commercial works (which the vast majority of doujinshi are) making an advance into Amazon may create friction between the fan-creators and the rights holders for the original title.


Some people often perceive doujinshi to be derivative of existing work, analogous to fanfiction. To an extent, this is true: some doujinshi are parodies or alternative storylines involving the worlds of popular manga/anime series. However, many doujinshi with completely original characters/storylines also exist.


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