Even the Faust collections could not finish their run despite being several hundred pages thick.

Also to get omnibus releases pubs need to get permission from mangaka and the original publisher. Sometimes its easier said than done with certain rights holders.

Licenses are done on a per volume basis. So in the case of Seven Seas, they have already paid for license fees on their titles and if they are given permission to do an omnibus they are going to pay for all two or three volumes and not one omnibus. So if they only print one book, that book needs to sell three times as much to recoup the license fee costs. Also, even though printing costs go down with more pages, they also go down even more with higher print runs. In general omnibus sales are not high, stores do not like to shelve them, and they are often done for reprints (as the case with Viz Big or the Tokyopop omnibus releases), so as in the case with Swallowing the Earth books can go out of print and may never be reprint as it might not be economically feasible to do so due to costs being too high.

In Vertical’s case when we do omnibus releases we do a relatively high initial print run to last us some time. Reprint costs for a few thousand units are too hard for a small publisher like us bear. That is why we will be reprinting MW in paperback next year after two successful hardcover printings.

And, the weight really is an issue. Two volumes in a book I can deal with. More than that, I just won’t buy again.

My short ramble side – may its limbo be temporary, whatever is causing it! I haven’t read any yet but I really should since I love Ai Morinaga’s Your and My Secret.

While I’m not eager to drop $30 for a single volume, thus far prices don’t seem to be ranging quite that high – around $20 seems to be the norm and I think I can handle an extra $8 or so if it means getting 3x as much manga. It’ll be interesting to see how we might all shift buying habits when presented with a stack of omnibus versus a stack of single volumes however.