Publishing titan Shueisha has apparently decided that the time for selling manga on your phone has come. According to NHK, popular titles like Dragon Ball will soon be available (for a fee) via a multi-region software-distribution site- provided that the phone in question is running Microsoft software. They will offer somewhere in the range of 20-30 titles, of which only Dragon Ball has been named specifically, in Japanese and English.

I'm really not sure what to make of this without more information; presumably, the manga will be formatted for the phone, right? What exactly does that mean in practice? As something of a mangaka myself, I have extremely mixed feelings about comics on cell phones; the convenience factor cannot be denied, but most comics aren't drawn with such a small screen in mind. Sure, you can zoom in, but it's not the same. Plus, as tablet PCs and other devices with larger screens continue to come down in price over the course of the next few years, will your phone really be the best mobile device for reading, manga or otherwise?

I don't have the answers, so I'm interested to see how this works out for Shueisha.

[Via Anime News Network]