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Del Rey Pushes Omnibus Format

Mushishi Vol. #10 (Japanese)
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Del Rey has quietly started pushing more omnibus format releases for their manga series, following the move done by finishing out books with Kodansha for Samurai Deep Kyo and Rave Master. According to Amazon, three series have had that solicitation come through to the retailer with 2010 release dates:

Air Gear volume 15/16/17
School Rumble volume 14/15/16
Mushishi volume 8/9/10

Additionally, we've learned that Chapters.ca is listing Suzuka 13/14/15 with an Augusto 2010 street date.

These are all ending volumes of series that have run for a bit and likely have seen slowing sales if not significant drops due to economic issues. Most series stabilize after the first couple of volumes and hold steady for most of the rest of the run, but sometimes other issues affect them as well.

Mushishi finished its original run in Japan in 2008 with volume ten. School Rumble finished in 2008 as well with volume twenty-two, which means we should see two more omnibus collections there. Air Gear is still ongoing with twenty-six volumes out in Japan at this point, and it's likely that depending on how well the omnibuses do for that series we may not see much more of it. Suzuka finished in 2007 with eighteen volumes and it looks as though there should be one more omnibus for that release after this one in August if the information at Chapters.ca is accurate.

In a discussion about this change of format, Adam Arnold of Seven Seas Entertainment talks a bit about a couple of their releases which were canceled before the final volumes came out for The Last Uniform and Strawberry Panic!. With this change to omnibus format for some series, would it work for light novels as well?

Says Mr. Arnold, "It's a great idea in theory, but it's not actually really that feasible to do. You have to license each volume individually (and likely an additional licensing fee to do an omnibus edition), and then you have to pay for three books worth of materials, translations, rewrites and copy edits. Manga generally cost a third or even fourth of what light novels do, so the production costs quickly balloon out of control for a Light Novel Omnibus. So realistically, you're looking at a book that has to be priced between $25 and $35 dollars, and it hasn't been proven that anyone would pay that given the niche nature of the majority of the Light Novels out there."

Jump into the discussion here and talk about what titles you'd want to see done in omnibus format, concerns about the omnibus format by different publishers and whether this is a good idea at all.