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My friend and I had a conversation the other day about manga in the U.S. and
in Japan. I know that in the U.S. manga is sold in the form of a book. My
friend said that _One Piece_ and some others are printed in a weekly magazine.
I just wanted to know if manga in Japan is printed in the style of a book or
like American comic books or perhaps they come in both. I tried to google it
but I couldn't find a very good answer.


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question
manga-production
How do they serialize manga in Japan?


The information that answers your question is on the [Wikipedia entry for
Manga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga).

They describe the general process about how manga is distributed starting at
the "Magazine" level:

> **Magazines**
>
> Eshinbun Nipponchi is credited as the first manga magazine ever made. Manga
> magazines usually have many series running concurrently with approximately
> 20–40 pages allocated to each series per issue. Other magazines such as the
> anime fandom magazine Newtype featured single chapters within their monthly
> periodicals. Other magazines like Nakayoshi feature many stories written by
> many different artists; these magazines, or "anthology magazines", as they
> are also known (colloquially "phone books"), are usually printed on low-
> quality newsprint and can be anywhere from 200 to more than 850 pages thick.
> Manga magazines also contain one-shot comics and various four-panel yonkoma
> (equivalent to comic strips). Manga series can run for many years if they
> are successful. Manga artists sometimes start out with a few "one-shot"
> manga projects just to try to get their name out. If these are successful
> and receive good reviews, they are continued. Magazines often have a short
> life.

Then in the next paragraph talks about the collected volumes:

> **Collected volumes**
>
> After a series has run for a while, publishers often collect the episodes
> together and print them in dedicated book-sized volumes, called tankōbon.
> These can be hardcover, or more usually softcover books, and are the
> equivalent of U.S. trade paperbacks or graphic novels. These volumes often
> use higher-quality paper, and are useful to those who want to "catch up"
> with a series so they can follow it in the magazines or if they find the
> cost of the weeklies or monthlies to be prohibitive. Recently, "deluxe"
> versions have also been printed as readers have gotten older and the need
> for something special grew. Old manga have also been reprinted using
> somewhat lesser quality paper and sold for 100 yen (about $1 U.S. dollar)
> each to compete with the used book market.

There is also a link to a list of "Manga mangazines"
[here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manga_magazines).

_One Piece_ currently runs on _[Weekly Shounen
Jump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_series_run_in_Weekly_Sh%C5%8Dnen_Jump)_
and is also stated as such the second line in the description of its [wiki
entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Piece):

> One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース Hepburn: Wan Pīsu?) is a Japanese manga series
> written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda. It has been serialized in
> Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine since July 19, 1997, with the
> chapters collected into seventy-eight tankōbon volumes to date. One Piece
> follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, a funny young man whose body
> gained the properties of rubber after unintentionally eating a Devil Fruit.
> With his diverse crew of pirates, named the Straw Hat Pirates, Luffy
> explores the ocean in search of the world's ultimate treasure known as "One
> Piece" in order to become the next Pirate King.

[Shounen Jump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekly_Sh%C5%8Dnen_Jump) is
described as

> Weekly Shōnen Jump (週刊少年ジャンプ Shūkan Shōnen Janpu?) is a weekly shōnen manga
> anthology published in Japan by Shueisha under the Jump line of magazines.
> It is the best-selling manga magazine, as well as one of the longest-
> running; the first issue was released with a cover date of July 2, 1968. The
> manga series within the magazine target young male readers and tend to
> consist of a large number of action scenes and a fair amount of comedy. The
> chapters of series that run in Weekly Shōnen Jump are collected and
> published in tankōbon volumes under the "Jump Comics" imprint every two to
> three months.

Clearly stating that it is a manga magazine, and outlines that series are
collected and published in tankoubon volumes.

The " _One Piece_ " [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Piece) entry also
states (at the time of this answer), that there are

> seventy-eight tankōbon volumes to date.

And the wikipedia entry for
[Tankoubon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank%C5%8Dbon) describes it as:

> A tankōbon (単行本?, "independent/standalone book") is the Japanese term for a
> book that is complete in itself and is not part of a series or corpus
> (similar to a monograph), though in modern Japan it is most often used in
> reference to individual volumes of a single manga, as opposed to magazines
> (雑誌 zasshi?), which feature multiple series. It can be used for a novel, a
> nonfiction work, an economics textbook, a book of beauty tips, a book
> presenting a coherent set of photographs, an exhibition catalogue that
> samples earlier books, and so forth in a hardcover format. It is more
> specific than plain hon, which encompasses such books but also one or more
> issues of a periodical, one or more volumes (or the whole set) of an
> encyclopedia, etc.

This information is slightly more detailed than required by your question, and
a simple search would have hit the Manga entry in Wikipedia.


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