Although everyone agrees that the Japanese publishing industry is in trouble, there is less consensus as to the causes. Book and magazine sales have been declining for five years and book revenues for last year were at roughly the same level as a decade earlier; indeed, some say that if it were not for the Harry Potter series sales would have fallen over 30 percent from the previous 30 years.
The nature of the best-seller list has changed as well, with the top 10 sellers for 2001 and the first half of this year dominated by the sort of books relegated by the New York Times best-seller list to the side category of "Advice, How to and Miscellaneous." The No. 1 seller in Japan last year was "Who Moved My Cheese?" by Spencer Johnson, and, with the exception of Harry Potter, fiction has been conspicuous by its absence.
Last year saw the publication of several books on the crisis in Japanese publishing, of which "Dare ga hon o korosu no ka" (Who Is Killing the Book?) by noted nonfiction author Shinichi Sano particularly received attention. Now Sano has put together a new volume, "Dare ga ho o korosu no ka Part 2," gathering together the speeches and interviews he did on the topic after the first book came out, as well as the many book reviews it garnered.