In October, 17,110 members of the MyVoice Internet community completed a questionnaire about manga on mobile phones, according to the latest What Japan Thinks summary.

It turns out that while 64% of Japanese do not buy manga at all (which nevertheless does not mean they don’t read them), about 25% spend up to 1000 each month on them, and 10% more than that (mostly 1,000-2,000 yen but sometimes up to 10,000 yen and more).

While 13% read manga for free on a mobile phone, the vast majority (85%) either are unaware of this or just don’t read them. Of those who pay, most (60%) spend only 200-500 yen each month, although 11% spend more than 1,000 yen.

But there are four big genre categories of favorite manga: love stories (31%), school stories (28%), action/adventure (20%), and comedy (19%). All other categories, such as work, hentai, yaoi, and robots come in at about 10% or less.

Why would someone want to read manga on a cell phone? The top reasons cited were to occupy free time (65%), when commuting (18%), more compact than print (15%), and to re-read legacy material (10%). A probably hentai 5% said they like it because others can’t see what they’re reading.

In terms of non-manga content, the top categories for cell phones were weather (43%), news (38%), traffic/maps (35%), and ring tones (32%). Manga and anime were way down at 2.5% along with novels at 2% and books/magazines in general even less. 23% don’t use any mobile content at all.

It’s easy to understand that the mangaka like to dwell on their comic books, but considering that anime tend to be episodic and thus both easily budgetable in terms of time and pricing as well as urgent in terms of the latest (or missed) episode, you would think these would be a popular item? Like sitcom episodes in the States are?