One Piece Manga Sales Top 20 Million This Year

As of this week, the total sales for Eiichiro Oda's One Piece manga series have soared past 20 million copies in Japan, during 2010 alone. To be more precise, that's 20.328 million copies sold following the August 16-22 week, according to the Oricon Communications market survey firm's report cited by ANN. This is already a new record for yearly sales in any book category, at least since Oricon began its tracking of various media sales in 2008. And the year is still far from over!



By comparison, the entire Naruto manga series seems to have sold below 5 million copies during the same period of 2010. And to think that the latest volume of One Piece (#59) - which was released this August 4 - had already sold over 2 million copies during the first two weeks of availability... Yep, it's that big in Japan.

In other Oricon e-peen news, the Blu-ray version of Volume 2 for the ongoing anime series K-ON!! topped last week's Blu-ray chart, with 28,000 copies sold in Japan. The volume had only been available for a few days, since its August 18 release, and its DVD version also did reasonably well: 3782 copies sold during the August 16-22 week - beaten only by the special editions of Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Go figure!