Japanese PlayStation Store To Sell Manga Later This Year

It may not be the first video game console to make comics available, but Sony's PSN digital retailer is now the first formal video game distributor to monetize manga for its devices – at least, in Japan. According to Kotaku, Sony has announced that its Japanese PSN store will offer manga by late 2009 for the PSP and PSP Go.

There are still a lot of unknowns regarding Sony's entrance into e-tailing manga. Price, title availability and a specific release date haven't been announced just yet.

This isn't Sony's first foray into sequential art either. Fans have been able to view pretty much whatever JPEG files they want on the device since 2005, meaning the capacity for the comic reading experience itself is nothing new.

It's a safe bet that a similar practice could eventually make its way to the United States given manga's popularity among the gaming crowd. The only real question is whether or not developers would retool manga's traditional left-to-right reading orientation for western audiences.