No, I’m not writing more about manga (well, actually I will be soon since I’ve just finished or about to finish three different manga series in about a 2 month span), but I just wanted to talk about my trip to Books-A-Million today to go buy Ai Yori Aoshi 17 (among other books).

At first I went in and went to where manga has always been and…they were gone. My first reaction was somewhere around “oh my god! did they get rid of their manga section?!” I then looked up the side of the store I was on to look for any sign for manga, and didn’t see anything.

I then crossed through one aisle and started walking down the other side of the store and there, 2 rows from the back of the store, finally I found manga. My next thought was “oh crap, they moved it to the back so they must be hiding it” (note – I know nothing about what meaning or purpose, if any, stores have in putting certain sections up front or in the back).

I then start to walk down that aisle and then I must have let out a verbal “oh my gosh!” as the manga section was now HUGE. It has to be 50% larger than their last manga section (but they still didn’t have any of the CCS Master of the Clow books. grr.)

So that was a pleasant surprise to see that the Books-A-Million near me decided to super-size their manga section. When Fruits Basket takes a full 2 rows and Naruto takes a full 3 rows of shelf space, you know it must be doing good.

Oh, and I got my first look at those Fruits Basket Ultimate Edition books. I thought they were supposed to have some color pages in them, but no suck luck (well, unless the title page counts). But they have a significantly larger page size than standard manga, and of course it has 2 volumes in 1 book and is hardback. Since I already have the entire series to the point that it’s been released in the US, I don’t know whether it’s worth it to buy it again, but it’s tempting.

I pretty much never comment on the web design of other blogs or anime related websites (in fact, this might be the first which talks about it, other than my own blog), but I thought I’d just comment on AnimeYoshi’s new website design which they launched next week.

I must say that it is one of the slickest designs I’ve seen. Being a web designer/developer myself in my normal job, I love to appreciate good web design when I see it, and that is, I think, a fantastic design. The only complaint I may have is that the “news and releases” section is somewhat down the page, but that’s more of a minor quibble than anything. If that’s all I can come up with, you’re doing pretty good. I could probably (certainly?) come up with a lot more just with my own blog.

It almost makes me want to take another crack at my blog design (no, I don’t think I’m going to for a little while, though).

Update: I love the RSS link right there on the news/releases section too.  I hate it when I have to scour a site to find their RSS feed (assuming they even have one. many still don’t).