The manga series Inuyasha was written and illustrated by Rumiko Takahashi and serialized in Shonen Sunday from November 13, 1996, to June 18, 2008. The 558 chapters have been collected into 56 bound volumes by Shogakukan, with the first volume released in May 1997 and the final one in February 2009.
Viz Media licensed the series for an English translated release in North America. Initially, Viz released it in monthly American comic book format (page size 17x26cm, or 6⅝×10¼") under the title "Inu-Yasha[sic]: A Feudal Fairy Tale", with each individual issue containing two or three chapters from the original manga. Eventually, this system was abandoned in favor of collected volumes in trade paperback format, using the same chapter divisions as the Japanese volumes.
The first-edition series of Viz trade paperbacks retained the same title and subtitle but reduced the page size to approximately ISO A5 dimensions (14.5x22.5 cm, or 5⅝x8⅞"). After volume 12, the first-edition A5 series was discontinued. Subsequently, Viz issued new volumes and reprints of older volumes in the "Action Edition" second-edition format, with the simple title "InuYasha" and slightly smaller pages (12.8x19cm, or 5x7½").
Viz released the first 37 volumes on a quarterly schedule, mirror-imaging the artwork to a "flipped" left-to-right format as standard in English-language works, as opposed to the right-to-left reading direction of Japanese. Volume 1 was released on July 6, 1998; volume 37 was released on April 14, 2009. On April 22, 2009, Viz announced that future volumes would be released in an unflipped format on a monthly schedule, starting with volume 38 in July 2009. However, reprints of the first 37 volumes have remained "flipped" instead of being reflipped back to right-to-left.
In November 2009, Viz began to issue a third-edition set of paperbacks in their "VizBig" format, with three of the original volumes combined into each omnibus. These restore the page dimensions to the slightly larger size of the first-edition paperbacks, and also faithfully reproduce the occasional full-color bonus pages that were reduced to grayscale in previous printings.
Viz Media also releases a separate series of "ani-manga" derived from full-color screenshots of the anime episodes, with dialogue and sound effects added in. These volumes are slightly smaller than the regular manga volumes, are oriented in the Japanese convention of right to left, feature new covers with higher quality pages, and are sold at a higher price point versus the regular volumes. Each ani-manga volume is arranged into chapters that correspond to the anime episodes rather than to the manga.