Sun Wide Comics
| Division of Asahi Shimbun | |
| Industry | Publishing |
| Founded |
Tokyo, Japan (1959-09-09) |
| Headquarters | 6-11-7 Orikomi Building, Ginza, Chūō-ku, Tokyo, Japan |
|
Key people
|
Takashi Iida (President) |
| Products | Novels, manga, magazines |
| Parent | The Asahi Shimbun Co. |
| Website | publications |
Asahi Sonorama (朝日ソノラマ) is a Japanese book, magazine, and manga publisher and a division of Asahi Shimbun. "Sonorama" is a coined word combining , the Latin word for "sound", and , the Greek word for "sight". The name was acquired through the purchase of the trademark for sonosheets.
Asahi Sonorama was created as a division of Asahi Shimbunsha on September 9, 1959 under the name "Asahi Sonopress". It was initially established to record interviews, news, crime scene investigations, and articles on a variety of topics, and then release them on tape and sonosheets in the audio recording magazine Asahi Sonorama (from whence the company got its name). While doing this, the company also began publishing other magazines, manga collections, and novels.
Even though the sound quality of sonosheets was lower than that of vinyl records, the sonosheets were flexible and could last a long time. Asahi Sonorama found a market among those who could not afford the high price of LP records and was therefore able to enter the record market and compete with record companies and publishers.
After a time, however, the magazine and the sonosheet started having different content, and sale started dropping, so the magazine began changing its area of specialty toward having more child-oriented music and content. As anime, manga, tokusatsu, TV dramas, and the like became more popular, the magazine became more of a digest or anthology of stories, theme songs, and pictures from these series. Because of this, people began purchasing the magazine as a gift for children and sales began to be brisk again. However, the various record companies and publishers began taking advantage of this popularity by publishing their own magazines and sonosheets.
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Wikipedia