Here’s a stealthy bit of data that sneaked out recently – from the 20th June, Amazon announced an increase in printing prices for most of its print-on-demand books, offering authors the choice between upping their cover prices or taking the hit in their royalties. Amazon was reacting to ever-climbing prices of making books, as printworks shut down, logistics firms increase transport prices, and the cost of paper goes ever up.

It’s not just tomatoes and whatnot affected by covid constrictions and Ukrainian upsets. These increased costs are impacting everything that gets printed, and that includes DVD sleeves and collectors’ booklets. Particularly in the UK, where including an on-disc video extra like a commentary or Making-Of incurs punitive extra certification costs, collectors’ booklets have formed an important niche within bonus materials. That’s where you get the interview with the director; the storyboards; the Easter eggs. But I already hear whispers of companies cutting back on the size of their bonus booklets, or even giving up on them altogether.

Meanwhile, this year’s Annecy animation festival in France tried to make light of the absence of a print brochure. The Annecy brochure used to be a handy souvenir item, but this year it was taken online, supposedly for the convenience of punters, but actually to avoid paying 40% more for initiation costs.

Two of my most recent books were written under the radar, so to speak, given away as bonus extras as part of Blu-ray boxes. Some of you, I hope, were super-pleased to discover that your copy of Momotaro Sacred Sailors came with my 120-page book about its director – one of a tiny handful of full-length anime director biographies to be found in English. Others hopefully enjoyed the chance to read Future Boy Conan: Miyazaki’s Directorial Debut, a chunky 88-page monograph co-authored with NEO’s Andrew Osmond. Ironically, although such items were intended to add value to Blu-ray releases, they often went unmentioned (and unseen) by reviewers who stuck to describing the contents of the discs themselves.

Such scrimping worries me, of course, because I’m often paid to write the text that appears in these booklets. Hand-on-heart, some of my best writing in recent years has turned up in places like Arrow’s Shawscope box set, where punters might only encounter it when idly flipping through the extras. But if we’re on a slippery slope towards no extras, then we also risk a world where there’s nothing collectible at all to which a “collector’s edition” can be attached. In that case, all we have left is bare-bones releases, which itself is a drift towards no physical media at all.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #233, 2023.