Sharon Domier's blog

A mook is a morph of a magazine+book. Mooks get ISBN but they also sometimes get ISSN as well. It gives librarians the opportunity to add them to their collections as a magazine or do subject analysis on each one like a book.

For readers interested in science, a well known publisher/title is Newton. In addition to Newton magazines, it also publishes a kind of kind of mook, also called a bessatsu ??. These have ISBNs, generally around 170 pages and are on particular topics. Within this category is Newton Light Newton ???.

Newton???2.0 is the most recent version – less text, and more images intended to appeal to people who want to spend less time reading but still get the content. There is no furigana included in the text, so readers would need to be reading at a Japanese high school level to read comfortably.

According to Wikipedia in Japan there is a whole category of (???????) brand mook. Indeed when I did a search I came up with all kinds of them, particularly for fashion brands. These are not cheap but they could be used by someone doing research on a particular company. Not what I would necessarily buy for my collection or recommend to students, except when I have students working on a particular band, comic book or video game. These are often called “fan books” and can be a very useful source of information for a student wanting to do an undergraduate paper on the topic.

I have also added mook that were from food/cooking magazines, not so much for the reading content but who doesn’t love to see pretty pictures of ramen or Japanese pickles. And learning how to make them from the recipes is a bonus.

If you are looking for more literary mooks, Bungei Shunju, Taiy?, NHK all have them and I have used a number of them. Again, most come from a magazine and are issued as an extra editon or supplement. Probably the best known is ???? Bessatsu Taiy?, which has been published since 1973 as a deluxe version of the Taiyo issues. These really are fabulous for senior theses on a range of topics, from Chibi Maruko-chan to Hiroshige.

Another interesting variation I have seen is from Kadokawa. Kadokawa has lots of brand mook, but there are also tanka nenkan and haiku nenkan. Kwai magazine also publishes mook for special issues of the magazine ? (rendered kwai) like this one of interviews.

?????? Bessatsu Bungei Shunj? is itself a magazine, so it is a bit misleading. Instead the label is ????? bunshun mukku.These mook tend to come from Bunshun magazine rather than Bungei Shunju. Red herring altogether. Never mind.