I love this thread. I really do, despite all the things I say. Here we are talking about new series surpassing a well past 10 year old series as if that has never happened before ever, or that makes the ten year old series any less of a juggernaut. Oh and lets not forget these new series aren't even a year old yet, and one hasn't even been put out for sale for us to have stable numbers to compare! Yet we're already talking about it surpassing a series that has had more than ten years worth of mettle and a sizeable fanbase. Shouldn't these new series be compared to other lesser series first? Oh ooh, lets have more fun with this, and start asking ourselves how quickly these newbies will over take the old guard. 2 years? 3 years? 5? Oh man this is so bad for me that it has to be fattening, yet I can't help but go for seconds.No! That is not what it is saying. Youre implying that "digital" would be the only other channel increasing, but they clearly use it in the plural which still suggests traditional print channels, maybe even others are increasing. New retailers and stores could be opening, maybe new mom and pop shops, etc. You would also be working off some assumption that the ones that had a 4mln print run didnt have any digital copies sold which I dont think there is any evidence present to suggest to any of us that the previous volumes, volumes dating back to 2011, truly did not sell digitally, which is impossible if, accoding to your post One Piece is popular digitally.
Additionally based on what was previously posted by Stark700
We cant simply assume that the loss of 200K print copy buyers are truly being replaced with digital buyers, we would be ignoring the natural buyer attrition process. For example if volume 68 had 4mln print buyers then we would have 200K digital buyers with a grande total of 4.2mln copies total. Now we have with v77 3.8mln print buyers and 200K digital buyers which gives a total of 4mln. We have lost 200K buyers in the process.