Digital Manga Publishing recently put Vampire Hunter D on Comixology which sell a wide variety of comic books but haven’t until now sold any manga. As it turns out the price Digital Manga chose was 9.99$ which is higher than any other site or service selling the Vampire Hunter D manga.
The Manga Xanadu blog looked at all the various services and noticed that the average price is around 7.20$, so you might feel like a sucker if you paid 9.99$ for it. On Comixology though Digital Manga Publishing can probably get away with it since it has not been a manga publishing site traditionally and the audience for that site probably won’t do any price comparisons before buying.
I guess it’s something to remember for the future if you ever decide you want to buy some manga that has been licensed rather than download scans of it that there is price variation on all the services selling manga. If you have the time and patience to look around you just might save some money and get 2-3 volumes from another site and save in price for an entire volume of that series.
Source: Manga Xanadu
Why pay?
Because people like to support the artists, by paying they support the artists. At least most of the time.
There are actually some people who like to buy stuff, but it is certainly true in the case of manga that it’s extremely easy to not pay and a huge amount of stuff isn’t licensed.