Starting with Volume 46 on Thursday, Viz Media began releasing a digital edition of a new volume Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto every day leading up to Tuesday, September 6th when Volume 52 will be published simultaneously in both paper and digital formats.  Henceforth new volumes of the bestselling series will be released on a “day and date” basis.  In spite of an accelerated publishing program begun in 2007 (see “Naruto Salvo Hits the Mark”), publication of Naruto in the U.S. still lags behind Japan, where 58 volumes of the manga series have been published.
 
More than 100 million volumes of Naruto have been sold in Japan, and the Shonen Jump ninja property has been the bestselling manga series in the U.S. year-in and year-out since the Naruto anime began its run on the Cartoon Network in 2005 (the Naruto Shippuden anime remains a fixture on the Disney XD network).

Viz Media’s SVP and General Manager Alvin Lu discussed the publisher’s digital strategy at some length in a recent interview with ICv2 (see “The ICv2 Interview: Alvin Lu, Part II”).