There are rental book shops in Korea, which lend you mangas(including some manga magazines and fiction books) for certain period of time, with certain amount of fee.
The key difference from library would be; there are mostly mangas in the shop. Many of them run DVD rentals at the same time.
Fees and periods are all different in each book shops. There are 4500 rental book shops left in Korea, and they are on their downhill.
This kind of book shops started spreading throughout the country since early 1990s. In every single neighborhood, or apartment complex, there are one or two (competing against each other) rental book shops.
I, myself, have been a big fan of it. Knowing that it is too expensive to buy every beloved mangas for myself, this kind of book shop was the only way I could reach to enjoy manga. My big hobby during middle school was to stop by these shops after school and to scrutinize what kind of new fun mangas there were. If it were not for these places, I would not have been much acknowledged with manga at all.
Many the book rental shops appeared after 1998 IMF crisis broke out in Korea, as they were rather easy to run with small fund. Once there were upto .2 million shops in their heydays. However, after internet cafes('PC bang' is the Korean term) took over the alley of neighborhoods and scanned files of manga started to be released on the internet, they could not keep their business tight.
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| Many 'pc bang's look like this |
In Japan, there are not many manga rental shops as many. Still, there are book rental shops in shades. Also, there are other kinds of shops like 'manga cafes' and 'book-offs'(second-hand stores) much more popular than in Korea.
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