Acquiring Anime

Anime has become relatively easy to access throughout the English speaking world. Often the more popular anime titles can be found in local video and rental stores. Another important outlet for anime sales is the Internet, where sites specializing in anime and more general retailers offer a very wide selection.

Generally, anime is sold on DVD, though it can be found on video. Often, anime series are sold in box sets, which are cheaper than buying individual DVDs of the series. Anime DVDs are typically more expensive than standard DVDs.

Since almost all anime must come be licensed be a company in the local country after it's development in Japan, there is most often a period where an anime has been produced and is available in Japan, but has not been licensed in the US, UK and other countries and so is not available there. Fortunately, this also means that no copyright exists in these countries for the unlicensed anime, so it legal to freely distribute copies of it. Fansubs, or versions of the original footage that have had English subtitles added to them by fans willing and able to do the translation, are common and available legally for many unlicensed anime.

The most common way of acquiring fansubs is to download them, often through the use of the Bittorrent client. A link to Bittorrent is provided in the links section.