Manga Gap-Completion Cost Planner

The cheapest way to fill a story gap depends on the exact units missing and the prices you can actually obtain. Enter the books you own, choose a fixed target and price the mapped editions you want to compare. This worksheet finds the minimum entered total among those verified choices. It does not search shops or claim the cheapest price on the internet.

Compare a bounded set of edition prices

No prices are supplied by the site. Blank prices mean unknown, not zero. Use the same currency and include shipping and taxes consistently in the edition prices if you want those costs reflected. The tool does not model order-level discounts, resale, bundles missing pieces or stock availability.

How the minimum is calculated

First, the selected series’ verified owned contents are subtracted from the target. Each candidate contributes only its documented membership in that series. Unverified contents never cover a gap. The planner examines combinations of up to sixteen relevant priced editions and retains the least-cost combination covering every missing segment. It can therefore choose two smaller purchases instead of one larger collection when your entered prices favor them.

This is a bounded set-cover calculation, not a recommendation about binding, translation, presentation or reading preference. A price change can change the resulting plan. If the target is already owned, the required story-purchase cost is zero. If ownership is unknown, no purchase plan is produced. If the priced editions leave a gap, that gap remains visible.

A reproducible price example

Consider a hypothetical three-unit map where unit 1 is owned. A verified book containing unit 2 costs 5, a verified book containing unit 3 costs 5, and a verified collection containing both costs 11. The two separate books complete the target for 10. If the collection’s entered price changes to 9, it becomes the minimum. These are mathematical fixture prices, not actual manga offers or contents records.

For a real membership boundary, Berserk Deluxe 4 covers regular volumes 10–12. Owning singles through 10 leaves 11–12 missing; buying that deluxe would also repeat 10. At the other end of that map, Dark Horse’s deluxe contents record keeps Deluxe 14’s regular volumes 40–41 separate from its guidebook. The guidebook cannot fill a fictional volume 42 gap.

The Noragami map uses Kodansha’s documented omnibus memberships, so a missing middle original volume does not disappear just because you own a later omnibus. The A Silent Voice switching reference instead needs symbolic parts within volume 4, based on Kodansha’s Collector’s Edition 2 boundary. These examples explain why edition numbers alone cannot supply the sets.

Read the duplicate-story tradeoff

The result lists its edition identities, source links and repeated story segments. Repeat membership may come from your existing shelf or from overlap between selected purchases. This is a list of repeated segments, not a page count or a financial valuation of duplicate material. Unknown bonus contents remain unknown, and a shared numbered range does not establish identical extras or translation.

Check the exact edition, language, market and ISBN against its source before buying. This worksheet adds no shopping buttons. The edition identity comparer helps keep format and contents separate; the next-book finder can show additions without requiring prices.

Method and limits

Tool arithmetic reviewed October 15, 2026. Catalog records retain their individual source-check dates; this is a bounded map rather than a complete publication database. The original contribution is the reproducible combination search over verified membership and reader-entered costs. We did not inspect books physically, quote live merchant prices, test stock or calculate resale value. Your entries remain in the open page and are not uploaded or saved.