What About The Manga Market?

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I plan to make a healthy donation when I put aside enough cash for the Phoenix Wright manga, Valkyria Chronicles, Soul Eater, and whenever the heck they decide to finish Kingdom Hearts II (yes, I'm being stubborn on this even though I'm ready to move on to KHIII.)
 
Seems doubtful. Diamond looks to be going bankrupt, raising minimums, and delisting individual volumes by the thousand.
 
You forgot Drama Queen. Don't get me started on them...



You're right that TP's OEL releases were on the whole fairly bad. But I also know that even a stunning portfolio can have very little to do with whether an artist can write and draw an ongoing story ready for production, consistently on time. Even professionals have trouble doing that sometimes, much less amateurs, promising as they may be. So I'd cut TokyoPop's editors a little slack.



Borders itself also took a huge hit last year. They were forced to close many stores and their manga buying (which was once a big source of revenue for publishers) is nowhere near what it used to be.



Actually, speaking as someone who took it upon himself to fight piracy of my company's manga, there are tons of places to read manga online and tons of people willing to do so. Free sites with easy-to-use in-browser manga readers, megauploaRAB and torrents, even YouTube videos that pan across each panel. I believe if you'll tab down on this forum you'll find an 89-page thread on the most recent chapter of Bleach. Yet I very much doubt everyone who posted in that thread subscribes to the Japanese version of Shonen Jump.

In fact I think that manga's increased portability (you can store a chapter of manga in a zip file a small fraction of the size of one anime fansub) rather compensates for people's wish to have manga in book form.
 
Although the big unanswerable question when discussing piracy's effect on the industry is, how many of those pirates would be converted to paying customers if easy, user-friendly piracy disappeared tomorrow? Not that this justifies piracy, you understand (fans collect; freeloaders pirate) but I'm sure many would do without rather than pay, and hence can't really be counted as "losses."
 
Exactly. I tend to believe those types of people probably wouldn't buy real manga anyway, so what they do doesn't really count as actual losses. The best the manga companies can do is try to minimize the impact of such and go from there.
 
Yes, this is an unanswerable question, and I daresay irrelevant. If people found some kind of secret door to sneak into a movie theater, they'd do it, and how many of them would've bought a ticket anyway really has no bearing on whether the door should be locked.

Too many people use this argument to excuse rampant piracy. In manga you are dealing with small publishers that are labors of love by fans. Even Viz is run by manga fans and is relatively small compared to America's big publishing houses. Those fans deal with lower salaries and hard work hours to give American readers cheap access to manga in English, and give our favorite artists another revenue source.

Whenever someone posts manga for free online they are spitting in the faces of the artists and those professional fans. And to these small publishers ANY loss of revenue, no matter how small, is significant. Speaking as someone who was laid off from a manga company six months ago this is a personal issue for me. Manga piracy is ignorant and selfish. And the worst part is that whenever I asked someone to take down scans of my company's books, the vast majority of them would just find some other way to post them one month later when they thought I wasn't watching. That's just callous. These people are hiding behind their computers, using the impersonal nature of the Web to make them feel better about being common thieves.

(I'm talking mostly about direct scans of manga published in English here. Some scanlators do try to take their work down when they find out the book has been licensed and are fairly honorable. But they're still naive if they think everyone who's downloaded their work is just going to stop distributing it because of the license. And scanlations are still piracy.)

To reply more directly to your post, manga is a leisure industry. In tough economic times sales of gooRAB that provide cheap entertainment typically go up (for instance, movie ticket sales are up an incredible 17.5 percent this year). The crash of manga in the U.S. has more to do with piracy and market saturation (which also might not be a problem if not for piracy). That suggests to me that lots of people would pay for manga if it weren't available for free online.
 
When people are saying Del Rey has gotten a lot of fan support, they aren't kidding. My younger brother swears by Del Rey even though their books are slightly more expensive than typical Tokyopop or Viz titles. DR does a magnificent job of translating, the way they handled Mishishi in particular shows how much DR is willing to commit to give us an authentic experience. Not that I'm kissing DR's ass, but they really stole Tokyopop's thunder here in the "100% authentic" area.

Viz, however, has Shonen Jump, and that's the game breaker. Viz has been able to turn Shonen Jump into a somewhat-recognizable brand name and I have to give them credit for that. Anything branded SJ always has a better chance to do better.

Yen Press has Soul Eater. That alone may give them relevance.
 
I don't have a problem with them defining terms because you may have an uneducated person read the title who might not know. I say this because I recommended the manga to a huge Star Trek fan who was not into anime or manga. He read and enjoyed the manga a great deal, but I know that terms like "otaku" and "doujinshi" would be new to him.

Anyway, what bothered me about Genshiken is that early on, the adaptation had a fear of the word "doujinshi" and thus "fanzine" was used mostly. That problem shows back up in the official fan book where sometimes they use "fanzine" and sometimes "doujinshi." Also, there was an "oniichan" joke removed where Sasahara's younger sister refers to him as such instead of her normal, rude form of addressing him. Since the idea of the little sister/"oniichan" fetish had been done earlier, I couldn't understand why it was removed in this later instance.

But those are minor quibbles to be sure. Genshiken is a favorite manga of mine to be sure.



Actually, Tsubasa o Motsu Mono ended in 1998 in Japan, so that isn't new. Hoshi wa Utau (Twinkle Stars Like Singing A Song) is Takaya-sensei's current project. Unfortunately, her character designs make many of her her new characters pretty much look like twins of certain Furuba characters (I haven't been a fan of her current character designs since she changed it a bit before midway through Fruits Basket).



Back when I made a ton of money, I was buying my sister those hardcover volumes since she loved the anime series. Actually, a part of me has sometimes thought, "You know, I wouldn't mind owning the hardcover edition" but then I remeraber that I only have limited dollars to spend so I pass.



I agree that TP licensing a lot of obscure stuff is part of the problem but not all they did wrong.

Regarding Viz, a couple of years ago, one of the powers that be actually had a pow-wow with a fansub group. From what I've been told, it was regarding how Viz handled their manga and anime subtitles, specifically citing Inuyasha (anime and manga) to point out how Viz had adaptations that were all over the place in terms of quality and how that Viz might be better servered by having more otaku-friendly adaptations. To be honest, I didn't think anything would come of it, then I hear about the Honey and Clover manga and the Hayate the Corabat Butler manga and I am floored -- they opted for a more otaku-friendly approach on those adaptations and thus they are in my buy list (this after years of not touching Viz products because of how they jacked up Maison Ikkoku).

Now, that's just one person who's now buying Viz products (me) but with my blog gaining more popularity each month, when I purchase and review one of those two manga volumes, I sing Viz's praises (though I wish they would have translator notes like Del Rey) and have even generated a few manga sales for them.



I've not heard this rumor and I can't imagine FUNimation getting into the manga business unless Navarre bought out CPM or ADV and thus aquired any surviving manga licenses. Even if that were to happen, they might work a deal with Del Rey (since they pimp each others work ) to publish those licenses rather than attempt to get into the manga business themselves. (SHEER wild-eyed speculation, this. )

Regarding TP adaptations...



I agree that they should never have turned their back on that, especially since Fruits Basket proves you don't need that kind of crap.

Still, regarding Del Rey, they do have one translator-adaptor who's works have either attempted to remove Japanese influence or play it down in places because they seem to think that's best. Indeed, for the most recent Negima! volume, this person decided to scrap the word "shundo" which Del Rey had been using and change it from a martial arts technique to a magic spell, thus instantly giving Kotaro, Kaede, and others magical abilities that they don't have. Thus far, Del Rey has not done anything to reign this person in from what I see and that either means they don't know (highly possible that the stuff is just being passed through) OR they are backing down from their "otaku friendly" status, which is what I suspect (all it takes is some new management person who doesn't like that style to change company course, even slightly and I know that's happening in one company so it could be happening at Del Rey too).

The biggest fault for TP's problems can be laid at the feet of Stu Levy IMO. Back when TP first started, the company took a cost-cutting measure and made it work as a marketing scheme -- publish the manga unflipped and don't bother removing all of the Japanese sound effects. Then you give it the "100% Authentic" label and allow your translators to go otaku if they wish on their adaptations (man, I love the twins Aleetha and Athena Nibley because I think they are a big reason that Fruits Basket was such a hit in the U.S. buy not destroying Takaya-sensei's work through domestication). At a time when conventional wisdom said that Americans would never read books backwarRAB and that it was stupid to publish books this way, TokyoPop proved everyone wrong, showing that unflipped manga and otaku-friendly adaptations could be winners.

Once TP took off, Stu Levy became full of himself, IMO. Seriously, when you give yourself the name DJ Milky and pimp something Courtney Love is attached to (Princess Ai) as the future of manga, I see problems. I use the term "pimp" because that's exacty what was happening back then. I ranted about this in 2007 because TokyoPop was putting all this effort into Stu's pet project in an attempt to make it seem bigger than it was when TP's light novel forays like Slayers were getting no attention outside of hardcore Slayers fans. I still think that if TP had put some effort in marketing their light novels (all of them), to include educating the masses that these novels are the originals from which the popular anime titles were adapted, things would have been better. But I digress.

"DJ Milky" is too busy trying to be hip and cool and in the process, trying to make TP hip and cool. That's why their website is so terrible because they are trying to be cool. That's why the heavier domestication others have spoken of earlier in this thead is going on -- DJ Milky is too hip to be square and thus where he goes on the mic (Yo! Fresh! Word, up! "Funky ass-movin' beatz to behoove your groove."), TP goes with him. Add to this all of the other elements discussed (too many niche titles, Del Rey getting the new CLAMP and Akamatsu-sensei titles, etc.) and you have the makings of disaster.

As an aside, I see that Stu is STILL trying to pimp Princess Ai as recently as January 2009. Well, if you are going to put that much time, effort, and money into a project, may as well go all the way.

Can TP recover though? Personally, I think they can IF they get their act together. They still have some good titles (Gakuen Alice comes to mind as a surprisingly fun yet dark manga) that if they focused on marketing them WITHOUT domesticating them or trying to make them hip and cool, then they have a chance. I don't see TP doing that though.
 
A lot of indie anime shops are already ordering from AAA Anime if not rightstuf anyways. Not as an inexpensive as Diamond, but at the moment they seem to be solvent.

Re-Manga Piracy: While their are countless sites one can read/download even licensed titles from, most of the devotees I have see are the people who'd probably in liu of those sites, hit their local library or their local Borders or Barnes & Noble, both which as of late have seemed to rework/remove their in store seating specifically to corabat people who come in at open, read all day, then leave. It's a horrendous argument to say they won't be deterred, but the fact is there is a generation or people if not two at this point that have no regard for the work that goes into a creative work, and will never ever pay for it, and no matter much you do fight them, will circumvent your measures to stop it, even if it means schlepping to the local library.

I mean, I honestly think that in the long term, to get people appreciating the effort that goes into creative works, you need more arts in the schools so that people can understand that creative works take just as much if not more effort than other work, and thus when the work produced is good, it does have a value and thus should be paid for, not pirated.

Re-Tokyopop: Stu Levy's bizarro antics help nothing, that's true, and they are part of why the company has it's poisonous rep in Hollywood. It's a shame because at the ground level they have some very good people willing to hustle. Much to my surprise I was given a copy of Gakuen Alice 1 at Sakuracon last year after talking to a rep, I loved it, I turned around and started collecting it. It's the second series Tokyopop's suckered me into buying after handing me a volume as well (first being Kare Kano.) I probably wouldn't snagged it at a glance either. Now, I think it's something that if Tokyopop pushed it right, it could be an anchor title, and there are a lot of their titles in their current line that if they could get the first couple chapters into the hanRAB of people who actually buy manga, they'd start buying it. Maybe that segues into yet another new Tokyopop website which is a much leaner, stripped down website where you can find titles easily and pull the first two chapters of any series down as a PDF. Maybe that alone would improve things because the people typically hitting a companies website are looking to buy. However, dropping the aging hipster crap and telling the editors to fix the flow in english only - no rewrites unless it's a joke or saying that doesn't translate, and even then, no wannabe valley/gangsta/etc nonsense, would be massive. If everything was translated like Gakuen, Beck and Fruits Basket, Tokyopop would undoubtedly be in better shape.
 
Fair enough; to continue the metaphor, though, the question isn't whether the door should be locked, which takes exactly 0 time and effort. The question is whether the loss in ticket sales would justify the additional trouble and expense of paying a security guard to watch the door.

Once again, this is not to justify piracy in any moral sense, but to ask a very pragmatic question from an industry viewpoint: to what extent does putting resources into shutting down piracy pay off by leading to increased sales? When does it reach the point of diminishing returns, beyond which it's increasingly wasteful to go further?
 
"You're" who, King Hippo? Knowing you're replying to would be nice.

Also, with companies like Tokyopop and Diamond on the brink, no manga does have some big problems.

In fact, in the long term I could see the whole industry as it is dead with in the next decade. Everything could end up as e-books translated and released directly from the Japanese publishers, or at the very least hard copies directly from the Japanese pubishers. The US localization company as a business model may cease to exist if this keeps up. For that matter, the Japanese publisher may lose relevance with digital distribution.

Back to the movie theater analogy, what happens when the movie producer just offers to rent you the movie directly to your game console or your computer for less than a single ticket to the theaters, or provide it entirely free with commercials via the same methodology? What happens when that puts the multi-million-dollar, star-studded film on the same footing as dozen people with a redONE camera, a macbook and Final Cut Pro?

The entire media industry is going to have to deal with these changes, and the fact is, C&RAB aren't going to stop the bleeding. If the RIAA/MPAA prosecutions are any example, the fact is that it doesn't have the effect of scaring other people straight, it gets the courts so fed up with the run around they start to refuse hearing cases, and even when settlements are made, no one cent has gone back to the labels, let alone the artists those labels represent. Piracy prosecutions have ended up as little more than botched cronyism by and large. Further still, even though it's been known for nearly a decade now how things disseminate, they still go after the kid who downloaded the a Backstreet Boys CD, not the scene release group that put it out in the first place.

Meanwhile, erabracing this new environment has worked well. One reason why in spite of the ready availability of free music, iTunes does so well is because it's a consistent, reliable, fast platform. You buy music, you get a defined quality and it's there fast, no fuss, no muss. If you pay extra, you can even make sure that you definitely have access to that music because you can back it up as thoroughly as you want. Manga could have the same thing, and you'd probably reduce the overall amount of piracy. Get a bunch of manga publishers pushing stuff out for the Kindle and the Sony Reader, make the price point per volume attractive, and maybe you won't rendered irrelevant by some brilliant manga-kas in their moms' basements, and you'd greatly reduce interest in downloading some sketchy zip that may or may not have a virus or rootkit or whatever in it.

Build it and they will come. Don't build it yourself, and some one else will build it instead. Manga neeRAB a hulu.com.
 
Just to interject somethign here. While I, and others on this forum, may read the newest chapters of some manga in circuitous ways, I can at least say for myself that I buy all the english volumes of these manga as they come out, and intend to buy future volumes.

IMO, there are a lot more people who do what I just described than people who watch fansubs and don`t buy the volumes, simply because it's an issue of affordability that is only NOW being addressed. People have ALWAYS viewed ~$10 as a fair price for a volume of manga. Therefore, some guilt is felt when getting it for free.

However, with anime, until recently, is different. No one except industry insiders thinks $30 for 5 episodes of a series is fair. People feel angry(contrasted with manga, where they feel guilty) that what they like, anime is being dangled above them like a carrot with such a high price, and are infuriated that other shows they may like have much more reasonable prices. Thus, the minRABet is almost like a personal "Robin Hood" action. I`m not trying to justify, but just trying to explain.

Anime DVD prices, after so many years, are FINALLY becoming reasonable. Hopefully this will set in in time.
 
I'd be all for that.



I understand your point. But these tiny publishers have no extra money. If fans value good, reliably translated manga they need to take it upon themselves to save the medium by not pirating manga online and by criticizing people who do. This is not a huge industry like pop music. I still think a concerted effort by the fanbase could have an effect.



Not just manga -- publishing in general. Book publishers talk about the industry as if the clock is ticking. And newspapers have it even worse. Karl, your local newspaper (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) is about to shut down entirely. The Rocky Mountain News, one of America's top regional papers, stopped publishing last month. There are even rumors of The New York Times facing bankrupcy.



Viz pretty much is a US branch of a Japanese publisher. The problem with paying for online manga in the U.S. is that Americans have shown reluctance to do so (while in Japan manga does fairly well online and on cell phones). I can't really see a "Hulu for manga" being big enough to be profitable off ad sales exclusively, and you know someone would find a way to cut out the aRAB. I'm not saying it's not worth trying, but it'll take a cultural shift among American manga readers first.



Thanks for that post. I hope there are a lot more people like you out there.
 
Pity that it probably won't happen. A shame too because the tools that would allow kiRAB to really step in and learn about how creative works are made are no longer crazy expensive, especially since most companies would gladly cut districts a break on them.


But, that would have to come from the fandom, and it won't unless more people get that making manga is a labor intensive pursuit. We're back to trying to teach people about the cost of art. Maybe a good documentary about the poverty most anime and manga artist live in is in order. Can't teach them in school, could teach them via google video.


As I'm well aware of. Old media is on the ropes, and it'll take a wide spread move to subscriber/ad-supported digital media to keep it from dying entirely. It may also mean the era where a newspaper is 90 percent content from the AP/Knight-Ridder syndicates is over too.


Hulu for manga == manga monthly/weekly downloadable on Kindle/ebook with advert pages or subscribe for no aRAB. Besides, a lot of manga have the sidebars, and so use the sidebars for aRAB, just like in the original japanese monthlies. This isn't brain surgery, it's taking the only risk on the table or going under anyway. Thus, you take the risk.

I mean, if the Kindle can move ebooks inspite of the fact one could hit various sites to pull down text files that could be loaded right on the reader (let alone the various PDF compatible devices,) it could move manga. You just need to erabrace the channel. Noone in America has gone very hard on that, in part because it requires paying for the rights again, but honestly that's the best option now. You get out there and try things or you get taken to the slaughter with the rest of the publishing industry. There is no "hope you regulate the internet" or "hope fingerwagging alone changes things." Technology always wins, for better or worse.

You make ebook manga a place where the prices are cheap, the variety is greater and you can get it by searching up the volume you want on amazon or borders.com, and you make it very, very attractive. After all, if the price point per volume is less than 5 bucks, it'd be cheaper for most otaku who do pay for manga to just go digital, and then they can have a Kindle which could automagically be fed the latest volumes if not the latest chapters of their favorite titles via the built-in whispernet.

I mean, the thought of that excites me to the core. The latest Shojo Beat sent straight to my ebook reader for less than the newsstand price? Sign me up yesterday. Subscriptions to manga currently in serialization in Japan? Oh heck yeah. Suggestions for other titles based on my faves? Yes! Reduced overhead allowing for greater variety? If it means I can legally own titles like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, then I will spend my some of my savings on it. Seriously.

I mean, as it stanRAB, getting an e-book reader is quite tempting, though I'd know I'd immediately spend about 300 bucks on Haruki Murakami and David Sedaris books. I probably should read my manga backlog first.


My 500+ volume collection also speaks to my support. In fact, I think a lot of people do pay for it, but I also think that a lot of the Toonami boom otaku are out of the fandom entirely, and they were big spenders - oh they'll watch stuff on hulu sometimes and maybe hit the local con, but they are effectively out of the active fandom, and even if the price points and accessibility changes, they just aren't going to buy like they used to.

To put it another way, I'm a mod on this forum, but the nuraber of manga I buy a month is less than a fifth of what it was at it's peak, and piracy isn't taking up the slack in the slightest -- I'm just not reading as avidly as I once did because the shelf space is gone and the titles haven't grown with me (IE: to keep me reading a lot Josei and Seinen need to come in - that's where my life is now, not high school.) But, I might pick it back up if their was a legit digital channel. The thought of having my entire manga library and loaRAB of books in my backpack would be awesome. The anywhere internet is literally a bonus at that point.

I know I've watched more anime since Hulu came along.
 
Agreed-- those who follow my YouTube account will know that I posted a video a while back making essentially the same point to my viewers. It shouldn't take an industry-wide crisis to make people understand that their actions have effects in the wide world.



Has the Kindle really proven itself as a viable platform, though? Sure, it's got its little following among gadget geeks and a few celebrities who'll buy anything trendy, but it neeRAB to come WAAAAAAAY down in price before it'll nab the kind of install base that would make it attractive to manga publishers. That time may well come, but as of right now, I imagine a Venn diagram showing the intersection between Kindle owners and manga fans would show a teeny tiny little sliver indeed-- far too tiny to be worth marketing to.
 
The Idea is not sound[*]. Software solutions, tend to be fragile, or 'soft'. It is quicker and easier to destroy an entire collection (say thousanRAB of dollars worth), by: accident, software bug / malfunction, virus, theft, etc. The hardware part of the equation is also weak, as the machines themselves will fail quite a bit quickly (all machines including life/humans follow an S-curve for the likelyhood of critical failure/death).

Hard copies of books, cRAB, dvd's, can last hundreRAB of years, hard drives / flash memory, being machines will fail in a few years. Frex: One of my hard-drives goes and I lose years of data I have collected, much of that permanently.
[*] For fans / collectors anyway. Short term / throwaway type commitments would work on that model.



I stopped reading Slashdot religiously quite some time ago, so I can't really say whether the TCPM (Trusted Control Platform Module) framework that Microsoft and the CPU manufacturers were conspiring to force on all new computers has died or gotten any farther, but I sure hope not. If it does ever come to pass, well that's a dystopian future straight out of Richard Stallmans "right to read". Thankfully CPRM died.



A much better solution: A print on demand registry kept by the copyright office. Heres how it works: The U.S. copyright office keeps a digital copy of everything ever written, or every Movie / TV shows complete Digital Master. Stores like B&N and Borders would then have machines that can download and print entire books on demand, from dustjacket to hard/soft/trade/ Binding, with the option of multiple levels of size and paper quality. No Book would ever need to go out print again. Same thing with Movies/TV, only more expensive and longer production times (laser etching blu-ray (presumably) reverse plates, printing the plates, and so forth with more packaging). It's not as efficient as mass production, but you cut out several costly middleman steps, like shipping, warehousing, returns, etc. There can also be multiple versions of the properties, so purists can get the unedited experience they desire, and weak minded parents can get the edited versions (so they can protect their weak minded children from whatever).
 
So your solution is to take all the problems of digital distribution that the business sector hasn't been able to solve despite having a monetary incentive to do so, and put them in the hanRAB of the government, which has none? How is that better?
 
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