Japanese publishers’ idea of fighting against manga piracy: kill all legal options and launch their own website that is only available in USA (kmanga).
For real, I’d pay for anime, manga, hentai, manhwan, western comics, etc. if there was just one site or a group of sites that:
required just one account and/or one subscription for all of them
was available worldwide with no restrictions
was fast
let me pay in any currency
translated everything in different languages
Fuck yeah I’d pay for that. Sign me the fuck up for that awesome legal option.
Instead we have whatever the fuck is going on right now. Fan-subs and fan-translations are mandatory because their shit isn’t translated either ever or not in time. I want to give you my money for what I want and so that you make more awesome shit, but you fucking won’t let me.
Also have a crappy pricing scheme that people have been pushing against for years, while Shonen Jump rakes in money by having their app and monetization not suck
Sorry Japan, manga piracy/scanlations until I die. There are so many niche authors/manga that never get officially translated to any other language because your industry thinks everyone just wants to read shounen and only the top 1% of shoujo/seinen/josei. Don’t even get me started on BL/GL.
Meanwhile some fucking random scanlation team does a better job of translating and making a chapter of Rose of Versailles more accessible to modern audiences than the entire Japanese manga publishing apparatus ever will.
Personally, I have a subscription to Shonen Jump’s app and love it, while kmanga insists on trying to get you to buy individual chapters, which I refuse to do.
Shounen Jump is a great example. It works, it’s readers find value in it enough to pay for subscriptions, and it clearly has some sort of profitability. A great model of what other manga magazines could do, but they refuse because most of them are run by dinosaurs and would rather cry “piracy is ruining our profits wah” when they DON’T EVEN HAVE A PRODUCT in the market to profit from!
I tried to read the attack on titan manga years ago. I bought a manga at Barnes and noble and thought it was a decent price. But then I read the entire book in like 20 minutes and thought to myself that I way over spent on the book.
I regretted that purchase. Maybe it’s worth while if you want to look at the art for a long time, but I just wanted the story.