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You may have already noticed, but there is a lot of hullabaloo on the Internet at present about the presence of illegal manga scanlation aggregation sites (we won't link to them here for the sake of integrity) as well as the recent formation of an industry coalition to fight this particular practice. One response to this, and one I have personally echoed in my own vehement and nerdy voice, is that there needs to be a legal equivalent to fill the obvious market that exists for digital manga. There have already been some steps in this direction, as you will have seen from my review of the Astro Boy Magazine (Soon to be provided in iBooks, I hear!), but this is only available for Apple platforms in selected countries at present.
I want to outline how a digital marketplace for manga would make me a more lucrative consumer for the manga companies.
The first problem that can be solved by digital distribution is availability. There are two parts to this, because I can't help overcomplicating things.
Part number one: Retail availability can be a double-edged sword. Every few weeks I make a circuit of the two remaining manga booksellers that exist where I live and pick up things that interest me. This has led to some wonderful impulse purchases I would not have otherwise made, but as time has gone on this practice has declined just as the available space for manga has shrunk within these stores. More often it poses an issue — you see fragmented series missing volumes you wish to purchase, or only the very latest volumes of something you may be interested in. Ordering in copies can, depending on the service, be a royal pain and the time until delivery is often worse than shopping online.
Talking about online, these same issues are amplified in the digital bookstore, where ordering out-of-stock items is often a lot less transparent and impulse purchases are all but non-existent. I don't know about you, but most of the suggestions that Amazon offers me on its front page are for books I have already purchased from other vendors. Still, this shows that their system works.
With a digital product there is (barring a freakish technical fault) no such thing as “out of stock”, or “available in 7-14 weeks” — just a digital file on a server that is waiting for me to fork over my cash. While you lose some of the romance and physicality of a brick-and-mortar store, the instant and obvious availability of stock makes for a much easier purchasing experience overall.
The second part of the availability issue comes in when a manga is no longer in print, or hard to find. You may end up having to pick up volumes from many different places, both from physical bookstores and online counterparts, and trying to order unavailable volumes can be a lottery. I’m sure many of you can think of a time you have heard an exciting series described to you by a friend, enemy, or podcast with the soul-crushing words “Oh, but it’s hard to find now” appended on the end. Wouldn’t it be nice for there to still be an option available to obtain the series while still ensuring that the publisher feels the love?
For a personal example of this problem, I had a hell of time picking up Buddha recently. While not strictly scarce, the wildly fluctuating availability of individual volumes in the UK made picking it up for a reasonable (i.e. RRP or less) price a hellish endeavor. I ended up ordering it from four separate places, one of which was a bookstore in Croydon who did mail-order but had no e-mail and so I had to phone the (very pleasant) shop assistant.
How nice would it have been to simply press a big button on a digital delivery service labeled "Buy Series"? I would have done that in a heartbeat.
A digital option would also have cut out a big additional cost and inconvenience of manga purchasing — physical delivery. Instead of waiting 3-5 working days and/or paying a varying sum for delivery, the manga can come direct through your Internet connection at minimal cost. This immediacy would allow for an even greater volume of impulse purchases — something I am already highly susceptible on the iTunes Store and on Steam.
The next, and main, reason is amazingly boring and a bit obvious: Manga made from dead trees takes up space. Once you start a collection, the amount of space needed tends to skyrocket. I currently own the first 6 volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist, and while I would love to continue reading the series, I have no space to house it. I already have two full bookcases, and purchasing a long series like FMA would cause me no end of headaches trying to find a home for it. Note that this does not mean that I will stop buying physical manga volumes, but I have to be more selective about what I buy, especially longer series.
This leads me to a secondary item — while I enjoy reading Fullmetal Alchemist, I am not desperately chomping at the bit to devote the not-trivial amount of money and shelf space to the rest of the series. With this current state of affairs, I have no (legal) method of reading the series and the publisher is missing out on the money I would happily pay them for a digital version.
These are all issues with the current model that can be remedied by a digital marketplace, and would not displace my existing desire to buy physical copies. I haven’t even started to talk about ways that manga could be enriched and enhanced in a digital marketplace, but that is within the scope of a different article.
Editor's Note: Digital Manga Publishing is currently running eManga, a site offering digital distribution of manga through a rental system.
5 comments:
The thing is, with a digital copy you aren't giving away your best edition, so you can charge a bit less to gain a wider market (since it costs less to "print" and distribute).
You can then let fans buy the high-quality paper versions for more (esp. if you entice them with limited editions and special offers).
You may not be able to convert diehard leechers, but you CAN convert the ones who are just there because they aren't being offered the product in that format in the first place.
If you can't turn this "loss" into a profit, then you aren't fit to live in the digital era, and the works you are publishing will eventually move on to better publishers.
On my computer I have too many distractions to read much digital manga. Those portable digital book readers are way too expensive to become mainstream anytime soon. Just some thoughts.
Thanks for the comments, peeps! You are lightning fast.
@Jura:
With respect to the mainstream status of portable book readers, I would respectfully disagree in several ways.
First, I made sure in the article not to pin any hypothetical digital solution to a platform. This is mostly because I would like to see a prospective solution across many digital platforms - smartphones, laptops, eBook readers, tablet PCs, and bog standard computers. All of these already have a mixed bag of legal and illegal solutions for reading manga and so there is a definite market available.
In addition, I believe digital book readers are already mainstream, although I will agree that they are expensive and have yet to realise their own potential, hobnobbed as they are by traditional publishers strategies.
Why do I think they are already mainstream? My own mother has one. My mother, bless her heart, doesn't know much about technology. Neither is she flush with cash. But what she does know is that technology can solve problems like overflowing bookshelves and delivery times and so the bought an eReader. People are aware of eBook readers, and the companies who are supposed to be publishing content onto them only need to mature to become fully mainstream.
@metzger:
There is nothing to say that a digital copy cant be high quality either, but that is the scope of another article.
I believe that at least some of the "diehard leechers" can be converted as a digitial manga marketplace can make official availability and purchasing more convenient than having to hunt around various scan sites.
Convenience is King, and I feel a bit of a dance for not directly mentioning that in the article.
However, "the works you are publishing will eventually move on to better publishers" I would disagree with. Given the static nature of manga licences and book properties in general, I do not feel this is a very likely threat.
True, that was badly worded.. I meant to imply that mangaka (or artists in general) will move on as soon as contractually possible, but already-licensed works themselves will probably remain stuck in limbo.
Diehard leechers are very difficult to convert, but I'd say they're enough of a minority as to be unimportant compared to the bulk of leechers (who you should be able to win over with convenience and by becoming proactive members of their communities, ie learning how the online world works).
I think there are hidden expenses when putting something like this in a digital format. Not to mention what it will do for the sales of manga in bookstores, which isn't that hot to begin with. It's going to take a lot to see the widespread adoption of digital print manga. The technology is there and with HTML5 starting to gain ground, I can see a huge shift in the next couple of months. Does this translate to more people reading manga, I'm not sure. Will I read more manga if I can get it on my iPhone (sorry, no iPad or Kindle) maybe. This should be an interesting next couple of months.
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