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NEWS: Manga Reading Site JManga to End Service in May

One points does equal one dollar. I fail to see how Peebs could've gotten any other idea.

... 1) Manga just plain costs more to translate than anime. English anime subtitling has just translation as the very highly labor-intensive step. English manga localization also has lettering, which takes similar effort and time as the translation and also requires a specialist if you want it done well. For it to be profitable, they'd need to charge a lot more than the original cost of the Japanese volume.

Discounted prices would require a lot more buyers for it to work out. It's all about economy of scale, which they didn't have in their favor as illustrated in point 2).

2) Crunchyroll has Naruto. Sure, they also aim to allow us to see quirky shows that normally wouldn't get a release, but they also were able to get some super-popular shows, which attracts more members and subscribers and allows them to afford the quirky titles.

BonnKansan wrote:

... 1) Manga just plain costs more to translate than anime. English anime subtitling has just translation as the very highly labor-intensive step. English manga localization also has lettering, which takes similar effort and time as the translation and also requires a specialist if you want it done well. For it to be profitable, they'd need to charge a lot more than the original cost of the Japanese volume.

How do you figure? Its not as if the cost of subtitling is the largest of Crunchyroll's overhead costs on a title, so its only a secondary overhead cost that you are increasing here. Digital mastering costs seem likely to be lower, assuming that an international online manga reader site is getting materials that have been already prepared for digital distribution in Japan, so there's a secondary overhead per volume that is lower than anime.

And of course the bandwidth cost for a volume of manga would be substantially lower than the bandwidth costs of an anime episode.

agila61 wrote:

BonnKansan wrote: ... 1) Manga just plain costs more to translate than anime. English anime subtitling has just translation as the very highly labor-intensive step. English manga localization also has lettering, which takes similar effort and time as the translation and also requires a specialist if you want it done well. For it to be profitable, they'd need to charge a lot more than the original cost of the Japanese volume. How do you figure? Its not as if the cost of subtitling is the largest of Crunchyroll's overhead costs on a title, so its only a secondary overhead cost that you are increasing here. Digital mastering costs seem likely to be lower, assuming that an international online manga reader site is getting materials that have been already prepared for digital distribution in Japan, so there's a secondary overhead per volume that is lower than anime. And of course the bandwidth cost for a volume of manga would be substantially lower than the bandwidth costs of an anime episode.

I was referring more to the unique costs of making it available in English, versus streaming a raw Japanese episode on TV Tokyo's site or providing Japanese manga on an ebook site. They may have been able to get some digitized manga files from the publishers, but the license rescues required them to produce their own digital files from the Tokyopop & DelRey volumes, whether by converting or scanning, so even the lack of translation costs there didn't mean it was free and easy. You make a good point on the non-translation costs being higher for streaming, but they're still significant for ebooks too. Either way, it costs a LOT to run a venture like this, so yeah, they definitely needed good tentpole titles to bring in a consumer base to support it.

Fortunately a tip led me to ebookjapan, which has a huge selection that includes much of what JManga had, and allows even overseas buyers to purchase, so I can continue some of the series I liked in Japanese. Instead of reading books on a website, you download their reader to your computer or mobile device, and then download your books there to read, so you don't have to be online. The one caveat is you can only have a given purchased book on one hardware device at a time - to switch from reading it on computer to reading it on mobile, you have to 'upload' the book back to your 'trunkroom' (i.e., Cloud), then can download to the other device from there. I'm not sure how things would go if they had to close down, but at least the reader app and book files could be on your computer, and with their larger library of titles, and the fact that Japanese actually buy books more, I'm pretty certain it'll have more staying power than JManga did.

Of course, the site's all in Japanese - it would be nice if they could add an English-language storefront to make it a little easier for international buyers, but I'm not sure how much more expense that would add. It would be even nicer if they could provide some of the now-lost English-translated volumes there too, since I hate to see those go away entirely, but I'm not holding my breath due to likely rights issues and costs. Continuing translations past what's done would be even more of a pie-in-the-sky, sadly, unless there's a clear enough demand to make it worth the risk. For now, I'm just glad there's at least one option for reading more without paying huge shipping costs.

I was referring more to the unique costs of making it available in English, versus streaming a raw Japanese episode on TV Tokyo's site or providing Japanese manga on an ebook site.

They may have been able to get some digitized manga files from the publishers, but the license rescues required them to produce their own digital files from the Tokyopop & DelRey volumes, whether by converting or scanning, so even the lack of translation costs there didn't mean it was free and easy.

So basically you're telling us to just learn Japanese and import manga if we want to read the rest, because no other site, app or publisher will want to get them?

ZeetherKID77 wrote:

So basically you're telling us to just learn Japanese and import manga if we want to read the rest, because no other site, app or publisher will want to get them?

A lot of the titles on JManga will be waiting on someone else putting together an online reading solution. Hopefully someone like Crunchyroll, with stronger technical chops. Indeed, I've seen it claimed that Crunchyroll pitched a concept very much like JManga7 when they were providing technical support for the JManga start-up, and the JManga7 startup copied the Crunchyroll upsell page where they pitch a paid subscription to free members almost word for word.

But whatever the specifics of the next effort and whomever puts it together, it is going to run on business deal time rather than internet time, so it would be months before we hear anything at the quickest, and quite possibly years.

Digital mastering costs seem likely to be lower, assuming that an international online manga reader site is getting materials that have been already prepared for digital distribution in Japan, so there's a secondary overhead per volume that is lower than anime.

And of course the bandwidth cost for a volume of manga would be substantially lower than the bandwidth costs of an anime episode.

If they had had discounted prices, they might have been able to build a larger audience. Instead they were leasing online access to niche titles for the common price of a digital download eComic of the titles licensed for print publication in North America.

Quote:

If they had had discounted prices, they might have been able to build a larger audience. Instead they were leasing online access to niche titles for the common price of a digital download eComic of the titles licensed for print publication in North America.

True but consider page count. 40pg AmeComi vs 200pg manga for a dollar difference. Hmm. I checked Comixology and most graphic novels are near $10. Scott Pilgrim is $10. 100pg of Love and Rockets is $8. And that's without the overhead.

So $5 for 200pgs was a good deal. Heck $8 might have been in tune with the industry average. But fans don't see that.

I'd probably have sent JManga at least a little money if they had just done "print-on-demand" for those of us physical media Luddites.

I knew it'd fail. I didn't bother getting an account.