Forum - View topicNEWS: Manga Reading Site JManga to End Service in May
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Haterater
 Posts: 1727 |
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Sorry to see this. Was hoping it could grow strong.
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sunflower
 Posts: 1080 |
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Now, you know from my previous comments I wasn't talking about Jmanga. That's not digital media you buy and download so that's not a valid example. There are very few examples of media you download where you haven't been able to go back and get another copy. I have had that happen to me, back in the 90s with a book publisher that closed, and I lost all the DRMd books I'd purchased simply because I bought a new computer. But that's no longer the case at any publisher of size, because they know that's a major detriment to sales. It does come down to preference. I have a large library that takes an entire room of my house, about 7000 volumes. I have about 1200 volumes (paper) of manga, in another room. It takes too much space. Yes, there are books I want to keep in paper, but not most mass market paperbacks and frankly most of the manga I've bought. It's a waste of trees and space. It's a dust collector and a fire hazard. I am getting rid of the paper and going e-format for everything I can. That said, there are some paper books I'll never part with, so I understand wanting to keep paper. I just am not attached to most cheap throwaway versions of books. So I think I can get my library down to 2000 paper volumes, and maybe even fit a chair in there one day. That's the route I prefer. It is, as you say, a matter of preference. 
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Cecilthedarkknight_234
 Posts: 3820 Location: Louisville, KY |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DdeLUA0Fms
I think crunchy roll is kicking themselves now for trying this. |
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Twage
Posts: 358 Location: North Bergen, NJ |
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There is no danger of publishers giving up on digital. They can't afford to. Don't worry. |
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The Mad Manga Massacre
Posts: 1166 |
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Could ANN do an ANNCast about JManga closing at some point?
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RAmmsoldat
 Posts: 1261 Location: North wales coast |
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well i cant help but laugh, I've been saying all along that you just cant own digital manga it goes when the company does so if you bought anything from these guys you're out of luck.
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jsc315
 Posts: 925 |
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Pretty much. Valve is one of the very few companies where DRM is not intrusive and works well. Not perfect but for the most part it works. I said this on Crunchyroll and I'll say the same thing here. This is why DRM sucks guys. They shut down and you get nothing for it. Jmanga is at least nice enough to give you something in return for unused credits, so there is that. In the end DRM screws over the consumer and we are left with nothing. Guess what, it's stuff like this that causes people to pirate your products. If i decided to just torrent the manga illegally there is absolutely no implications of and i did not have to bother spending a penny other then a little time downloading the manga illegally and i have it for life and can do with what ever i want, or I can pay for a service that has strict DRM on it and can only use as how the publisher says and when things go bad or the company like this goes belly up, I'm screwed and wasted a bunch of money on a product I now cant use anymore. I'm not blaming Jmanga for this at all, its the greedy publishers that think charging the same or more for a digital copy of a physical copy of something is fair. |
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emmapeel
Posts: 15 |
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Hopefully SubBLime and DMP's emanga offer a glimpse of a future where download-to-own, non-DRM PDFs are widely available. IMO they're the only worthwhile digital alternative to high-quality scanlations.
http://www.dlsite.com/eng/ also uses that model, although I've only made one english-language purchase there and it was pricey at $12.00 for a volume. Last edited by emmapeel on Thu Mar 14, 2013 3:35 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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sunflower
Posts: 1080 |
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Even legally-bought products. I de-DRM everything I buy, books, music, and movies, because when I pay for it I consider it to be mine. And if for some reason I can't remove DRM, I download a copy I can have in case mine fails (which has happened several times with anime DVDs). But, I will say that when I buy a service like Crunchyroll, I don't download anything because I don't consider myself to be buying their anime, but rather ad-free access to their "channel". |
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jsc315
Posts: 925 |
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The Netflix model works great. All you can eat, commercial free anywhere you want, on just about any device you can think of. If Jmanga and the publishers allowed that then we would most likely not be here discussing the failure is Jmanga. Has other media businesses learned nothing from the music industry? DRM nearly killed it, and just now they are finally making a profit again. I can rant and rave about how stupid companies are to implement DRM like this, and how it kills there product and people will just steal there product anyways and how torrents dont actually mean sales, but I think the failure in Jmanga speaks for itself. |
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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For trying what? (I don't have Youtube on campus, so I can't see what you are referring to.) JManga wasn't theirs, of course. They were hired to do technical work for it early on, and during that period had JManga marketing tie-ins with Crunchyroll, but JManga stopped using Crunchyroll's service before the introduction of JManga7 (an approach that Crunchyroll had originally pitched). If Crunchyroll had still been a part of it, at least the Android app would not have been so shonky, and promotion of a more functional at Crunchyroll would likely have led to much stronger app pick up.
JManga "allowed" most of that with JManga7 ~ where they fell down on that was (1) content that larger numbers of people wanted read and (2) working device access on a much broader range of devices. Actually Netflix itself has been struggling with (1) (hence the commissioning of its own original content), but the reason that so many yuri titles were best sellers at JManga when they were released seems likely to be that the volume of sales were so low ~ JManga never really had any tentpole titles to "cover their office overheads" ~ and then the range of niche titles that they had made it even more critical for them to be ultra-convenient to use on as many devices as possible, which was a target they never came close to hitting. Last edited by agila61 on Thu Mar 14, 2013 3:34 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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TD912
 Posts: 274 |
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While DRM played a factor in this, there were other things that probably did them in. The way they handled promoting the site was misleading at times, with "free previews" being virtually nonexistent. The way the subscription and point system worked was confusing and vaguely worded, which could have turned away potential customers. In addition, if you were actually able to find the few free titles that were available, the interface for actually viewing them was clunky and poorly thought out.
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PBsallad
 Posts: 338 Location: Phoenix |
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I'm not sure if other people had this problem, but I have a android tablet so I could download the stuff I bought. Could've sworn they made a IOs version, but I guess they didn't based on the complaints here. The problem was the only way to download a volume was chapter by chapter, and in order to do that you had to be on that chapter wile reading it online. If that makes any sense. Not sure if they changed that since I last I used it though.
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belvadeer
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I got their email about this yesterday. I didn't even really use the service anyway, so I'm not that disappointed.
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Dark Absol
 Posts: 813 |
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I might be a big-headed, but the digital versions killed them. Physical manga sells. I'd prefer physical version over digital version.
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