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NEWS: DMI Puts All Print Releases on Hiatus in January-June 2013

Hmm. I've been subscribing to a Japanese manga magazine (Ribon) through AKAdot Retail (a division of DMI) for a while, but they recently advised me they would not be able to continue to do this, as in a few months they would be "unable to purchase my magazine from their vendors due to various reasons."

I think JManga is doing things right. They have a subscription service or the option to buy points as you need them. I feel their prices are right for digital manga. What they need to do is get their act together and release an iOS app. I have so much manga on that account and no way to read it but my computer.

osakaedo wrote:

Books before 2000-2005 (depending on the publisher), are not likely digitized. So pubs would have to scan them. Now some don't mind just slapping pages on a cheap scanner but to get high-res clean scans... Well, that costs money.

I don't think it does. I have an an Epson scanner, you just need to do 300 for the res (that's the standard for scanning), but it can go up a lot higher and the Japanese artists only work on half sheets (half from 8x11 size). I'm not sure how companies get their scan like (like are they already clean by the time they get them, ect, and just do the translations). I think if they get scans clean and they do scans themselves, they don't want to do the extra work.

Peebs wrote:

I think JManga is doing things right. They have a subscription service or the option to buy points as you need them. I feel their prices are right for digital manga. What they need to do is get their act together and release an iOS app. I have so much manga on that account and no way to read it but my computer.

Yeah, so what if Fruits Basket was already published by TP? If you haven't notices, Fruits Basket is OOP, DMP can easily reprint the series and use the same damn translations that TP used. Yes, translated manga go back to the Japanese company, as well, just like English dubs. They can license it and print it in omnibus books. There is demand for that series, it was the top selling shojo manga when it came out, it was the series that kept TP around for so long.

And JManga has another site (the one I was referring to), it's a site that you pay monthly to ($6 a month) and you can read whatever manga they have listed. You don't pay to read each volume. It's a monthly fee and you read what you want.

HAH!! Print quality is 1600dpi minimum. So 300 is not going to cut it. Also Japanese mangaka draw on pages twice originally are twice the size of the magazines their titles are published in. These are then sent off to printers to make plates and now to get digitized.

Increasing numbers of mangaka work in digital through the whole process know. But the plates still end up being the same size... HUGE.

And why don't they pick up and reprint Fruits Basket?

Not for 8x11 paper, you're not going to print a damn manga on a damn 16x20 sheet of paper. As someone, who in fact went to art school and had to scan art to put on the computer, 300 does the job for prints that size. You can EASILY edit manga at the 300 dpi size. Oh, and I just double checked, I scanned a sheet of paper (full of text, black text) and it comes out damn fine without the 1600 dpi. FYI, hate to tell yo this, an Epson scanner, only about $300, easily goes up to 3600 dpi. You're telling me that a small company can't afford that and an assistant scan the pages?

Yeah, sorry, you're using an excuse. For the purpose of scanning hand drawn graphics 300 dpi resolution is usually sufficient. And since you claim that manga pages are using large sheets of paper, 300 would still do fine since you're shrinking them down into our format.

Because there would still be huge, upfront costs that wouldn't return enough in profits. If they reprinted the volumes already out, fans won't be buying them. Why? Because they already have Tokyopop's.

Like Gunslinger Girl, for example. I have up to volume 6 by ADV, then when Seven Seas released it, I just started at volume 7 (actually omnibus 3, vols 7-8). No reason to buy the first two. I don't know how many volumes TP released of FB, but I highly doubt casual readers will pick up a volume of something they have.