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Digital Manga puts all print titles on hiatus for 6 months
Just saw today's MangaBlog post: Digital Manga goes all-digital for six months. Like it says, all of Digital Manga, Inc.'s imprints (DMP, June Manga, DokiDoki and 801Media) will be releasing only digital editions and the print editions will be on hiatus for the next six months. A message from DMI's president explains "This hiatus will allow us to coordinate our production schedule for 2013 and temporarily shift our focus to our digital publications".
This doesn't make sense to me--do they not have enough resources to publish print editions right now? Six months is a long time to expect your readers to wait around when a lot of people will only buy print editions. How do they know those readers will come back in six months and won't have moved on to buying books from other publishers?
Also, they sell their digital titles mostly through eManga, which you can only read online and uses the points system of purchasing--you have to buy a minimum of 500 points, but nothing is ever exactly priced at 500 or 1000 points, which means that you'll always end up with leftover points, which is why I haven't signed up with them. (JManga has a similar system, but I reluctantly signed up for it anyway because they have a lot of cool obscure titles that can't be found in English anywhere else, along with some rescues of TOKYOPOP series that I never got to finish.) At least some of their titles can be found on Kindle and Nook, and while I'm still not too keen on a system that amounts to leasing rather than owning the titles, at least I can just buy the individual book that I want and not to have to hassle with the points system. But most likely, I won't be buying many DMI titles for the next six months.
While I am annoyed at the inconvenience to myself (and mourning the fact that I won't see vol. 2 of Otodama until Oct. 2013), I'm also concerned about DMI's future. Things have been tough in the manga/anime industry, so since they feel this hiatus is necessary, I hope that it will help them regroup and survive in the long run. However, I'm worried that they will end up alienating a large portion of their customer base.
I also worry that this may affect my comic book store owner friend, since I know that manga accounts for a significant percentage of his sales (and a good portion of that is from BL fangirls like me buying June titles. I figure that at least half the manga are June titles). But this may be a good time for me to check out Viz's SuBLime imprint--they have a mix of print and digital titles, and you actually get to download and keep the digital files that you buy. Sounds like they are trying to do things right, so I would like to support them.
And trying to find a silver lining in this hiatus cloud: with no June titles coming out in the next six months, maybe I can finally get caught up on the huge stack of "to read" manga that I've accumulated!
This doesn't make sense to me--do they not have enough resources to publish print editions right now? Six months is a long time to expect your readers to wait around when a lot of people will only buy print editions. How do they know those readers will come back in six months and won't have moved on to buying books from other publishers?
Also, they sell their digital titles mostly through eManga, which you can only read online and uses the points system of purchasing--you have to buy a minimum of 500 points, but nothing is ever exactly priced at 500 or 1000 points, which means that you'll always end up with leftover points, which is why I haven't signed up with them. (JManga has a similar system, but I reluctantly signed up for it anyway because they have a lot of cool obscure titles that can't be found in English anywhere else, along with some rescues of TOKYOPOP series that I never got to finish.) At least some of their titles can be found on Kindle and Nook, and while I'm still not too keen on a system that amounts to leasing rather than owning the titles, at least I can just buy the individual book that I want and not to have to hassle with the points system. But most likely, I won't be buying many DMI titles for the next six months.
While I am annoyed at the inconvenience to myself (and mourning the fact that I won't see vol. 2 of Otodama until Oct. 2013), I'm also concerned about DMI's future. Things have been tough in the manga/anime industry, so since they feel this hiatus is necessary, I hope that it will help them regroup and survive in the long run. However, I'm worried that they will end up alienating a large portion of their customer base.
I also worry that this may affect my comic book store owner friend, since I know that manga accounts for a significant percentage of his sales (and a good portion of that is from BL fangirls like me buying June titles. I figure that at least half the manga are June titles). But this may be a good time for me to check out Viz's SuBLime imprint--they have a mix of print and digital titles, and you actually get to download and keep the digital files that you buy. Sounds like they are trying to do things right, so I would like to support them.
And trying to find a silver lining in this hiatus cloud: with no June titles coming out in the next six months, maybe I can finally get caught up on the huge stack of "to read" manga that I've accumulated!