Discussion Series Topic #11 - ebook and Manga

[Floating_Sakura]

Many sites rushed to report the new Sony Reader, a portable e-book device that was made available to order Sept 27th (for $350 US). At the same time, Sony opened its online e-book store CONNECT, partnering with many publishers, including Tokyopop, who is selling select titles at $7.99 per book. Most of the titles available are Tokyopop's OEL series. Check out Sony's ebook store CONNECT.

A review of manga reading on the Sony Reader can be found on Comic Wire.

Question: Do you think manga on e-book will work? Will you personally support them or buy them? A more interesting question comes to mind: Do you think it will change how scanlation works right now? (Note that the Sony Reader's supported formats are pdf, rtf, and jpg, plus some audio formats.)

A few things to think about:

• A couple of months ago, we reported that Shogakukan has started releasing their longer series in e-book format to make it more cost-efficient for their readers:

http://www.rbbtoday.com/news/20060728/32675.html

eBookJapan will start carrying Shogakukan's long-manga series in e-book format. The first series is "Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari" (first ten volumes) on sale July 28. There are plans to do the rest of the series (34 volumes in total).

eBookJapan has a line up going along the Shogakukan's popular long series because they believe that there is a demand on ebook for them since it is quite expensive to buy them in an entire set and expects an increased in buying rate for "whole series bulk buying."

Future planned series include, "Gekka no Kishi" (by Noujiyou Junichi), "Okami-san" (by Ichimaru), "Ogisa ME Kounin" (by Kitazaki Taku), "Umi no Yami, Tsuki no Kage" (by Shinohara Chie), "BANANA FISH" (by Yoshida Akimi), "P.A." (by Akaishi Michiyo), "Koi Monogatari" (by Saitou Chiho) and "Princess Army" (by Kitagawa Miyuki).

The e-book manga market is rather new worldwide, but cellphone manga has been around in Japan and China for a year or more now.

• In Japan, manga has been available for cellphones for quite some time now (usually for 30 yen - 50 yen a chapter, depending whether it's colour or not, or if it has special effects that vibrate during action scenes and such), and is reported to be widely popular.

• Last week, 591ac.com (a big Chinese manga news site) had an interesting article about cellphone manga in China http://www.591ac.com/make/dmzt/200609190001.htm.
Some interesting stats:
- The mobile phone manga market had 10 million users at its initial launching and by 2007, they expect 100 million.
- The manga market in Hong Kong alone, not including mainland China, is currently worth $4.6 billion HKD, or about $700 million US, well exceeding their movie industry!
- Mainland China has 44 million mobile phone users, with 36 million users age 18 or under.

Question: Would you prefer your manga chapters distributed through cellphone networks? (Unfortunately, North America isn't using the G3 system, so it seems rather difficult as of now.)

Question: How about micro-payments -- would you rather be paying, say, $1 per chapter, instead of, say, $8 per manga?

[brewthatistrue]

First of all, the e-book readers are useful for those who are away from a real PC, and who have some time to kill.

I don't wait in lines, don't use trains, subways, planes, buses, or chaffeur services. I imagine the market in Japan and China is larger because they do make such use of public transportation, and have plenty of time to kill.

Students, children being chauffered by their parents, and those who use public transportation in big city hubs such as in Portland, Oregon, or New York City, New York, may find more use for such devices than commuters in Los Angeles, California, as reading manga does not mix well with driving an automobile.

Perhaps I just have a lack of imagination. Anyone planning on using such devices at home or in a dorm environment?

Originally Posted by Floating_Sakura

Question: Do you think manga on e-book will work? Will you personally support them or buy them? A more interesting question comes to mind: Do you think it will change how scanlation works right now? (Note that the Sony Reader's supported formats are pdf, rtf, and jpg, plus some audio formats.)

pdf/rtf/jpg seem like poor formats for a small reader of images. for text it might work, but for manga, I think the screen size will require too much scrolling.
I'm not sure how they do it with cel-phone manga, but if they use the same technique (maybe it's panel-by-panel?) then it should translate just fine to readers with larger screens like Sony's PSP.

Originally Posted by Floating_Sakura

Question: Would you prefer your manga chapters distributed through cellphone networks? (Unfortunately, North America isn't using the G3 system, so it seems rather difficult as of now.)

It would be nice, but I'd also want a way to transfer them to m PC for archival. As you say, the cel-phone networks in America are only starting to bring broadband capabilities, so that's not a real option. Also, they charge per-byte for data transfer, as well as a montly fee for data-transfer capability, fees that I'm not intersted in paying.

Originally Posted by Floating_Sakura

Question: How about micro-payments -- would you rather be paying, say, $1 per chapter, instead of, say, $8 per manga?

$1 per chapter is fine if it doesn't add up to more than $8 per manga. $8 per volume seems reasonable to me, although it would be nice if there were some kind of discount later on. $8 is fine once in a while, but buying 30 volumes of kenshin comes out to $240, a sum I'm not interested in paying. Maybe spreading it out in mini-doses would make it more palatable?

The best scenario would be a micropayment scenario where I pay for one chapter and read it. At the end of the chapter, it can prompt me, "continue reading for 1 more dollar?". If I agree, the reader downloads the newest chapter, and I "own" that copy.

Archival and media-shifting are important to prevent loss of my investment, so I expect to be able to save these chapters or volumes to my computer, to a flash card, USB flash drive or some other ubiquitous storage media.

So in short, good idea, but its success hinges upon its execution.

[edit] and there's no way I'd pay $350 for an e-book reader. I might consider the cel-phone manga though, if it were done right.

[wrook]

Hmmm... I have the same potential problem with e-books as I do with iPods. If it's DRM'd, I don't want it. In other words, I want to be able to take the content and read it in a normal browser that I can run on any machine I want (including machines that don't run Windows or OSX). If I can't do that, it limits my interest dramatically.

I don't know what Sony has in mind for DRM on these things, but I can guess (root-kit, anyone?).

Secondly, I'm going to want these files in at least 600 dpi. Yes, the resolution will have to be less for display on the e-book itself, but a real printed manga is, what, 1200 dpi? 2400 dpi? If I'm going to pay the same for it, I want the same quality.

Thirdly, let me download the manga, and let *me* realize the cost savings inherent in that. Most manga is about 6 chapters per volume. It costs about 100-150 yen per chapter. Much of that is printing and handling costs. So charging me 50 yen per chapter would be fine.

I'd be more than happy to pay "micro-payments" for chapters. It would be great to make my own anthology.

But, I think the odds of any of this actually happening the way I want it is basically nil.... So I'll stick to paper...

[wrook]

Arghhh... Replying to my own post...

But I've done some checking, and I may have to eat my words.... It seems this Sony Reader is running Montavista Linux and will operate as a normal USB device. There seems to be a few people who are hacking the thing to do things other than reading books (not sure where they are getting their units...)

In any case, I'm now officially very intrigued...

[anitra]

i recently tried putting some anime on my ipod -- you know, with that tiny screen -- and to my great pleasure and surprise, the subtitles were quite readable. so it is not implausible to me to think that a well-edited page of manga might be reasonable to read on the sony-reader screen, which is larger. well-edited is key, however -- i have difficulty making out some of the small-type parenthetical comments on printed manga sometimes, and certainly if it were smaller.

as for the price, it is certainly too much. $8 is very little less than the $10 the printed version costs, but the relative value to me is not quite that high. if it is a work that i like, i want to have it in my hands; if it is marginal or i don't know it yet, i'm not going to spend that much to try it out.

as for the reader as a portable linux box -- i'm all about that. they had better not try to lock that up in future versions, the way i've seen with other kick-ass hardware.

[Emeryl Tekutsu]

As a Californian, I understand Brew's point quite well. My first wandering thought was when I would use it over reading a printed copy. That is, Californians drive. We drive everywhere. Our public transportation sucks; I wouldn't trust it to take me across the street. You might end up somewhere and not be able to get back. Our trains suck, are slow, and overpriced.

So all that time I'm stuck traveling is me driving myself. And while I don't doubt that there are drivers out there who would be reading as they drive, I don't think I'll do that.

It could interest me if it didn't cost so much and I had a better idea of how they wanted to implement it. I think I still like having a book in my hands, though. My eyes are pretty bad as it is.

[Floating_Sakura]

heh, no one answered the scanlation question that i'm interested in... I guess no scanlators are interested in this new toy eh? Back when psp just came out last year, I remembered getting requests/offers to redo scanlation releases in psp-friendly format (not that I can help them, since I never own one)...but I just thought it's interesting...

(Not to mention png is not a supported format on the sony reader it seems... may have to go jpeg or *gasp* pdf!?)

[wrook]

I did some sniffing around on some forums dealing with hacking the Reader (I guess it was release last year in Japan under a different name -- which I forget). It seems that the software only displays JPGs, but also doesn't deal with collections of pictures well. You have to display them one at a time.

The suggestion is to embed the pictures into a PDF document... It's an interesting idea, but kind of lacks the simplicity of the png/rar packaging that most scanslators use now. Also, there are no really good tools for creating PDF documents full of pictures IFAICT.

It would be rather simple to write such a program (simple perl/python/whatever script would do it). I'm tempted to write one just for laughs. The upside of having a PDF distro of scanslations is that it could be read with software that is already installed on most people's computers.

An interesting idea, anyway...

[Floating_Sakura]

looks like fujitsu has one out that's 10x cooler looking: http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news...s.php?id=12521

(too bad it seems to be only available in Japan for the time being)

[Floating_Sakura]

Of course I'm talking to myself, but Tokyopop has a new review of the Sony Reader and also a chart on the pros and cons! <3

http://www.tokyopop.com/498.html