manganews.net

The word on the street is that Japanese publisher Libre have at last got the ball rolling on relicensing Yamane Ayano's immensely popular Finder series for an English release. The title had been licensed and released here in the states with much fanfare, with Ayano even making the trip to Yaoi Con back in 2004 partly to promote the series, with licensing being handled by CPM's Be Beautiful Yaoi line.

It was a year or so ago when the wheels fell off, so to speak. CPM had bought their release license from publisher Biblos, who then filed for bankruptcy in April of 2006. This in turn caused the business rights to Biblos's titles to end up in the hands of Libre, who made headlines when they accused CPM of failing to renegotiate rights for the Biblos titles CPM held, including the Finder series. We e-mailed Libre about the situation and got a more detailed breakdown of the issue (from their perspective of course) in response to our questions. Since then things have been quite, aside from CPM's breaking silence on the issue in an impromptu interview from NYAF where CPM head honcho John O'Donnell revealed that Libre had been avoiding attempts to resolve the matter, possibly (he theorized) to hurt sales of the books and stonewall things until the licenses expired naturally, leaving Libre free to shop the titles back out to other publishers.

As it turns out, this may very well be exactly what has happened. As reported over on Simon Jones' most excellent (and most NWS) Icarus Blog, Gia over at A Geek By Any Other Name (who, in fact, conducted the interview with John linked above) is reporting that comments made by Libre Editors on their forum have revealed that relicensing the series is underway, though they do not of course say to whom. There are a number of possibilities of course, with the large number of Yaoi publishers that have come out in recient years, and it is also possibly (but not, I think, highly likely) that CPM and Libre has resolved their issues and will be working to get the series out. At this point, only time will tell.