Please Miss Yuri ships; Infinity moves to e-books, continues some books in print

Comic AG issue 75 is in stores TODAY.  Go grab a copy for yourself right now! 

Please Miss Yuri by Syowmaru has also started shipping from California, and should be in most comic book stores by March 5th.  If you’re not yet entirely convinced that this is worth a $20 bill and some change, you can check out the first chapter in its complete glory by downloading Comic AG Digital Issue 00.

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RightStuff has launched a new yaoi-themed portal, YaoiAnime.com.  I guess that makes eromanga and anime the evil twin brother they keep locked up in the attic… sniff.

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StarWars.com has an absolutely fascinating comparison between the various adapted Star Wars manga, some of which have been released by Dark Horse in the states, and the Marvel Comics version which, to be fair, predates the manga by a couple decades.  I’m not foolish enough to declare which version is superior… much of it comes down to personal preference, after all… but if one were to condense the differences between the Eastern and Western approach to comics storytelling through this comparison alone, it would be the propensity of American comics to tell the story, and manga’s preference to show the story.

Ah, what the hell. Manga wins!  Suck on it!!

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(Found via Anime On DVD forums) In what must have been a herculean negotiation effort with their licensors, Infinity Studios now have plans to offer purchasable e-books in March, consisting of both exclusive online-only titles and existing print books.  In a somewhat pioneering decision (at least within the North American manga/manhwa arena), the files will be download-to-own PDFs (see edit below), as opposed to the view-online micropayment model employed by manhwa publisher Netcomics.

On cursory reading, it seems that Infinity will be reviving some print titles that have been placed on-hold exclusively as ebooks… or to look at it another way, putting the print edition of those titles on permanent hiatus, mid-series.  While not implicitly stated, it also appears that all of their future print releases will be made available online… perhaps simultaneously or even before the in-store date.

These moves recall Tokyopop’s shuttered POD-ish initiative to sell some titles exclusively through its website, and the much more recent online strategy of Boom Studios.  Whether Infinity’s e-books will incur nearly the same level of scrutiny and wrath as the aforementioned controversies is debatable; the publisher is in a very different position right now, and given the number of missed release dates it has had since last year, this may very much be a strategy born out of necessity.

In any case, any such concerns will play second fiddle to the commercial viability of the e-books themselves, whose triumph or failure will doubtlessly be seized upon by bloggers and forum pundits as yet another referendum on the larger picture of internet publishing.  The reality is that of the various forms of publishing models whose relative merits and practicalities have been debated endlessly by comics experts, self-appointed visionaries, and so forth - ad-supported, download-to-own, micropayments – all have been proven viable for comics… within foreign markets with conditions and user habits conducive to each specific model.  Major success stories are more difficult to come by within the U.S., usually in another medium (music, for example) or limited to a very select group of pioneers whose fortunes have been difficult to replicate.  And one common thread among the most genuine realizations of the promise of internet distribution has ironically been portal-like central distribution platforms that, for all intents and purposes, act just like the gatekeepers of old media.  In that way, internet ‘products’ are actually more like a ‘service,’ and its much more difficult for any one publisher to offer a full-fledged service by itself.  If Infinity should succeed (and they’d better move to a speedier webserver fast), it would be a major coup.  If not, then let’s all hope for their sake that Apple decides to open a comics store, and the Kindle dips below $99 soon.

Related: Ed Chavez provides an excellent breakdown of the company’s highs and lows, with some important reader advice that all future e-book publishers should take into account.

Edit: Just as I posted this, Infinity updated their page with two titles ready for purchase… and rather than being downloads, the PDFs are being offered on DVD, which makes a lot of what I just typed totally moot.  All I can say is… wow.

DVD.  Whoa.

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Only semi-related… Adobe has taken a huge step back with Acrobat Reader 8.  It’s clunky, slow to load, and has some kind of memory limit where it would stall on very large files (i.e., the PDFs we send to our printer) after viewing a certain number of pages, and give an erroneous corrupt file error.  Too bad… Reader 7x was actually a big improvement over the buggy 6 series, and one I’d still be using if not for its publicized security issues.  Stop making it harder for me to justify using PDF, Adobe.

That said, we have figured out why our books weren’t displaying two-page spreads properly, which bodes well for our next Comic AG Digital.  Wheee!

[/End rant]