DMP launches eManga.com

Digital Manga Publishing has launched eManga.com, an online ebook service which, despite some claims made elsewhere, is not the first such online manga provider of its kind in the US (an honor that likely belongs to Netcomics).  Check in with Brigid Alverson and Gia Manry for in-depth reviews and reactions.  I’ve also a few early thoughts on the service… mostly technical, since the site seems geared towards a very specific audience.

Damn, this domain must have been hella expensive.

All the books are either soft-core BL from their June line, or how-to-draw books which are free.  The one about drawing characters flashing the shocker while wearing 80s hip-hop clothes made me puke a little in my mouth.

The Flash-based online reader is no frills, and works at a decent clip.  I was able to load it up and read comfortably even on our oldest PC here (a Pentium 3 system), although the reader is buggy at times, intermittently losing the ability to scroll.  As I understand it, Flash doesn’t work all that well on Linux boxes, and eManga doesn’t offer an alternative at this time.

Each individual page in the manga I sampled is roughly 885px by 1200px.  Based on the book sizes provided on the June website, that translates into a native resolution of between 140 ~ 150 dpi, depending on whether the pages contained the bleed (usually an 1/8th inch-deep border around the page that is meant to be trimmed away in the printing process).   It’s a good balance between viewing quality and loading speed, a very important but sometimes overlooked element of the online reading experience.

Unfortunately, and you all probably know this is one of my pet peeves, all text are part of the image rather than in their original fonts.  I haven’t played around with Flash since, well, the first version.  But even then it was a vector-based program.  It’s certainly capable of high-quality fonts (granted, it might be rather difficult to port their original files into Flash).  But there wasn’t much in the way of small or unusual type in either the manga or the HTD books, so reading never becomes an issue, thanks to the ample resolution.

The Flash player has an automatic reading advance feature - it scrolls through sections of the page in the logical reading order – which works well for the most part.  But there is one small flaw… it seems most of the viewing functions are relative to the size of the browser window, so if you resize or maximize it, you may get hideous visual artifacts (images must be at a 1/2^x magnification to look right… this is true of most image viewers), and the auto reading function will no longer work properly.

The purchasing system is based on points which you purchase with real money.  Each point equals a penny, so at least they’re not trying to take advantage of your poor math skills like Microsoft XBL.  The yaoi manga were all priced at 400 points.  Now, I know just the other day I wrote a small tirade against ebook price obsession, but wow… $4 for a 72-hour rental?  Damn you for making me look bad, DMP!  Granted, most of the books being offered are proto-porn for women, and there are still plenty of guys who spend 69 cents a minute to talk dirty to housewives pretending to be half their age, so I guess it’s not too bad.  You also have the option of purchasing any book again for “unlimited” viewing… at least, for as long as the website hangs around.  So you save about a third off the cover price of the print version, but just keep in mind that it’s not quite the same as owning.  (Microsoft and Yahoo’s shuttered music services, and the ensuing backlash over the broken DRMs that followed, illustrate the fallacy of such systems.)  I would be surprised if DMP doesn’t offer some kind of unlimited-viewing membership soon after the site is out of beta.

That’s it for now.  My apologies to the 101st fangirl who signed up for the service and didn’t get the 500 free bonus points.