Spice and Wolf Japanese covers at online retailers | Romance manga arrives on Kindle, phones

November 22, 2009 in Manga Minutiae | 9 comments

In an effort to appease fans of Spice and Wolf who objected to the somewhat odd, pseudo-realistic cover chosen for the first American edition, Yen Press will be offering unfolded dust jackets containing the original Japanese artwork to retailers at no cost.  The Japanese cover also shipped as a bonus item with the December issue of Yen Plus magazine, although it was folded into the magazine like a letter, rendering it unsuitable for its actual purpose.  Sigh, I really hope the decision to use the Westernized cover was worth all this trouble for Yen.

The dust jackets will be available only through participating online retailers.  Outrage from brick and mortar shops in 3, 2, 1…

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A 16th-century Japanese Buddhist temple is using “moe” to attract visitors, with designs apparently furnished by Gonzo artist Toromi.  The holy men of Ryohoji will also manage a maid cafe for festivals.

I’m not Buddhist, but even I’m not sure if I shouldn’t be slightly troubled by this.  You just know what fan artists are going to do to those characters.

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Ignoring some grating generalizations about manga, the Wall Street Journal has a great article about the Korean manhwa market, which is running into some issues related to online distribution.  Some print magazines are folding, web cartoonists complain they are not getting a fair share, and only 3 out of 10 million web comic readers actually pay for the content (a “problem” we wish we had over here), but old cartoonists are ready to tackle these new media problems head-on.

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It seems SoftBank/Harlequin’s deal with eManga was just the tip of the iceberg… the romance publisher is making its manga adaptations available on the Kindle, optimized specifically for the bigger screen of the DX version.  The books will also be distributed to mobile devices via a company called For-Side.

I found the following titles in the Kindle store (and in the process, saw one too many book covers featuring cowboys with unbuttoned shirts):

(I’m too lazy to use my Amazon referral code.  Click through without fear of benefiting me financially.)

First of all, what is it with romance readers and their obsession with being kidnapped by wealthy Arabian rulers?  And you thought ero manga readers were weird.

Second, the press release specifically touted Kindle DX’s native PDF capability (which is absent from the regular Kindles), so that may be the format they are using.  I had previously assumed that all eBooks sold on Amazon were in Kindle’s proprietary AZW format.  I don’t have a Kindle, so I can’t confirm.  Anyone want to check these out and give me a shout back?

With this multi-pronged approach, Harlequin is embarrassing almost every other US manga publisher outside of DMP in the area of online distribution.  But hey, they own their content.  That makes all the difference.

Edit: Silly me.  Having just remembered that Amazon released “Kindle for PC” as a response to Barnes and Noble, I quickly downloaded “To Marry McAllister,” which to my great humiliation is the first Kindle ebook I’ve ever purchased.  The ebook is stored in a folder called “My Kindle Content”, in PRC format with DRM (could not open the file in Calibre.)  The file is roughly 7.33mb in size, and the images are basically compressed jpegs.  No fonts, but the book is quite readable, owing mainly to the fact that no attempt was made to fit the words inside their proper balloons.  Since the program doesn’t offer zooming, I cannot ascertain the true image quality/resolution, but there was severe artifacting around the text on some pages…

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  1. linger on November 22, 2009 at 8:43 pm

    >Sigh, I really hope the decision to use the Westernized cover was worth all this trouble for Yen.

    It won’t be. Just watch as the new cover creates nearly zero new sales at brick and mortar stores.

    >and only 3 out of 10 million web comic readers actually pay for the content

    Do you mean 3 people out of 10 million people, or 3 million people out of 10 million people? Because that first one definitely seems pretty bad…

    Reply

    1. Simon on November 22, 2009 at 9:15 pm

      3 million out of 10 million users.

      That is still 2.5 million more than the US, I’ll bet.

      Reply

      1. Nakki on January 5, 2010 at 12:52 pm

        All of the local stores are having a hard time selling them even with the holiday. Two online stores sell the book with no guarantee of the dust cover and the one I tried is sold out and waited a week after the release to tell me this. I would have to say the dust cover sells, the american cover does not.

        Reply

  3. Masamonkey on November 23, 2009 at 8:49 pm

    There are a lot of ‘problems’ surrounding on-line publishing that are worth about as much as it costs me to write ‘problem’ here. If you consider the 3 in 10 ratio in terms of a comic shop, I’d say if three out of every ten people that so much as glances at a specific book picks it up, that’s pretty damn good business. If that comic shop is over here and you have a five people buying for every twenty that flips through your book on a rack of thousands of books, that’s astronomically good.

    There’s really no such thing as ‘over here’ either outside of a print publishing perspective. Theoretically, there’s nothing stopping anybody from translating their comic into Korean and facing the exact same ‘problems’ manwha artists are facing. You’ve made really good points about how publishing houses will better be able to make a book stand out from the crowd of, ‘Robbie and Jay, the Video Game and Dick-loving Roomates’ and support creative endeavors and serve up something more than the electronic content no one wants to pay for. A lot of the on-line ‘failure’ is a perception of publishers who fail to correctly perceive and interpret electronic delivery though. They’d rather blame fan entitlement in markets they haven’t established footholds in.

    Reply

  4. Shelly on November 25, 2009 at 1:36 am

    So how was To Marry McAllister? XD It’s very strange that Amazon doesn’t list the original author’s name on their listing. I tried A Most Suitable Wife, but was sad I couldn’t transfer it to another device. Though I understand why they do that.

    However, my first thought is that this manga is the perfect thing to download to an ereader. These stories can be read in under an hour, so they’re the perfect thing for a commute on a bus or train every day. It would be much easier for me to concentrate on these in that kind of environment. Plus the price is right. If I could, I’d buy my manga this way. And if I really liked a series, I’d get it in paper format. (A subscription for reading books would be a cool idea with these too, a la Crunchyroll – I’d do that).

    The sheik thing…. God knows. There are a lot fewer sheik romances than there used to be, but I can’t stand them. I would love to see one end with him introducing her to wives 2, 3, and 4. But that’s more in line with what you publish LOL.

    Reply

    1. Simon on November 25, 2009 at 4:09 am

      Honestly, the biggest kick I got out of “To Marry McAllister” was that while I was reading it, I remembered a girl back in high school. She was an incredibly intelligent redhead, very pretty. Tall, pale complexion, thinner than she should be, but very mature and reserved… she could be mistaken for a Victorian painting. She had that kind of cold grace. She sat in front of me in math class, and every week she’d have a new romance novel with her. She was very shy about it, always carefully hiding them in her binder, but I could see them from my vantage point. And every chance she had, she’d sneak a peak like a little child who’s found a baby bird, and she knows her parents would never let her keep it. God, that was cute.

      Umm… as for the book itself… for what it is, it’s entertaining. The storytelling was efficient, as one would expect for a condensed adaptation. Some of the storyline conceits were the kind of things I’d expect in porn manga, so I got a laugh of that.

      But, on a purely technical level, the good thing about Harlequin’s e-manga is that they are readable, as in I didn’t have to squint at the screen so much as to give myself a headache (the font wasn’t really appropriate for comic lettering, though). My impression of the other comics and manga that I’ve purchased or sampled is that many were given very lazy treatments, with no effort made to optimize the reading experience for Kindle. No enlarged text, no re-paneling. Some of them were basically unreadable… as if the publishers never bothered to test them on an actual Kindle.

      Reply

      1. Shelly on November 25, 2009 at 10:36 am

        I too was impressed by the clarity and the ease with which I could read it. The lettering reminded me of poor scanlations, but at least it was readable. Harlequin is ahead of the pack when it comes to combining its books with the tech out there.

        Content-wise, the one I bought had one of the most hackneyed plots I’d ever read. Out of curiosity, after reading it I bought the e-version of the book so I could compare. The book was terrible, just terrible: inconsistent characters, choppy flow, no character development, ridiculous plot. I’ve never liked the Harlequin line this book comes from –most of these are British Harlequins, aka Mills and Boon, and they’re much more in the tradition of Barbara Cartland than American Harlequins. There is the occasional one that rises above the rest, but this one was worse than mediocre. The manga at least managed to make something more entertaining out of it.

        I wonder if these titles were popular ones in Japan? I don’t think they’re the best choices for readers over here. I wonder how something like a manga version of JD Robb would go over…

        Reply

  5. DocWatson on December 9, 2009 at 3:01 am

    The Wall Street Journal article was originally posted in The Far Eastern Economic Review, which (unlike the WSJ) is free:

    http://www.feer.com/jaunt-through-asia/2009/november51/will-the-internet-kill-the-manhwa-star

    Reply