In a few hours I’ll be traveling to Otakon, so what better way to prepare than publishing OMG Kawaii Desu!: A parent’s guide to anime, manga, and cosplay on the Nook family of readers and tablets. If all goes well it will be available for purchase in a few days. So stay tuned!
Tag: ebook (Page 1 of 2)
As I prepare for Anime Central this weekend, I am pleased to announce the publication of OMG Kawaii Desu!: A parent’s guide to anime, manga, and cosplay! This book has been in the works for the last year or so, somewhat later than I had first planned. So thank you to everyone for your patience!
About the book:
Your kids are watching cartoons with apple loving demons and magical schoolgirls, mixing Japanese words you don’t understand with their English, reading black and white comic books backwards, and wearing strange costumes. What’s a parent to do? First don’t panic, it’s okay. Your kids are just fans of Japanese anime, manga, and cosplay. This guide is intended to give you an educated look into the world your kids have embraced.
As expected, Black Friday sales of the Kindle Fire were very good and some analyst project that Amazon will sell 4 to 5 million Fire tablets before the end of the year. While there have been some indications that sales have cooled a bit, right now there’s no reason to believe that the Fire is going away any time soon.
The thing I find most interesting about the news I see is the continuing comparison to the iPad. Many stories cast the Kindle Fire as a potential “iPad killer” when clearly the hardware and software indicate a different target. Amazon’s new tablet is first and foremost, a Kindle. It’s an eReader first and was probably initially intended to be a response to the Nook Color than the iPad. As I’ve ranted here before, the Kindle Fire was made for book lovers making the initial move into digital. The Fire and iPad are horses running different races. If anything, over the long term, the lower spec’d Fire is more likely to drive iPad sales as many Fire users get hooked on digital media and seek out a more capable tablet still compatible with most of the media they’ve already bought.
It’s too early to tell if the Fire has made a significant dent in iPad sales, but it does look like it has claimed at least one victim as Dell has recently dropped its own 7 inch tablet. Dell has always been pretty quick to drop products that have no long term profit potential, so this move speaks volumes. As for the Nook, Barnes & Noble has been claiming good sales and a doubling of its Nook business since last year. We won’t really know if the Nook tablet has gained any traction until Barnes & Noble’s next quarterly report.
Competition is generally a good thing for the consumer, so I hope the Nook tablet won’t fall victim to the Fire too soon. However, the days of other 7 inch tablets that lack strong ties to eBook and media stores may be numbered.
Anime News Network reported that the JManga web site had launched with a lineup of titles that included manga never seen in print in the United States. These new titles include Macross Frontier.
It was the Macross Frontier part that piqued my interest primarily. JManga is a web portal where manga can be purchased and read online in the most popular web browsers. Reading manga online is not new, but being able to do so legally is, for the most part. And any anime or manga fan can attest to the very loud absence of anything Macross Frontier (legally) on US shores. So as a Macross fan, I put aside my general dislike for web based manga reading and signed up for a JManga account to look around.
Well first, I should note, that at this time Macross Frontier is not yet available on JManga, but still there was quite a lot to see. And I wanted to see if the site would work on my iPad. All of the legal online manga reading sites make use of Adobe Flash based readers which don’t work on Apple iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. I had hoped to find that JManga was iPad friendly. Unfortunately, the JManga reader is also Flash based and didn’t work on my iPad.
The Flash based manga reader wasn’t really a surprise. But I was surprised and a little disappointed at the price of manga on the site. On JManga, readers buy manga using points. These points are worth a penny a piece. Many titles on the site do not have prices listed as yet, but of those that did, I found the range from 895 to 899 points for a volume. Nine dollars is not a bad price for a printed manga volume, but charging that for digital seems excessive considering that Viz typically charges $5.99 for their iPad friendly digital manga. JManga does have a $10/month subscription plan that currently has a one time bonus of 500 points and then a 50 point/month bonus after that. This brings the cost down a bit, but not enough to escape the fact that they essentially charge print prices for digital.
Pricing aside, I’m happy to see that new titles are being made available to US readers in digital format and hope we’re seeing the beginning of a trend. The general decline of retail bookstores and loss of Borders and publisher Tokyopop in particular has made it more difficult for US manga readers to find new titles. JManga was established by the 39 Japanese publishers who make up the Digital Comic Association with the goal of making manga available worldwide in a fashion that benefits the publishers, artists, and readers alike. If manga is to have a future in the US, JManga is going to be part of it.
With 39 publishers to manage, issues like pricing and availability will take some time to work out. But yes, even at print price I’ll be there for Macross Frontier!
Many Harry Potter fans, myself included, have been waiting for some time to add the adventures of the young wizard to our growing collections of eBooks. But alas, they have remained out of reach, until now. J.K. Rowling recently announced that not only will the collection be available as eBooks, but readers will be able to experience the world of Harry Potter in a whole new way.
In announcing Pottermore, Rowling has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged eBooks to be more than mere words on a digital page. We’ve already seen some glimpses of a more interactive approach to eBooks in children’s books on the Nook Color. And visual novels (aka dating sims) have been around in Japan for a long time. But Pottermore promises to go far beyond that.
Rowling said that the reader will uniquely shape their own experiences as they read through the books. I would guess that the experience will be centered around the web site itself. But there is no reason to believe that it will stop there. While there are no details yet on what or how the current crop of eReaders will be supported, I can imagine the interactivity of Pottermore being extended even there. Both the Kindle and the Android-based Nook are capable of supporting interactive applications. The introduction of touch screen eInk readers can only expand the level of interactivity supported by the devices. And, of course, there is the iPad and other tablet computers.
With the resources Pottermore likely has at its command, we could be seeing something approaching what I’ll call a Literary MMORPG. Rowling’s video gave me the impression that she wants something that retains the “bookish” quality of reading, but reading that immerses and is in turn shaped by the reader. When we read a book, we all imagine the characters and settings in our own unique ways. I think Pottermore will attempt to retain that quality in a way that other media like movies and video games cannot.
Right now, no one knows how this is going to turn out. So like thousands of fans probably already have, I put my email address on the list and eagerly await further news and perhaps the chance to experience Pottermore a little early. ~_^
I received a most wonderful gift for Fathers Day which just arrived today. An iPad 2 from my lovely wife! I’m really looking forward to putting it through it’s paces!
In particular, I’ll be checking out more digital comic offerings from Dark Horse and comiXology, as well as manga from Viz. On the publishing side, it’ll get a workout with my son’s graphic novel I’m currently editing.
And of course, I’m writing this post with it right now!
Anime News Network has reported that TokyoPop’s manga licenses will revert to their owners when the publisher shuts down at the end of May. There is no word on the status of TokyoPop original English language (OEL) works.
This is rather disappointing. I had held out some hope up until now that perhaps TokyoPop could continue its current licensed series in eBook form, at least until license expiration. But it is very likely that the licenses were specific to printed distribution. Digital distribution usually requires negotiating a new license if not part of the original.
It’s a near certainty that at least some of the most popular titles will be licensed by some other publishers. Still, anyone following any current TokyoPop series is in for some anguished waiting while things get sorted out.
Soon it will be possible for Kindle readers to check out Amazon Kindle eBooks from their local libraries. eBook lending from public libraries in the U.S. has been around for a few years now, but not in the Kindle format which effectively left most Kindle readers out in the cold.
This is certainly great news for Kindle eBook readers, but I think the timing of this action is the real story here. Recently, publisher Harper Collins sent chills to libraries everywhere by declaring an absolute limit of 26 loans on any of its eBooks in a library’s collection. And much has been made of the maintenance of artificial scarcity of digital goods like eBooks. eBooks don’t wear out, and an unlimited number of copies can be made at virtually no additional cost. So why limit the number that a library can loan out, much less impose some limit on the total number of times a copy may be loaned?
Obviously Harper Collins and other publishers don’t want library eBook loans to kill eBook sales, or print book sales for that matter. And I think there is some validity to that. I have no problem with a library having a limited number of licenses for a given title. But this “wear out” factor Harper is trying to introduce is just stupid. Those eBook loans are more likely than not, going to drive sales, not kill them. Libraries are great advertising, and unlike a bookstore, even obscure titles get shelf space, indefinitely! Libraries help sell the back catalog in physical space.
So what does the entry of Amazon into the fray say? It says that Amazon sees a money making opportunity. During my recent visit to the Myopic Bookstore in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, I saw a puzzling sign in the store. It said that the use of barcode scanners was prohibited. I’d never seen any signs like that before. Later I thought about it and figured that maybe it was to keep competitors from inventorying their stock. But it also occurred to me that perhaps some people were coming into the store using it to browse books that they would later look up and buy on Amazon. There are plenty of smartphone apps to facilitate that kind of activity.
While Kindle readers certainly don’t need to go to libraries to buy or borrow books, it would not surprise me if Amazon’s data shows that a lot of them do. It is also very likely that the libraries that will loan Kindle books, will also have physical copies to browse and loan as well. I suspect that it is much easier to make a sale when a reader has had time to really get to know a book in person. Up until now, Barnes & Noble, and Borders with their free Wi-Fi have probably helped drive Kindle book sales via this access to physical books. If this is true, then Amazon has no doubt seen a slight decline in sales consistent with the declining number of bookstores.
Amazon’s entry into the library then makes good business sense. It’s entry may also send a pause to Harper Collins and other publishers. The Kindle has lost some market share to Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and the Apple iPad, but Amazon still maintains a lot of leverage on publishers. Publishers that won’t play ball with library loans, may find it a lot harder to sell titles to Kindle readers. The large bookstore chains are not coming back. Publisher fortunes will soon rest largely on digital sales. Right now Amazon is to eBook sales what Apple has been to digital music. Until publishers come up with similarly popular distribution channels, the road to eBook sales will continue to pass through Amazon.
That said, Amazon’s endorsement and support of library eBook lending will reap benefits for all readers of eBooks who want to borrow them from public libraries.
Okay, we’ve all read scanlations at some time in our manga reading lives. And we’ve all felt, or should have felt, guilty that reading illegally scanned and translated manga does nothing to support and thank mangaka for their work. Well now you can do something about that! Join the Digital Manga Guild and become part of the solution! In the latest Akadot newsletter this morning I read:
Did you know that the Digital Manga Guild just got 508 titles from Japanese publishers? I’m pretty excited because it won’t just be yaoi, but shojo, shonen, seinen and josei! I wish I had the time to join, but maybe you could help out at digitalmangaguild.com!
The Digital Manga Guild needs translators, editors, and letterers to succeed. And everyone involved will be paid for their efforts based on title sales. With 508 new titles, I think that’s an opportunity that should not be passed up. So if you have the skills and love manga, give the guild a shot and bring more of the manga you love to the ones you love in a way that supports the artists.
Yesterday Lendle, a Kindle eBook lending network service had its access to the Amazon API blocked. Lendle made use of the Amazon API to facilitate the lending of Kindle eBooks all in accord with the current restrictions. Kindle books may be loaned to another Kindle user for a period of 14 days. During that time, the owner of the book cannot read it until the end of the loan period. And any given book may only be loaned out one time and one time only. Barnes & Noble Nook eBooks suffer the same lending restrictions.
After changes to Lendle’s use of the API, Lendle’s access to Amazon has been restored. But the whole debacle casts light once again on the overly restrictive eBook lending rules. First, 14 days is too short. I’ve read plenty of books that with life’s little interruptions have taken me far longer than 14 days to read. I’m not a library, when I loan a book to a friend, I don’t stamp it with a due date and charge fines if it comes back late! Secondly, many of us have loaned a good book to family and friends more than one time only. It is not uncommon for an entire family to share and read a single copy of a book.
These restrictions, coupled with DRM, are intended to fight piracy. But by making it harder for the consumer to use the product in a way that seems natural and fair to them, they actually encourage the piracy they wish to limit. We’ve already seen this with software, music, and movies. People living in the same household don’t want to buy full priced copies of things they have already paid for once. If it is easier to obtain and use a pirated copy of a book than a legal one, then guess which one wins?
As eBook readers begin to fall below $100, more of them are finding their way into the hands of younger readers. Stripping eBooks of DRM is not all that difficult and a quick web search is likely to find pirate copies of anything even remotely popular. It would be better in the long run if lending restrictions are loosened up to resemble something closer to what book readers expect, than to raise up a new generation of casual eBook pirates.
Rather than continue unrealistic lending policies, eBook sellers and publishers should use the lending data to track reader preferences and trends in order to sell more books. The current policies actively discourage lending, opening it up should result in a larger, more significant data pool for analysis. Just as iTunes did for digital music, the eBook buying and lending experience should be as easy as tapping a touchscreen.