Manga eBook Interlude: JManga and Crunchyroll Manga

When JManga shut down earlier this year, I had half a mind to write a postmortem about it. Their approach was flawed on several fronts: cost, accessibility, library, quality. With the sudden appearance of Crunchyroll Manga, though, I'm pleasantly surprised that the publishers seem to have learned some lessons from that fiasco.

So what did they do wrong the first time around? The a la carte system certainly made things too expensive. They essentially tried to emulate the model of ebookstores in Japan, which sell mostly at price parity with physical books. This is not such a big deal in Japan, since volumes are about five bucks apiece. But when JManga started, they went for price parity with US releases, which is just insane. Discounts gradually rolled in, but even then, their catalog wasn't all that compelling. They also made a mistake with the region restrictions, although they did open it up worldwide later on. The lack of mobile apps was also a big issue. And of course the quality was rather uneven.

Consumers in the U.S., at least, have gotten used to services like Netflix and Spotify, where it's all-you-can-eat at one low price. And you would think that Crunchyroll, given their pricing model and their involvement in the JManga project, would've spoken up about it.

And so we come to Crunchyroll Manga, which we should probably think of as "JManga 2.0", or perhaps even 3.0. The latest chapters are free to read, and a low-cost subscription opens up the back catalog. It's available worldwide (mostly) and there are mobile apps. There are not so many titles at the moment, but most of the ones available are A-listers. It's almost too good to be true, and if you consume enough stuff across all of Crunchyroll's departments, it's a downright steal.

Of course, there are some details. It seems that some of the titles Kodansha already has in print are not going to have their back volumes online, just current chapters. That makes sense from a business standpoint, and it reflects what Kodansha has going over at their Japanese-language moae/moai.jp site.

The site lists the translator for each series, and immediately the big names stand out, like William Flanagan. There are a few where no translation credits are listed, though. (I'll probably review some of the translations in more detail later, but so far there's nothing glaringly off about them.) Apparently the goal is 50 titles by the end of the year (there is some background in this article, but the quotations are largely the same corporate boilerplate we've seen before), which seems doable, although I'm betting most of those will be recycled from JManga.

It's interesting to reflect on how Crunchyroll started out as a site that hosted (or 'stole', depending on your view) fansubs, and somehow parlayed that into becoming a legit streaming site. (They say that it's often easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission, but CR seems to have pulled off both at once.) And now, strangely enough, they have enough brand recognition to anchor a legal manga service. Time will tell whether CR Manga is ultimately successful, but given's CR's momentum, it seems likely.

Ahem, let's start the first annual JManga gripe fest.

JManga has finally landed. It being relevant to my interests, I took a look at the site, where there are currently about a hundred fifty volumes available, give or take. Their aim is an eye-popping 10k titles by 2013, which is a lofty goal indeed, and one I wish them luck with. It hardly seems possible to do so much in such a short amount of time without cutting some corners.

Their current seinen selection is somewhat odd; not exactly low-hanging fruit when it comes to popularity. There are some things that make sense (SoreMachi, Crayon Shin-chan), even if I don't like them personally (Asu no Yoichi, Crime & Punishment), and other ones that are kinda out of left field (Anesthesiologist Hana, wat?). One notes the heavy presence of Futabasha titles (Manga Action, Comic High); presumably they were more on the ball than the other publishers. I suppose it might be a good sign that a wide range of obscure manga is present.

Anyway, I decided to take a look at their preview for Fumiyo Kouno's Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. (I own both the English and Japanese editions, so it's something I'm familiar with.) I wondered if they had just gotten the rights to Last Gasp's version, but right away, one can see that this something completely new. There are no redraws in the front matter, and the English text for the table of contents is somewhat jarringly placed. Further in, the typesetting shows too-tight letterspacing, and the translation could use some editing ("We should make the pattern paper a little thinner for you." The pattern, or the paper?). Also, the folksy twang of the original dialogue is lost here. But what the translation needs most would appear to be translation checking.

This panel here is from page 8 of the preview.  If you rush through it, it seems fine: "Can I buy this bamboo skin?" But wait, why would you buy, from a friend no less, something they wrap their lunch in? And why would they answer "sure" without discussing the price? Something isn't quite right here.

Thankfully, JManga has a convenient button that magically switches the language, so we can look at the original Japanese.

It immediately becomes clear what has transpired here. The translator appears to have misread 貰う (morau) as 買う (kau). The latter means "to buy", and the former is a term used for receiving things (to put it simply). The original line should be, "Mind if I take this bamboo skin?"

To recap, we have a translation error right out the gate, on page 8. And in my mind, it's a rather critical error because it undermines the characterization of the protagonist and the impact of the poverty she lives in. I can live with mediocre typesetting and maybe even the occasional awkwardly-translated line, but errors are something else altogether. This does not build my confidence in JManga.

You might say, okay, that's one error out of how many volumes. It's true that I haven't looked at a broad swath of the website and found this situation to be endemic. But this is a basic error that should not have slipped through the editing process. It raises the question of who exactly is doing the translating and whether there's actually anyone checking the final product. I would love to see JManga succeed, but for $8.99, I think they can do better.

Anyway, I left them a note and we'll see what happens.

Edit 8/25/2011: no response. Let's try again. And now that I look at it again, the lower bubble is whack; you don't say "hey there" when you're getting off work.

Edit March 14, 2013: Today JManga announced that it was shutting down its services, so I checked to see if they had fixed this error. Surprisingly enough, at some point they had.

Unfortunately they left the nonsensical "hey there" in the lower panel. Well, as the internet says: RIP in peace, JManga.