JManga

» see jmanga.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2011 thirty-six Japanese publishers agreed on something, which is not a sentence that gets written often. The Japanese Digital Comics Association put its weight behind one English-language service, built by Crunchyroll with Bitway, a subsidiary of the printing giant Toppan. It went live in North America on 17 August 2011 and the point of it was to give the enormous English-reading manga audience somewhere legal to go.

The scan sites had been running for a decade by then and the industry knew exactly how many people were reading translated manga for free. JManga was the answer, and the answer was structurally correct: licensed, paid, publisher-approved, with money going back to the people who made the books.

It launched with 48 titles. The stated ambition was 10,000 by 2013. Anybody who has watched a licensing negotiation knows which of those two numbers was the real one.

It reached me not at all, and the first six months it could not have. The service was locked to North America until 28 February 2012, so for the whole of its opening run the question of whether somebody in Ankara would have subscribed was answered by a geo-check. When it did open worldwide it opened into a market where translated manga had almost no shelf presence in Turkish and the readership was small and mostly reading in English anyway. I know this the way I know most of it, from the outside, and I am writing about the shutdown rather than the reading.

~ the case file ~

~ what you were actually buying ~

You bought points. Points bought a title. The title then lived in a browser-based viewer on JManga's servers and nowhere else, because downloads were never offered and the apps promised for October 2012 never arrived in a form that changed that.

The prices moved around while they worked out what the market would take. A title started at $8.99 and dropped to $4.99 in October 2011 after readers said so. In June 2012 the membership requirement came off and a pay-as-you-go tier went on. What did not move was the shape of the thing. At no point in twenty-one months did anybody who spent money on JManga end up holding a file.

~ the seventy-eight days ~

On 13 March 2013 JManga announced it was ending both JManga and JManga7. The schedule was published at the same time and it was fast. Point sales stopped that same night at 11:59 Pacific. Purchasing stopped on 26 March. The viewer, and therefore everything anybody had bought through it, stopped on 30 May.

Seventy-eight days from announcement to nothing. Subscribers got the email on the 14th. There was no export, no offline archive, no arrangement with another service to carry the licenses over, because the licenses had been negotiated for one platform and the platform was the thing being switched off.

~ the refund ~

JManga did refund. Unused points, valued as of 13 March, were converted to Amazon gift cards and paid out between 21 and 25 March. That is more than most dying services manage and it was handled properly.

It also draws the line very clearly. Points you had not spent came back as money. Points you had spent had turned into books, and the books were about to be deleted, so those points came back as nothing. The customers who had used the service most were the ones who lost most. A reader who had bought forty volumes was in a worse position on 31 May than one who had signed up, bought points, and never got round to reading anything.

~ what carried over ~

The legal answer to piracy in English-language manga ended up being Manga Plus and the Shonen Jump app, both run by publishers directly, both cheap, and both still streaming rather than selling files. The mechanism JManga died on is the mechanism the survivors use.

What changed is that nobody calls it buying any more. JManga put a purchase button on a rental and that was the ordinary practice of 2011. The scan sites it was built to compete with got shut down eventually, but they never once deleted a page somebody had already read.

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