Manganovel

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

~ the obituary ~

The list of languages Manganovel translated into runs to twenty-three names before the Japanese record gives up and writes "and so on". Norwegian is on it, and so is Esperanto. Turkish is not, which is how a service that genuinely intended to sell Japanese comics to the whole planet still managed to route around me completely.

Manganovel Corporation was set up in Tokyo in June 2006, with Toshiba holding 89 percent of the shares and Fixstars holding the other 11. The concept came from John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab. The rights management was Toshiba's, the servers and the client software were Fixstars'. The Japanese service opened on 15 June 2007 and manganovel.com went live worldwide on 1 October, starting with twelve authors, ten of them from Shonen Gahosha.

Volumes cost four to five dollars. You registered for free, downloaded a viewer that needed Windows and would not run on anything else, and read inside it. The iPhone went on sale in Japan in July 2008, thirteen months into Manganovel's life, and the client could not follow it there.

~ the case file ~

~ the reader-translators ~

The idea worth remembering is the translation economy. Manganovel did not hire translators. It sold you a Japanese volume, let you translate it yourself, and put your translation up for sale beside the original. You could post a translation for free or price it at 2 percent of what the original volume cost, and if somebody bought it you kept half of that as a royalty.

Two percent of a four dollar book is eight cents. Half of eight cents is not a living, and it was never meant to be. What the arithmetic actually bought was permission: this was scanlation with the publisher's name on the paperwork, in 2007, while every other Japanese rights holder in the world was still sending takedown notices to fan groups. Shonen Gahosha and Media Factory both put books in.

~ manobe-chan ~

There was a mascot. Manobe-chan, seventeen, Japanese mother and American father, drawn by Izumi Beru, who also had an original series running on the site. She showed you around the pages. A Toshiba subsidiary building a global storefront on an MIT Media Lab concept still gave the thing an anime girl to walk visitors through the menus, because that is what a Japanese comics site had in 2007.

~ what came after ~

Service ended on 27 February 2009. Everything left on the shelf had already been switched to free when the closure was announced, and the Japanese article notes drily that downloads were still working on 1 March, two days after the end. No reason was ever published for any of it.

JManga tried the same territory in 2011 with thirty-nine publishers behind it and lasted two years. Crunchyroll got simultaneous professional releases working in 2013, and speed is what finally took the audience off the fan sites. Manganovel had the right diagnosis and the wrong prescription, four years early.

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