DMP’s eManga Rewards Early Adopters
Digital Manga Publishing now actually offers “digital” manga: they’ve launched eManga, an online manga viewer that allows you to read free previews of DMP’s manga (which in some cases are the full book), and to rent the full book if the preview is only a few pages.
The manga reader is Flash-based, and although it’s not quite as intuitive as I’d like it seems to work pretty well. Note that the buttons that take you through the book word bubble to word bubble, NOT page to page as I’d assumed at first, so you don’t need to drag the page around to see everything. (It also darkens the parts of the page that aren’t the bubble you’re currently on, which I didn’t like, but under the panel view menu on the upper-left you can adjust the brightness so that doesn’t happen.)
As an early adopter (one of the first 100 signups, apparently) I scored 500 free points; a manga rental costs 400 (presumably so that a point is worth roughly ¥1, for us nerds who go giggly for things like that, since a volume of manga is usually about ¥400 new). Each point also costs a penny, and you buy them in $10/1000 point chunks. So basically you can rent a manga for 72 hours for $4– and if you rent it again, i.e. spend $8 total, you get permanent access to the manga. That makes that rental price a bit high compared to, say, NETCOMICS (at $0.25 a chapter), but the free previews should help sweeten that deal.
The biggest problem that eManga is going to run into is the set of content currently available, which is only BL and “Let’s Draw Manga” titles– not to diminish either, but let’s be realistic about the appeal here. Now, if I were DMP, I’d be working towards getting at least the first volume of the new Vampire Hunter D manga up. If they can negotiate the rights they might also try Bambi and Her Pink Gun, which IIRC was ceasing physical publication (but might be able to survive online, plus the added bonus of being harder to get a physical copy of). I’m assuming that the co-published books with Dark Horse (Hellsing, Trigun, etc) are off-limits, but non-BL titles like Enchanter would be a good move. Of course, DMP also has their upcoming release of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, which is the sort of title that I suspect does very well with illicit online releases and not so well at actual stores– but a cheap rental/purchase scheme might attract some of those fans if DMP tossed it up there.
So, there are my thoughts on eManga so far. Apparently it’s still all in testing, but I’d say their biggest problem so far is narrowness of content rather than anything technical. Recommendation: register now to try and score those 500 free points, and if they don’t have something you want to use them on right now, be patient– DMP always has more up their sleeves.
Tags: digidistro, dmp, emanga
August 14th, 2008 at 10:37 am
There is something that has always been overlooked by every entertainment company on the planet. Geeks love having something real in their hands so they can put it in their nice geeky collection.
You cannot underestimate the power of quality packaging. Like the LOTR DVD boxes. They are unique, come loaded with little extras, and sit nicely together on your DVD rack. If you could get LOTR online for life it wouldn’t matter much because well … someone online will just push a copy to you for free.
It’s the physical item that holds entertaining content that sells, not the content itself. Content is part of it for sure but geeks are collectors and geeks are proud of their collections.
No one can see your collection of online stuff. If you show your peers they don’t see the care you take with displaying (because what’s there to display?) The certainly don’t see the capital that was spent feeding your inner otaku.
If I showed my 40 gigs of MP3’s to someone they would be unimpressed. If I show them the CDs that I made those MP3s from they will be impressed. Thus, validating my little sense of self worth and topping off my geek ego to full hit points.
Same goes for manga and anime. A great box set and extras always win me over.
Look at the Ghibli releases in the US. slip sleeve and a DVD just on the making of. They are consistently produced so the titles obviously show out on your DVD rack.
On that same note - I own the first two Potter movies but DVD-R’ed the rest because they cut the production cost a few cents from 3 on. The first two had a great theme going that was ruined by some corporate asshat accountant who felt the need to cut it down to a cheap mass market DVD case. By saving those few cents they lost my dollars.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:33 am
@Slim: While I’m certainly never one to downplay how much people like to own physical copies of things, I’m equally not likely to downplay how frequently people are willing to pay less (or even more willing to pay *nothing*) in order to just get the *content*– if fansubs and scanlations aren’t proof positive of that fact, I don’t know what would be.
And actually, you’ll frequently see threads on 4ch in which people take screencaps of their anime folders and whatnot, or else just the folder info page that just shows the size, etc. So there are even digital-only replacements for the classic whose-collection-is-bigger battles.
So, I’d be cautious at jumping to absolutes on either end of the physical vs digital debate; fans have been collecting anime digitally for years now and many are perfectly happy to continue doing so (illegality nonwithstanding for the purposes of this conversation).
August 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
hey thanks for posting this! I tried signing up for it when it told me i already had an account! LOL so i signed in and they said i had a gift of 500 points! LOL with out you posting this i would have never known! LMAO! i sign up to a lot of stuff.. and i dont even realize XD haha:???:
August 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
@Gia - I stay away from 4Chan but I don’t doubt about the screen shots.
when I was in my 20’s I had a large collection of CD-R downloads as did my friends and we have all sense moved into actual collectible items. Not only for the value of it being there on display, but also if you feel that you are done with them (like my friends and our now in the landfill CD-R’s) you can also make your money back threw auctioning.
As for jumping to some conclusion - it’s from the viewpoint of a 30-something. It’s something I just see from friends who are out of their 20’s. It was something that happened when cash became disposable. Sorry if you felt my ramble was in anyway personal … it wasn’t.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
@Slim I didn’t have any problem with the ramble, I just always caution everyone against absolutes. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes (except Absolut!) ;)
August 14th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Abso … … gotcha! ^.^
August 16th, 2008 at 6:44 am
[...] Gia and Johanna Draper Carlson weigh in with their thoughts on Digital’s new eManga site. [...]
August 17th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
My fear is the difference between fans-subbed and scanlation collections and this is that one is free and the other costs money.