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Slowly and lurchingly.
Robot6 on the new Viz Manga iPad app:
Of the five launch series, only Death Note has adult appeal, so the success of the others will depend on teenagers having access to an iPad — and a credit card, since you buy the comics in-app, not through the iTunes store. [...] If I were running Viz, I would put a couple of their Viz Signature series on there as well: 20th Century Boys, Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku, or the foodie manga Oishinbo. Or maybe Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, a sophisticated manga that is up to 31 volumes and would be less cumbersome on the iPad than in print. Despite the fact that they are very good manga with adult appeal, none of these series sells well; the iPad might be where they find their audience — after all, the average iPad user is closer to 30 than 13.
QFT.
Meanwhile, Yen Press is going to launch their own iPad app "in the coming weeks". But the GanGan Online iPad launch has been pushed back from November 1st to November 4th, darnit. And the Soul Eater content will be limited to textless cover illustrations and "bonus material," at least to start with. So no new SE chapters on my iPad. :(
I finally have an iPad now (yes, I gave in and bought a used from a co-worker) and so far it has proved stunningly useless to me, as most of the digital comics that I'm interested in reading are only available in Flash format (HI THERE EVERY SINGLE JAPANESE PUBLISHER AND THE ENTIRETY OF LIQUID COMICS), which of course does not work on the damn iPad.
Of the five launch series, only Death Note has adult appeal, so the success of the others will depend on teenagers having access to an iPad — and a credit card, since you buy the comics in-app, not through the iTunes store. [...] If I were running Viz, I would put a couple of their Viz Signature series on there as well: 20th Century Boys, Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku, or the foodie manga Oishinbo. Or maybe Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, a sophisticated manga that is up to 31 volumes and would be less cumbersome on the iPad than in print. Despite the fact that they are very good manga with adult appeal, none of these series sells well; the iPad might be where they find their audience — after all, the average iPad user is closer to 30 than 13.
QFT.
Meanwhile, Yen Press is going to launch their own iPad app "in the coming weeks". But the GanGan Online iPad launch has been pushed back from November 1st to November 4th, darnit. And the Soul Eater content will be limited to textless cover illustrations and "bonus material," at least to start with. So no new SE chapters on my iPad. :(
I finally have an iPad now (yes, I gave in and bought a used from a co-worker) and so far it has proved stunningly useless to me, as most of the digital comics that I'm interested in reading are only available in Flash format (HI THERE EVERY SINGLE JAPANESE PUBLISHER AND THE ENTIRETY OF LIQUID COMICS), which of course does not work on the damn iPad.
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I wish that all publishers, not just the manga industry, would hurry up and catch up with the twenty-first century. The fact that it's still 2010 and I still have to pay $40 to import an issue of Shounen GanGan and read the latest SE chapter is ridiculous. The infrastructure exists for Japanese publishers to make money selling their manga in digital format to an overseas audience; what's stopping them? Do they think that all of us foreigners are too stupid to read Japanese, are they afraid of piracy, are they afraid of undercutting their North American counterpart companies, or what?
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