Unjapanologist

 

Trying to sell people something that will disappear when the store goes away? When they have the options of either buying a print version that can sit on their bookshelf forever, or downloading a scanlated version that will not go poof when a company obviously not concerned with user rights decides the experiment is over? This will just not work. Readers are not idiots.

Readers will also realize that the restrictions SE puts on their use of these manga are so unsuited to fannish online interaction in the year 2010 that it's almost funny:
 

No interaction with other software, no modifying anything ever, no taking any sort of data out of the walled garden of the "Service". I hesitate to call this approach "old-fashioned" or any similar term, because never in the history of media have consumers been burdened with such restrictions before. With print books, a reader can make (limited) copies, quote, annotate, and generally tinker with hir purchase to hir heart's content. Terms of use for digital content such as those put forward by SE (and other media companies trying to get a handle on this "digital" thing) are not based in any tradition, and and utterly unsuited to the realities of present-day technology and the internet.

Of course, not allowing customers to download their purchases means that they will not be able to access their manga while the website is down for any reason:
 

Later, the TOS mentions what your options are if your license is revoked and you feel this was done for unfair reasons:

I'm not a law expert in any sense of the word, but does a company have the right to demand that you try to resolve your disputes with it through informal channels first? The rest of the TOS makes it clear that customers is basically powerless to fight any action by SE, unless they take this huge company to court and win there. What individual customer is capable of doing that? Seriously? (By the way, user data privacy regulations aren't exactly cutting edge in a good way either, a whole other can of worms.) Of course SE isn't some kind of evohl company that's making extraordinary efforts to ensure its customers can't lodge any sort of complaint. They're just following industry trends. But that doesn't make all this reasonable, or okay.

Manga publishers are going to have to do much better than this to convince readers of those other digital manga, scanlations, to switch to legitimately purchased content. Making digital manga work is eminently possible. The market of digital manga in Japan went from 40 million USD in 2005 to 543 million USD by March 2010, mostly thanks to the popularity of cellphone manga. These cellphone manga are in a sense problematic because they impose a lot of restrictions on what customers can do with their purchased manga. However, crucially, they offer a great user experience. Buying and reading cellphone manga is convenient.

Let me repeat: this online manga store is not iTunes, and its failure to catch on would not mean proof that scanlations readers are inherently bad people who do not want to pay for their content. It would mean that scanlations readers, like all manga lovers, can rub their brain cells together and conclude that this store is not a good-faith effort to earn their patronage and let them consume manga in a way that works for everyone involved. Customers will put up with some restrictions if they get convenience in return. Manga publishers trying to sell digital content overseas would do well to remember that. They would also do well to respect their readers' intelligence.