You might remember the recent big waves of takedowns on Mangadex. Kakao is believed to be the company largely responsible (I don’t think it is official anyway); and now they are completely leaving the North American market.
So now there’s no legal way to read this stuff anymore?
Maybe they’ll finally stop going after piracy sites since they don’t have skin in the game anymore.
I have my doubts that they’ll stop, since they’re giant cunts. But I have to wonder if they’ll throw away money for absolutely 0 gain now
Nah they won’t stop
Setting aside the absurd sounding investment claim (maybe they did waste such mountain of money, I don’t know), good riddance. I really wish companies learned from Steam in regards to combating piracy - providing good service is the best way to get people to spend money.
You compete with a sea of trash machine translations, how can you lose to that?
You compete with a sea of trash machine translations, how can you lose to that?
Point systems suck. They obscure how much you’re actually spending, to make you not notice the next reason: Being pretty damn expensive. 1 chapter. typically costs 450 ink (or 405 ink if you enable 1-tap spending, but same difference tbh given how you purchase ink). Using the minimum purchase amount of 1600 ink for 2,19 euro, that translates to rougly 63 eurocents.
By itself that doesn’t sound too expensive. But it piles up really quick. Reading only 9 chapters of something already costs more than the MangaPlus Deluxe subscription of 5,49 euro. Say you only follow 3 series that you pay for. Most release weekly. So that’s about 12 chapters a month. And you don’t even own it despite “buying” it (of course, they’ll say you’re buying ink, not manhwa).
So 12 chapters is 5400 or 4860 ink. Let’s use the latter. For that, you’ll have to buy the 5,49 euro tier. That nets you 5000 ink. You can only read those 12 chapters. So if you want to read anything else, you’ll have to spend 10,99 euro for the next tier.
Let’s say you find a new series you want to catch up with, say Villains Are Destined to die. This has 226 chapters so far. 1st 3 are free, the rest are pay or wait until free (available for 3 days). If you don’t want to wait, you can shell out 90.315 ink, which you have to get the 109,99 euro tier for. And again, all you own is the ink, not the chapters.
Now, that’s still not too expensive compared to the physical volumes (though more expensive than the e-books), but again, you own nothing, they’re obscuring how much you spend and it is much more expensive than something like MangaPlus.
Anyway, that was very long to say: shit’s not worth it 😅
Another thing to note is that a lot of official manga apps are tracking nightmares. Kodansha’s app, KManga, has more trackers than FACEBOOK. What’s up with that? And the Shounen Jump app had about 90% of the trackers that Facebook has.
When I found out I dumped my Shounen Jump subscription and deleted both apps. There’s no reason to treat paying customers like that
You know what? My question was meant to be rhetorical since everything you’ve described was exactly why I stopped using a different official service but having it written down like this is a good reminder of why I hate those sites. Thanks, I needed that. And I definitely agree.
As for physical… I’m curious how well physical releases work for manhwa. I know there are some series that did release this way but I never got my hands on one so it’s still kind of abstract for me. I certainly prefer physical for manga, even if more expensive, but manhwa? I’d like to check that out some day.
My question was meant to be rhetorical
Whoops haha.
I’m curious how well physical releases work for manhwa.
It works pretty well. Obviously, it’s not a scroll, so they restructure how and where panels are placed. Everything’s still there, but it’s much more like a manga (or more like a comic, since the read order is how western comics are read) and tbh, I really prefer that over the vertical format. The vertical format makes it too easy to quickly scroll through.
I’d like to check that out some day.
If you’d like a cheaper way to check it out, you could buy the e-book versions on Kobo or something. They’re the same as the phyiscal, except, well, digital. If you need a rec, check out Villains Are Destined To Die.
They are more expensive than manga, but that’s because they are fully coloured
I’ve read the “normal” version of Villains Are Destined To Die so trying out a physical version could work as a good comparison. I’ll probably go with the printed one though - I’m not a fan of proprietary apps and DRM. Well, that and I simply prefer reading physical (too bad not everything I’m interested in is available officially in English).
I’m not a fan of proprietary apps and DRM
That’s fair. I use Kobo mainly because they’re easy to remove the DRM from.
I simply prefer reading physical
Mostly same, but space is becoming a thing for me. Digital is easier for travel too.
Weak DRM is a plus but I’m honestly over jumping through hoops for paid products. I’d rather spend money on something that’s exactly how I want it from the get go - there’s enough stuff in my backlog I can be a bit picky without feeling like I miss much.
I can understand the space concern. Thankfully (or unfortunately), my collection isn’t big enough to worry about it just yet but I can see it being a problem in the future. Besides, I spend vast majority of my time in front of the screen already so I try to find ways to step away from it for certain activities - reading physical is one of them.
That investment number jumped out at me too. That has to either be an error or some really funny accounting.
I initially thought the AI translation might’ve borked currency conversion but the Korean version of the article uses 1.1 trillion for the total value so that’s not it. Either way, that’s one expensive blunder.
Genuinely surprised by this (but also not really: everything is just a line on a spreadsheet to CEOs), as it seemed to tick all the boxes for monetised serial media: locked in, free stuff, paid stuff, freemium (pay to unlock sooner, timed wait for the next chapter under some circumstances, etc), endless nudges to buy their unlock currency, etc, and the mobile app is surprisingly good.
They’ve built a platform begging to be
abusedshare-maxxed by its owners, but they’re axing it instead of turning the screws. (That’s the surprising bit for me.)Oh this explains a lot. Recently Wuxia World announced that its original founder bought back the company/website from Tapas, and I was wondering why considering it seemed to be doing fine (ww was doing fine). But it seems Tapas might not have been.
A few years ago I used to read TBATE on tapas, and even regularly spent some money on Ink, and it was fine because it was a first party publishing directly to there. But then I later tried to read a manhwa (Lightning Decree) and they managed to have a far slower update rate than the unofficial translation. Like, several dozen chapters behind. And also the translations were not that good, clearly made by someone who had no context of what they were translating, just a general knowledge of the language.
Ngl I always wonder how translations can be so… bad sometimes. Reading it in English, just leaves you scratching your head sometimes. Like someone types out the Japanese text, a second individual translated each line at random, a third then just copy pasted it in, and the final touched up things to make it not look shit. And at no point does anyone actually sit down and read the end result, because whole words are missing, or random letters are missing, or genders are incorrect, or the sentences just make no damn sense.
Don’t get me wrong, I can’t do all that myself by any means. But as a reader I’m just sat wondering how such obvious mistakes are overlooked.
