Chapter 10 of The Tale of Löwe is out! Read it here.

This chapter concludes the second volume of the manga. There’s one more volume left, and we’ll keep you informed about when we will continue publishing.

Chapter 9 of The Tale of Löwe is out! Read it here.

The awaited tournament is underway, and the preparations of the coup are progressing. In the final round, Löwe and Joshua face each for the first time in five years…

Chapter 8 of The Tale of Löwe is out! Read it here.

The plans of Ouroboros are progressing. At the same time, though, Löwe is starting to question Weissmann’s judgement…

Chapter 7 of The Tale of Löwe is up! Read it here.

Löwe has joined the army of Liberl under a fake identity, and not long after that a familiar figure comes to visit. It seems that colonel Richard is quite easy to persuade into believing that the interests of Ouroboros are also what’s best for the future of Liberl.

Chapter 6 of The Tale of Löwe is up! Read it here.

Löwe, while under the identity of Lorence Begar the mercenary, receives an offer to join the military of Liberl. While walking through the peaceful streets of Liberl, he bitterly thinks about the concept of peace and the sacrifices some have had to make because of it.

We’re publishing In Search of Lost Coffee, a doujinshi created by Nao Yazawa (of Wedding Peach fame) and Saeko Doyle. The manga was originally created to collect money for the victims of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. 

Read it here, it’s completely free!

Chapter 5 of The Tale of Löwe is up! Read it here.

Löwe mulls on the happiness he once had. He’s also tormented by the fact that Joshua has lost his innocence, and can never go back to being the happy little boy he once was.

Great news for fans of Sora no Kiseki! We’re continuing the publishing of The Tale of Löwe, our The Legend of Heroes spin-off manga.

It’s been a while since the previous chapter, but chapter 4 is up now. Read it here!

madinkbeard:

The digital manga site JManga sent out a message that they’ll be shutting down at the end of May. What happens to the manga you “purchased” from the site? It disappears! Surprise! This is what happens when digital “purchases” are really digital rentals due to DRM schemes. I never bought anything from them, partially because of this, and partially because none of the manga looked interesting enough that I wanted to pay to rent it.

Will the same thing happen when Comixology fails? When Dark Horse Digital fails? When… whatever other options out there fail? Probably unless you have a way to break the DRM and download the comics you purchased so you can read them outside of their home apps.

Bleak, but it’s hard to disagree.

You’d think that we’d be happy about JManga shutting down, but it’s actually quite a sad day. While it’s generally good news to have less competition, it’s not really worth it if that comes at the cost of people losing their trust to digital manga publishing in general.

We’ve written before about how trust is a central issue to any digital publishing platform, and those thoughts are now more topical than ever.

Up until this point the idea of a digital manga service shutting down and all purchases vanishing into thin air has been just a theoretical threat. Now when the largest player on the field has fallen, that theoretical threat is suddenly a very concrete one. From this day on people will always remember the demise of JManga before deciding to invest their money into any manga platform.

Of course there are ways to sidestep these trust issues. The most obvious one is the Crunchyroll / Netflix model: paying for the service, not for the content. When there’s a fixed monthly fee, you wouldn’t be left with nonexistant purchases even if the service would shut down one day. It’s the solution everyone wants, but also a one that the Japanese publishers have not been eager to agree to.

Download-to-own is the another solution. It’s something that eManga has been doing for a while, and it’s been great to see SuBLime follow suit. What’s interesting here is that after what happened to JManga it might be easier than ever to convince the Japanese publishers to agree to this model.