JManga
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| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
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Type of site
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Digital Manga Portal |
| Founded | December 2010 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Industry | Manga, Digital Comics |
| Website | (defunct) http://www.jmanga.com/ |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Discontinued |
JManga was an American website and international online community focused on the promotion, distribution, and monetization of digital comics (specifically manga) as well as the development of other manga related services. Founded in December 2010 and backed by the 36 publishers of the Japanese Digital Comics Association, JManga was intended to serve as a legal alternative to scanlation sites and online piracy. The site was closed in June 2013.
JManga's arose from a strategic alliance between Crunchyroll, Inc. (an internet company specializing in streaming East Asian media) and Bitway Co., Ltd (a subsidiary of Toppan Printing and digital comic distributor) in the summer of 2010 to create the world's first legal, global online manga platform. Originally, the project was envisioned as way to explore mechanisms for economical, sustainable digitization of manga outside Japan, with the final product to be a white-label online platform for digitized manga (including manga viewer, social media integration, and a downloadable app for mobile devices) to be licensed to local publishers and distributors.
As originally conceived, local distributors would have a number of choices in how to use the JManga platform, with options ranging from simply using the viewer or app to licensing the entire Crunchyroll online publishing and management suite and rebranding it with their logos and graphics.
And where Crunchyroll worked as the technology partner to build the online tools for this venture, Bitway would act as liaison for the publishers of the Japanese Digital Comics Association and local publishers/distributors to help make previously unlicensed content available for those who desired more than their original content. Using its relationships with many of Japan’s key publishers, Bitway would assist licensees of the Crunchyroll manga app in negotiating the rights to a digital license for desired titles - with an emphasis on publishers in the U.S. who had rights to the printed material, as manga licenses are unbundled and additional negotiations for the digital rights would be required for the same material.
At the time, the business model was simply to grow the digital manga industry, allowing existing businesses - and hopefuls with enough capital - to start up a digital manga distribution company, with the partnership taking a cut of the revenues for enabling easier and faster-paced development.
More details about the platform became available in July 2011, at San Diego ComiCon 2011, where a panel of Japanese manga editors spoke on the state of manga worldwide, noting while the numbers of fans had increased in the last decade (as measured by attendance at conventions such as Anime Expo), sales had drastically fallen, due to a number of reasons, among them piracy, lack of licensees, and the loss of the Borders bookstore chain. Since the project was first announced, the goal had changed from enabling would-be licensees to start up distribution companies, to simply offering a legal alternative to the numerous scanlation (unauthorized translated scans of Japanese manga) websites that have popped up in recent years.
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Wikipedia