Old news

[double_dear]

Whenever we get really busy with work, somehow a lot of fascinating articles pop up all over the internet. Not that we're getting distracted while we work--just that we take breaks to read email, and if there's something interesting, we read it. And I guess we just notice that there are more articles to read when we feel like we don't have any

Comments

[lyschan]

The trashed email is probably still in your gmail trash bin, right? Unless you use a different mail program to read emails. Anyway, yeah, it's not like I could read it even if you did have the link, so... thanks for summarizing the points!! :D

It is interesting to hear a Japanese person's perspective on the issue. The alienation resulting from unfinished series is a point I hadn't really considered before either. On the other hand, the companies shut down because people weren't buying, so clearly there was a problem before that (I guess the other reasons mentioned, like piracy, hobos, lack of market research come in there. Man, lack of market research makes me think of CMX's early licenses but in some ways I'm so glad they did fail at that task, because otherwise I don't think we'd ever ever ever have gotten the assortment of decades-old shoujo manga they published in English

[double_dear]

You'd think that, but something is up with our email client, and it seems to think that "trash" means "old drafts" and nothing else.

It's true that lack of sales was a factor in companies shutting down, but TokyoPop still had some pretty popular titles going on before it closed its doors. Obviously not enough popular titles to keep it going...

We agree that the companies that are still in business seem to have a good relationship with the fans. I think they're probably learning from past mistakes, too.

There definitely seem to be a lot of factors to keep track of. There are people who have gone to school to study exactly what they need (anthropologists take surveys and stuff). If only the manga companies had enough money to hire them...