Ken Akamatsu Starts Free Manga Download Site
- Categories: Manga, News
- Date: Nov 17, 2010 17:00 JST
- Tags: Announcements, Business, DRM, Internet, Ken Akamatsu, Negima, Sites
Ken Akamatsu, king of harem manga, is starting a free manga download site for out-of-print titles called “J-Comi,” and has announced all 14 volumes of Love Hina will be its first release.
The service is completely free and without any time restrictions
Authors receive payment based on ad views/clicks
J-Comi themselves take a 0% commission
The comics will also be distributed as PDFs so anyone can read them
There is no DRM and copies can be made freely and given to friends
The beta test, consisting of all 14 volumes of Love Hina, is to begin on the 26th of November. Further manga (seemingly intended to cover mainly out of print titles) should follow, and Akamatsu himself says he expects other mangaka to take advantage of the service.
Judging from the screenshot provided, the comics will be accessible through a simple web reader as well as in PDF, a not infrequently despised format, and the comics themselves should be available in high resolution PDFs.
J-Comi’s official site is not yet open, but will be coming soon.
The background to the move is of course a publishing industry in rapid decline yet still refusing to realistically embrace new technology or loosen its control over mangaka, and an increasingly loudly voiced feeling amongst mangaka that in the Internet age they should be the ones pursuing new opportunities.
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What is this Feeling...
A refreshing tingle on your toes from hell freezing over?
Need to get back to bed.
Must be dreaming....
I... I am... in love! I cannot... words... Should have... sent a... poet!
I bow before my god! We are not worthy! Our lord has graced us with our hope and dreams!
My sentiments exactly Seele. Now everyone adorn your ceremonial vestimants and celebrate.
Argh! The ships surrendered without a fight.
i feel a sudden urge to buy al issues of love hina
official legit japanese version of mangaone for out of print titles
No wonder Ken is my hero. Breath-taking harems, that's his signature, simple but no one else got the formula right like him.
I'll send him one of my daughters when I got one for all the good work.
It's kinda like a manga equivalent of Youtube. Where they get by with ads.
It'd be funny if I look at a character's face and it's tattoo'd with an ad.
Now we just need the Hentai/Doujin version HAHA.
Is the manga in english?
They did it! The mangaka revolution finally started! ^_^
They did it! The mangaka revolution finally started! ^____^
Doesn't matter if there's no other language yet. They are going to realize they can profit from it soon enough.
All I can say is thank you. :D
Negima~~~~~~~~~~~ One of the best manga I've ever read. One of the worst anime I've ever watched.
Ken Akamatsu is a genius. That is I can say.
A God has shown himself among us.
This is a very interesting news, indeed. Now, will there be any english release? This, I am curious about. The answer will entertain me nevertheless.
But in any cases. I put my points to the "Respect" skill and uses it on Ken.
thats going to be huge. I hope it will be made that fan scanlations can be submitted for other languages and the profit goes to the mangaka. Its could be hard for the fanscanlations but i think it would be a good idea because the editors would get the money and the scanlators do it for free like always
Why free? They just might get a small piece of the manga sales. Everyone profits. ^_^
Nobody would pay to see ken akamatsu's garbage.... I mean, this guy created love hina ¬_¬
"Nobody would pay to see ken akamatsu's garbage.... "
In which false reality are you living in?
what kind of douche calls Ken Akamatsu's manga garbage?
anon 02:07, you fucking troll-shit, learn to respect your God and beg forgiveness!
*boom*
Great, now I need to pick the rest of my brain that got stuck on the ceiling :/
Brb.
Do no exaggerate or fool yourself.
It's not now, but in the future.
It's not lots of manga, but love hina.
If this was the year 2000, I would second your comment. Now it's kinda too late to be happy so the feeling is difficult to describe.
It's like,... imagine yourself to be a woman, 10 years after some war. Your then missing boyfriend finally comes home, but you're already married to a rich guy and have kids. It's that kind of feeling now.
so you got two guys to choose from to jam it in?
don't forget to add that the rich guy is getting poorer along that past 10 years as well, and the kids have aids.
No, it's more like the rich guy stays rich and can offer you anything, while the poor guy can only offer you the past. Of course you can take both but if you stay too long with the poor guy he will grab _your_ money.
Hope everyon got that the rich guy means pirating manga while the poor guy means getting only few manga for free and to be expected to buy manga later on.
i bet they are doing this for the sake of marketing, since Akamatsu probably made f*ck load of money anyways, posting old stuff on the web makes him look a bit... generous (Even though a large sum of money has already been sucked from us)
i think its snowing in hell. i get laid it froze over and the devil is sick in bed
And once again, Ken Akamatsu has saved the day against the evils of evil corporations!
Remember folks, he gave for you, so remember to give to him in return. ^_^
Sooner or later they are going to sell new manga, other languages will be follow, then the publishers will finally fall.
We'll get cheap new manga fast, the mangaka will earn more than the slave wages they get now. Everyone is happy.
wow... am I dreaming? It sure is refreshing. And he's my new idol. =/
The numbness from getting super punched by Naru.
Deep hate for PDF. IT'S WORSE THAN DRM!
Wait, what?... Why the hate for PDF?
Easy to convert to any other format (if you got *nix at least), no DRM worth its salt and well... just nice with the right reader.
The PDFs are without DRM, so converting should be no problem. I'd prefer CBR or simple RAR.
let's see how successful the service is gonna be.
i'm certain the site admins (i.e. ken) will listen to people if many ask for cbr instead of pdf.
i hope this isn't an elaborate hoax!
What's wrong with jpg? It's so easy to read with irfanview.
right click, save image, ctrl+v in mspaint, save in whatever format you want. That's the crudest but one amongst millions of other ways to turn a pdf into anything else you want... why did you say you hate pdf again?
Congratulations on suggesting the lamest way ever to copy a PDF...
# mkdir comic
# cd comic
# convert ../comic.pdf page%02d.png
# zip ../comic.cbz *.png
# cd ..
# rm -rf comic
I bet there are more elaborate ways to do the job, but this one is easy to understand, scriptable and needs only ImageMagick and Info-Zip plus a Shell. And I'm sure you can even do it with cygwin.
The official reader sucks balls and introduces tons of security vulnerabilities for it's users. Not to mention it'ss a pile of over bloated crap that takes forever to start (or at least it did on my old P4). The format itself is neither open, nor standard, making available alternative readers less than ideal.
ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008
Your trolling sucks ass, Anonymous.
There are tons of alternative readers. Try PDF-Xchange or Foxit Reader, both are better, faster and smaller than the original bloatware.
PDF is indeed quite a pain. All adobe products are like blood-sucking leeches on your computer.
>>"What is this Feeling..."
That tonight's gonna be a good night?
wrong song Peter....
Epic comment Peter.
GO! GO! GO!
Go, Ken, Go!
There must be a chance for us all to pay only for what we like and to have a guarantee that the money go directly to authors.
I have a dream that one day all these parasites like major labels and major publishers go to hell.
seriouely people,
i understand that this makes you happy and that this guy indeed is awesome but it's not like this is gonna change anything.
we all pirate our stuff anyways so it won't really matter for any of us.
This era is truly the decline of book publishing which will be replaced by online and electronic reading