Tokyopop blinks

Chris Butcher has the scoop: We were right. Tokyopop is reconsidering the online exclusive program.

There’s a more thorough, formal announcement coming but the speculation is correct: Dragon Head, Heaven, and King City have been completely removed from the online exclusive program, and will go back to being standard (though exemplary) Tokyopop releases.

It looks like all titles will be available in stores in one way or another. Stay tuned for more.

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Comments

  1. This makes me happy, not only for the current TP titles that I read and enjoy regularly, but for any future TP titles which I may read and also come to enjoy regularly.

  2. Tokyopop is reconsidering the online exclusive program.

    Yeay! I mean, I could understand the move from TP’s POV, but still . . . yeay! I’m happy to see retailers working together about these kinds of things; it can only strengthen our community. :) Plus, I want to read “King City,” and I certainly wasn’t going to buy it at full price plus shipping from online. It hadn’t even started yet.

  3. Please correct me if I’m wrong here, but why can’t TP just do something like a n online magazine? I mean we know it’s too costly to put out mags like shonen jump for all the great titles TP has, so why not put together an online, PDF-based magazine that which contain chapters of series like a manga mag in Japan? Yeah people may just share it and not buy it but there are ways to get a bit of control over that, and it sure beats free scanlation of entire books. THEN sell the tankouban in the bookstores so people who liked the manga reading it in the online mag would go out and buy it. Just make the online mag cheap like the Japanese mags and I would say you’re able to get a lot of new readers this way. Kids are used to reading manga online anyhoo.

    I think this would be a great, legal way of getting readers to notice new manga titles since there are no manga mag outside of Jump in NA. This way you also still sell the books through bookstores, and leverage the online presence. Why don’t they do THAT instead of having exclusives online? I mean if a title is hot why don’t you want to sell a print version? Geepers.

  4. Tivome, I get the impression tha tTokyopop sees their freebie magazine as their manga/manga lifestyle magazine, though it only features excerpts, not full chapters (which requires that the editor pick the right pages to give the best taste).

  5. well they should put out full mags. They can’t grow the market this way. Are they going to depend on scanlation forever?