Back in 2007 we ran a panel called Fan Scanlations Stole My Innocence at MangaNEXT where one of the main topics was what would be the impact of the growing popularity of fan scan aggregator sites. In 2007 the major consensus was that print media had much less to fear from the Internet due to the appeal of physical media books to the average consumer. Here in 2011 that philosophy has clearly been proven wrong as all the major publishers in Japan and America are struggling to find a way to get a working business model around manga online. Like the anime industry there seems to be money to be made but no one is exactly sure how to do so in a legal manner. So when Crunchyroll, who is one of the few companies that is making money off of legal streaming, announced that they had teamed up with a consortium on Japanese manga publishers to create their own manga portal it seemed like they might have stuck gold twice. There was a good deal of buzz around their site but not a lot of details. Now that the curtain has been lifted off of the mysterious project the question on everyone lips is will this be the site to show everyone how to market their manga online.

JManga has been a highly anticipated project for a community that is increasingly getting their media online and in a streaming format. This isn’t the first of these sites launched for manga, but it has an edge by not being beholden to one or two publishers. With the added wonder of having titles that will never see an official U.S. book release being the real clincher. The site launched on August 17th in an open beta, but it should have tweaked itself a little more beforehand.

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