With 39 Japanese publishers participating in JManga they have a wide variety of titles from standard to rather unusual. But there are some clearly unfinished sections of the site and an unfriendly points system to buy manga. We gave our opinion yesterday but we are curious what your thoughts are on the site. Please vote below and then elaborate on your choice in the comments if you so wish. If you have done your own review on a podcast or blog feel free to leave a comment with a link as well. With a site this high-profile surely everyone has an opinion.
Category: Projects
Happy 4th Anniversary, Reverse Thieves!
Here we are once again celebrating a milestone. While technically the birth of Reverse Thieves is July 15th, we generally just celebrate sometime in July, and heck it is July 4th for the 4th anniversary so how much more fitting can you get? As always we use anniversary as a time to look at what we have improved about the site, what we plan to do in the upcoming year, and give out some nifty prizes as a reverse birthday gift.
In the last year, we’ve reinstated the Manga of the Month; began the No Case Too Small and Otaku NYC series; our new Sunday links series All Points Bulletin premiered yesterday; we made our first attempt at episode blogging with Gosick; we started participating in Bonus Rounds on Anime3000; and we even started having guests on the Speakeasy.
Perhaps the biggest change in the last year was the upping of the monthly post count average thanks to the implementation of shorter solo posts in between our main stays on Mondays and Fridays. Since August we haven’t fallen below 18 posts a month, most hitting 20 or more! Also since then, and probably because of it, we’ve been averaging 10,000 hits a month for a consistent year.
In the upcoming year we also have some big plans. We are still trying to find a way to but together a Manga Secret Santa project that does not cause too many headaches for everyone involved. When we find a viable method we will let you know. We’re also going to start our next big project as was chosen by the readers: A look at woman in fandom. This project will probably be several smaller questionnaires that will each focus on a different aspect as opposed to mammoth survey that accompanied the Otaku Diaries. This will let women participate on in the sections that are applicable to them. All of this is just the tip of the ice burg. We can’t wait to see what surprises lie in wait in the future.
So of course we are giving away a great big box of goodies to celebrate this anniversary! Just leave a comment telling us what your favorite Reverse Thieves article has been this year.
Entries are due by Sunday, July 17th. The winner will be notified by Friday, July 22th.
*U.S. residents only please. Sorry our abroad buddies we just can’t afford it.
Why we don’t do manga secret santa.
The Secret Santa Project has been an unexpected success each time we have run it with the number of participants doubling from 2009 to 2010. It helps bloggers spread the word about their favorite overlooked titles while broadening the horizons of all the participants. The thing is, every time the project is mentioned there is always one request we hear time and time again. People really want us to do a manga version as well. This call has not been ignored. It is just there are some logistical problem we that need to be overcome.
It might not be apparent but there were several problems with a Manga Secret Santa that do not come up with the anime version. The first being a maximum length of the series you could recommend. With the average anime series being 26 episodes or less it was easy to make that the upper bound. But there is no easy cap to use for manga. Also you can get a whole anime series for about 30 to 50 dollars with anime but even just 10 manga will cost you 100 bucks (not accounting for savvy shopping). Keeping this in mind, we came up with a plan.
Our solution was simple. Instead of trying to read an entire manga series, you would get three series you have never read before as part of the project and read the 1st book of all three series and then write-up at least one of them. It seemed like a good compromise. While you would not get the comprehensive look you would from the anime reviews, it would allow people to experiment a bit more with a reduced commitment required.
But another problem still loomed: how to get everyone to make a comprehensive list of what series they have already read. Every year when we do Anime Secret Santa we get several people whose lists of what anime they have watched is missing several vital titles they forgot. Invariably someone will then recommended them the title they forgot to list. Using My Anime List as an example, it has 322 pages of anime titles vs. 857 pages of manga titles (thanks to the inclusion of doujinshi). Even Anime Planet’s more streamlined list is still 150 pages of manga as compared to 105 of anime. Other book listing sites like Shelfari have inconsistencies in their manga collections such as missing author names or wrong numbers even in the same series.
Going along with this is the fact that most people are reading dozens of manga at one time. Unlike a lot of anime where you just watch through an entire series in a timely manner. But even if you are following a show weekly, it general doesn’t go over a dozen. But manga, we are constantly waiting for the next book in English to emerge. It can take years, even decades, for an entire series to see an English release so people have myriads of titles left only partially read. The chances of people handing in incomplete lists is so high that Narutaki weeps at the thought of having to coordinate such a project.
We don’t really have an answer to this problem therefore we have decided to try to crowdsource an answer. Is there a streamlined program that lets you record what manga you have read? It has to be able to make a simple but comprehensive list of titles. Does anyone even want to attempt to do such a thing with their manga reading now that we’ve explained the dilemma?
Reverse Thieves 