The Benefits and Drawbacks of Digital-Only Publishing

Good morning from Tokyo! I was originally planning on writing a review for this week, but the end of September has been a bit more hectic than expected, so instead I have a casual post about what it’s like to be a digital-only publisher, and the benefits and drawbacks therein.

When I was younger (like, late teens to early 20s) I must admit: I did not like digital publishing. I wanted a hard copy of all my books—and I mean all of them. When I still lived in the United States, I actually used to have the largest IKEA Kallax shelf—the one that’s five squares across and five high—situated in the middle of my room so I could use both sides, and I had the whole thing literally filled with books (mostly BL). Thousands and thousands of books. I hated the idea of digital manga because it felt like a ripoff. I wanted the physical book, in my hands, so I could do whatever I wished with it.

However, one thing you learn when you grow up and move—particularly overseas—is that you don’t want a lot of stuff. You can’t have a lot of stuff. It’s unfortunately just not possible to have so much stuff. Not only that, but apartments in Tokyo are incredibly small unless you’re unbelievably wealthy (or live inconveniently far from a station), so even if I could have afforded to bring all thousands of those BL back to Japan with me, I wouldn’t have the space for them.

Sadly, when I returned to the U.S. to clean out my childhood bedroom and decide what could and couldn’t come back to Japan with me, all but around 30 of those books had to be recycled. Soul-crushing, honestly.

So, needless to say, I had to make peace with the fact that I would be deciding between just not getting to read a lot of BL, having to read it and then sell it back (which is also a hassle, especially when you don’t have a car), or just… buying digitally, at which point I could have as many books as I wanted but also enough space left over in my apartment to eat meals, exercise, and play with my cat. And then I got a job at a digital publisher, and came to really understand that digital publishing for manga localization actually has a lot of benefits—though also, some clear drawbacks.

Benefits

I guess we’ll start with the benefits. First, as I mentioned, the most obvious: space. Books are wonderful—they feel nice in your hand, they smell like cut paper and ink, each page turned feels like a small victory, and flipping through them just makes you feel things. But the sad reality is that, especially for people who move frequently, live in a small space, etc. books take up a lot of space. They look beautiful doing it, granted, and I still highly prefer going over to my shelf and picking a manga to read rather than shuffling through my digital bookshelf. But I have to be much more mindful about the physical copies I buy.

For me personally, this often means reading the manga digitally and then buying the physical copy if I like it enough for multiple rereads, unless it’s by a mangaka I already love and trust—though in that case I probably still read it digitally as every new chapter was released—or is an impulse buy based on the cover… which is a 50/50 chance it’ll end in disappointment.

Which brings us to point two: it’s easier to sample. With traditional manga, the only way to “sample” it was to either buy the magazine it was running in (which is already quite expensive for BL publications, often running the cost of more than a single tankoubon on its own) or to wait for the official release and then read any online samples that were offered (usually just a few pages). Sometimes stores have a little sample booklet of about half of the first chapter, which is helpful but uncommon. So there used to be a lot of blind buying, and thus a lot of disappointment and wasted money.

With digital, however, books are often separated into multiple chapters, so you can read one chapter, and if it doesn’t appeal to you, you can just stop there. Having a single chapter of a story you didn’t like in your digital database is a lot less of a pain than owning a full physical book you don’t like (“Now what do I do with it?”), which you then have to pawn off on a friend who’ll find the themes more appealing, find somewhere to sell it back, or recycle it.

Even with tankoubon versions, digital publishers often offer a much larger sample than used to be allowed pre-digital. It’s a lot easier and less expensive to figure out if a story just doesn’t vibe for you, which is important when reading manga is one of your core hobbies.

Benefit number three, and one I think is most important in terms of discussing localization, is digital publishing removes a lot of restrictions that sometimes come with licensing BL. Even though it’s understandable, as a massive fan of BL it’s often been saddening when mostly only popular mangaka or works get translated and sold overseas. With one foot on both sides of the English and Japanese market at any given time, I’m always wanting to recommend titles I really love to non-Japanese-speaking friends, but the chances of those lesser-known Authors and stories getting an English release are often very small unless a localization company gets a lot of requests or happens to take a personal interest in a work. (This is especially the case if the content is less “safe” for the western market.) Then, in order to read and share a variety of less popular works, people have to rely on scanlations, which is a whole ‘nother can of worms…

Because digital publishers don’t have to also worry about the financial and spatial (storage of left-over inventory) cost of printing a book that might not be the hit in the English market that they were in Japan, however, we have a more leeway about testing the waters with a large variety of new and up-and-coming artists, highly erotic content that would be hard to market in physical stores, content and themes that haven’t already been shown to be popular in the west, etc. It’s okay to have more misses, because there’s less at stake, and so we can take more risks.

I sincerely believe the western BL publishing sphere has gotten significantly more varied because of this. The current ecosystem—where digital publishers can share a variety of new artists and stories, print publishers can continue to release hard copies of popular and better-known stories, with a handful of other publishers and random licenses landing somewhere in-between—works well to diversify the BL we can share overseas.

And it’s not just with localization—for the Japanese publishing side, as well, digital publishing has removed many of the barriers that some artists might have found restrictive, and it’s easier to publish manga through smaller publishing lines that may not be able to afford print, or self-publish on sites like DLSite, etc.

Drawbacks

As I said, however, there are definite downsides to being a digital-only publisher. The first is that… for many people (myself included) there’s no comparison between holding a book in your hands, and reading manga on a phone or tablet or computer. Some people just really love books as a concept. It comes with the territory within nerd circles. Plus, a key part of being an otaku is that we collect and treasure the things we love, and it’s so much harder to build a shrine or dedicate tons of love and care to digital-only works. You can’t stare lovingly at them on your shelf as you drift to sleep at night.

Another downside is that, understandably, mangaka prefer to give their stories to print publishers. They prefer to hold their hard work in their hands when they’re sent the completed copy of the translated edition. For this reason, when requesting a new license, if we’re competing with a print publisher who’d also like to release the book, the chance that we’ll lose is very high. Which is okay, so long as the book gets released anyway—I’m happy as long as people will be able to read it, even if it’s not released by us. It’s much more painful, however, when a print localizer never requests, so because the mangaka or publisher prefers print editions, the manga is never released in English.

The last (and arguably most important) drawback to digital publishing is: once the license expires or is revoked, the data has to be removed. As we’ve seen with many other full-digital services, once the license with a company expires, the content vanishes. At least with companies like Netflix or Hulu, which often just own the rights for the digital version, these media often have a blu-ray release, or have just moved over to another service. For us, however, if the contract expires and isn’t renewed, our work on the translation, editing, etc. just disappears into the ether. Gone. Forever. 😥 The digital economy is truly a painful one.

Overall, digital publishing has some pretty significant benefits, but also some equally big hurdles. It’s great to be able to read a larger variety of content from a multitude of artists, but it’s not so great to lose the effort put into translation and editing due to a contract dispute or renegotiation. It’s up to each person to decide if they think the benefits suit their reading style, or if the drawback are enough to keep them sticking with physical books.

As for me, I’ll continue buying the physical copies of the books I really love And it’s also still my dream to someday afford a big enough apartment where I can have either a study or a bedroom where a whole wall is just shelves and shelves of BL. But I’ve also grown to acknowledge the many benefits of digital publishing that I previously refused to accept, and now have a huge digital bookshelf filled with BL. And I’ll also continue sharing those benefits with Renta!’s readers. 🥰