Tokyopop Forum

I pinned this post to the message boards.

That really bum me out :(

that really sucks

@zombiepie said:

" @Sonata said:

" Sad to hear, I blame the pirating age. "

I would hedge my bets on the bankruptcy and liquidation of Borders Group as well as other major bookstores that sold manga as the main reason for this. To what extent can piracy be blamed on the complete collapse of the book industry? I doubt people are pirating Time magazine. The times they are a changing and paper based media is just struggling everywhere across all boards. "

I agree that the collapse of Borders definitely played a major role in this. Tokyopop and Borders have always had close ties - Borders took a chance on Tokyopop's publication of unflipped manga, at a time when conventional wisdom said that unflipped manga would never sell (so unflipped manga was never stocked... so it never sold, etc.) Borders would always stock a bunch of Tokyopop's stuff, even if it wasn't necessarily good (like some of their OEL fare). This probably had an effect of pushing Tokyopop along, even if perhaps they should have gone under earlier, which leads us to now.

While Tokyopop's demise is unfortunate for the manga industry - it's not too surprising. Tokyopop was doing for Manga what Geneon (and to a certain degree, ADV) did for anime - they'd license loads of Japanese and Korean stuff, and publish some OEL stuff even if the quality wasn't necessarily great. For example - Alice in the Country of Hearts is a series that is solidly mediocre. That said, before they shut down US operations they'd also licensed and published several volumes of Hanako and the Terror of Allegory, which is probably one of the best horror manga I've read in quite some time, and a series that I really hope gets license rescued by Vertical or Dark Horse.

This really sucks to hear...oh well, I better go buy the rest of the Fate/stay Night volumes on Amazon (I own Vol. 1 thru 5, need 6 thru 10) before the deadline.

@zombiepie said:

" @Sonata said:

" Sad to hear, I blame the pirating age. "

I would hedge my bets on the bankruptcy and liquidation of Borders Group as well as other major bookstores that sold manga as the main reason for this. To what extent can piracy be blamed on the complete collapse of the book industry? I doubt people are pirating Time magazine. The times they are a changing and paper based media is just struggling everywhere across all boards. "

I agree. To add, I'll say this issue with print-based media is why we have news outlets such as The New York Times beginning to charge people accessing it over the internet online to a certain extent - they can't sustain themselves from printed copies alone. While I'll clarify that they're not charging people for viewing anything from the Times at all, they're making it very difficult for an individual to read a complete paper on their site without a subscription.