Posts Tagged “itunes”

Earlier this week, ANN reported that numerous Kodansha and Bbmf manga such as Hataraki Man and Keroro Gunsou have been or will be added to the Japanese iTunes App Store to be read on iTouchs and iPhones. The chapters are mostly priced at 115 yen (a few are free in the case of Keroro and many BBmf offerings) and are in both English and Japanese, which I guess is why these are apps for that functionality alone.

An slightly different offering under the “Books” category is a 3-volume, 53-page Yoshitoshi ABe doujinshi called Pochiyama at the Pharmacy for 600 yen, which I would like read except I don’t currently own an iPod touch - a condition I hope to rectify in the near future as there is a rumored price drop/update happening next month. It would be my first Apple hardware product ever even though I have previously used Macs in campus computer labs and played with an iPhone inside an AT&T store. All those free games… [Just after posting this, I found out ANN wrote a story about Pochiyama a hour before. Whatever.]

I guess I should also talk about DMP’s initiative to also provide digital manga to the masses. Their method involves renting a volume for 72 hours for $4 that can be upgraded to unlimited use by re-renting for a total of $8, but the starting 3-day limit shouldn’t be a detraction for many people. The current offerings are BL and how-to drawing books, neither of which particularly pique my interest - Gia had some recommendations of non-yaoi titles they could add such as Enchanter. The interface was not perfect for me because while Panel Focus zooms in on each panel so you can read the text, I read manga while surveying the whole page. Luckily, I was able to switch to actual size at medium scaling and just drag around to see the rest.

The chapter drop-down menu, keyboard shortcuts and bookmarking features are nice touches that compete with Tokyopop’s online “player”, which allows you to view opposite pages simultaneously with readable text but at a lower resolution that what DMP is offering. (How do you play manga, anyway?) The eManga site is easier to remember and to navigate than Tokyopop’s site so I might use it in the future to preview titles or even rent one. The points system has a logical ratio of 100 pts to $1 but the option to actually add points 1,000 at a time isn’t available at the moment.

One of my 2007 predictions came true last week when Funimation launched its Funimation Channel on iTunes last Tuesday. That day I decided to plunk down 2 bucks to see what kind of quality the episodes are. Yes, I know they are dubbed only and I’m fine with that. I picked the first episode of Samurai 7 because I hadn’t seen it before. Now, I would have posted about this last week when it was actually news but my attempts to record a screencast came up not so good so I’ll have to settle for something more pictorial.
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