Any idea of which works specifically are getting an official English release?
So which story is getting licensed?
We have licensed four (4) works from 6th Manager (circle name Yogentei) so far. If those go well, we hope to work on more, with everyone's support. We're not quite ready to announce which yet, but we hope to soon.
Whether or not the quality actually will be better than the fan translations is yet to be seen
You may review our free releases on our Twitter, as well as our Touki release here, and make the decision for yourself. We expect the quality to be either similar or somewhat improved from our current work.
Speaking of that unless the originals are removed from the internet, what prevents other groups from doing translations in spite of the "official" ones?
Your pure hearts. As well as our personal requests and, in this case, a rather adamant tweet from Yogentei.
Is the stuff going to be available world wide or just US like usual?
would some online shop be willing to transport it over here
We should clarify that we only do digital releases. As Yogentei will be handling distribution, the works will likely be released on Booth and available to anyone with a PayPal account, unless Booth starts accepting foreign credit cards.
Physical releases require capital (of which we have none) and a much larger infrastructure and distribution channel than we have. As we have no parent company, we do not want to go down the route of unfulfilled kickstarters, lack of stock, etc. Self-published works, in particular, are very hard to get published physically as there is no independent publishing equivalent to comiket or comitia in these parts. For similar endeavors of yuri in the west, you can check out the physical versions of Always Human, Amongst Us, Band vs. Band, and Sunstone (all freely available webcomics).
most authors/creators choose to not pursue legal action against this site- however that doesn't mean they can't if they choose to do so
To complicate this matter, they would need to hire and interface with a western lawyer, as well as publish their personal name and address in order to file a public complaint. Something generally out of the power of a hobbyist creating manga on the side and a major drain on the resources of, for instance, the BL indie publisher Futekiya.
I'll buy digital manga in a heartbeat as long as i'm actually buying it.
So far, all of our works have been published in a way that they can be downloaded. Right now, this means works by Sumire and N.Bakery are on Booth in English and can be downloaded locally upon purchase. Ishigami Akira's works can be saved manually off of Twitter, though they are free. We did some translation work for Irua, but those are on Amazon and so you can only get encrypted versions (for anyone who remembers the Irua snafu awhile back). Due to the cost of using or hosting on a reader, we probably will not go that route ourselves when we have our own website and instead do downloads, but we do plan on selling on Amazon and Comixology as well. Our accounts are there, but getting contracts and payments in order for creators and staff is a large undertaking legally and logistically.
I'm down for removing them if it means that the artist can benefit from English translations of their work, I just wanna know what to expect from this.
As Yogentei will be selling the works themselves on Booth, they will be the ones making money from sales. Apart from the percentage Booth takes, that is. As such, it is up to us to promote the works, so any help will be greatly appreciated. Does this address your concern?
I like how this site...
Ruby is a helluva coding language
Did you make him aware that his works will still be instantly pirated on torrent sites anyways, so this move accomplishes nothing?
If a mere trifle such as the futility of life would stop us, we never would have started this endeavor in the first place.