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TRANSLATIONS – Grade: C

Grading criteria: Are the translations/localizations smooth, clear and readable? Are there many typos / grammatical errors?

I'll just say it: the quality of the translations on JManga titles are uneven. Some are pretty decent, some... aren't.

If I kept a running log of the grammar glitches, misspellings, odd line-breaks, awkwardly translated phrases, untranslated sound effects and cultural quirks that could have used a footnote or two in JManga titles...


well, let’s just say that I’ve seen worse on some fan-translated manga pages but I've also seen better. I’m paying pretty good money, so a little quality control might be in order here, especially with titles at $8.99 - $10.99 a pop, per volume.

But a few typos isn’t all that’s got me bummed here. A pet peeve of mine is the untranslated titles and unhelpful/not-very-compelling plot summaries on many of the JManga titles.

I know a little Japanese, but have mercy, if the meaning of titles like Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru and Edo Nekoe Jubei Otogizoshi are a bit obtuse to me, they must be practically like reading Thai or Greek or Klingon to your average English-reading manga fan.

It’s also disappointing to note that even JManga isn’t always opting to use the same translations that the U.S. publishers have used in their print editions. If you’ve read Last Gasp / jaPRESS edition of Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms you might be surprised to see that the JManga edition doesn’t use that translation, which is a shame, because it was really well done.

CUSTOMER SERVICE - Grade: B+

Grading criteria: Has JManga been responsive to customer questions, complaints and suggestions?

To their credit, the folks at JManga have been pretty good about responding to readers’ comments, complaints and suggestions, via both their Twitter feed and their Facebook page.

For example, on the first day of release, several Canadian fans complained that they weren’t able to access JManga. This glitch was fixed within hours.

Many fans have complained about the relatively high prices for many JManga titles. In early October 2011, JManga responded by offering many of their titles at up to 60% regular prices, and offered fans who had purchased at the higher price a retroactive credit for whatever they’ve spent on regular priced titles since August – a nice gesture that I certainly appreciated, since it’s made it easier and more appealing for me to sample even more JManga titles than I normally would. Thumbs up. Keep it up!

EASE OF USE - Grade: B

Grading criteria: Is it easy to use JManga? Is it easy to browse and sort titles, so you can find titles you want to read? Is the user interface intuitive and clear? Do users experience many technical glitches?

The JManga manga reader is pretty easy to use. It didn’t take too much for me to get up to speed on how to use it to purchase and read titles. The pages load reasonably quickly, although as a Flash-based app, you can't read this on an iPad, and you can't read anything if you're not connected to the Internet.

One annoying aspect of the JManga reader is that it’s not terribly easy to "bookmark" a page and return to it later if you stop in the middle of a chapter. Another annoyance is that I can’t zoom into a particular panel – I can only blow-up the entire page and use the cursor to move the page around. I also don’t know what the “Resume On/Off” button does either.

Browsing the site is somewhat annoying in that it’s not terribly clear which titles are actually available for sale and which are just covers. Believe me, I spent way too much time clicking through each title trying to figure out which ones are available to buy /read. It would have been nice to have some kind of icons or color coding or messaging that would tell me when I was at the browsing titles stage that a title is available for purchase, is new or is coming soon.

But if there was one thing JManga needed to nail, it was their manga reader. While it's not the best I've ever used, for the most part, JManga's reader works pretty well.

PRICING - Grade: D (debut) / B (sale)

Grading criteria: Is the pricing structure fair, flexible and easy to understand? Does it provide value compared to comparable offerings from other companies?

The number one complaint about Jmanga when it first launched was its pricing. At $8.99 - $10.99+ per volume, JManga was charging roughly twice as much as comparable online comics / manga websites in the U.S. This was bad enough, but to charge that much for titles that many fans had never heard of?

On top of that, JManga's pricing structure requires that you sign up for a 1,000 points per month "subscription" before you can read a single volume. At 899 points average, that gave you 1 volume to read, plus change left over. To read another volume, you'd have to buy more points in set increments of 500 ($5.00), 1,000 ($10.00) or 2,500 ($25.00). This is pretty annoying for readers who just want to read a single volume.

What does this 1,000/$10 points per month / "subscription" get you? Other than a set amount of points per month, not much, really. I certainly hope they are adding some additional "value-added" content for subscribers, because I'd almost rather just buy points ala carte for the exact price of the books I want to buy.

It helps that JManga recently launched a JManga Lovers Sale, offering half-off regular prices of their titles and retroactive credit for past purchases - but if this price reduction isn't extended beyond the end of October then we're right back where we started.

So what can JManga do to improve? Check out my 10 suggestions for JManga.com.

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