Missing the Boat: Requiem for JManga

I missed the boat on JManga, and I'm kicking myself about it a little now.  Like many manga readers, I didn't immediately jump on the JManga bandwagon even though I was pretty happy with it in concept.  I watched with joy as it licensed and released series I would never have dreamed would be licensed in English. I kept a list of the manga I was dying to read.  It is a long list, fed by reviews in Otaku USA and online at places like Manga Bookshelf.  And I waited, not subscribing because, well, frankly, I didn't want to pay that much to rent a manga volume.  I bought e-manga from EManga and SuBLime because they offered me content I could keep, even if only in the form of electrons, and even if I didn't want it as badly as I wanted certain titles on JManga.  I did not sign up on JManga even when they lowered the price because it still wasn't really money exchanged for ownership of content.  I was waiting for JManga to jump on the letting-readers-download-electronic-versions-of-content bandwagon.  I was sure it was only a matter of time.  Now I am kicking myself because I think maybe I was being stupid. 

I've rented anime from Netflix for years, so why did I have this "I want to own it in some tangible form, even if it's a PDF" mindset when it came to books?  Maybe part of it was because I was waiting for the rental to get affordable.  I mean, I have always been very careful to make Netflix a good deal for me.  I ended up paying $1-2 to rent a DVD that would've cost me $30 SRP to buy ($18 if purchased in a Right Stuf sale).  This is how I have an extensive collection of titles I like and like to rewatch even though I built a lot of it while working for peanuts at Borders.  Maybe part of it is that it's hard for a budget-conscious tightwad like me to justify spending $7-10 renting a single book when buying physical volumes of manga I love costs $6-14.  Scarce resources allocated to tangible assets I could trust I would be able to re-read until some disaster wiped out my physical collection (knock on wood :).

And now, suddenly, JManga is gone.

I wish they would have given me a week's warning.  I got an unexpected tax refund back this year, and if I had known even a day before they stopped selling, I would have dropped enough money to read all the volumes on my list because I would have realized that this was my last and only chance, and it's better to have read and lost than never to have read at all.  Instead, I found out the day after they closed, so I never had the chance to give them that money; not that, apparently, it would have made a difference.

Now I sit here, staring at my fluorescent pink list of volumes I will never get the chance to read unless some saintly publisher picks them up.  My Darling Kitten Hair, Fujoshi Rumi, the last volume of Your & My Secret, the last volume of Walkin' Butterfly, est em's works, Wonder, Dousei Ai, Pride, and so many others: I want to pay someone to get an electronic copy of these that I can keep and re-read even if the economy tanks more and publishers go out of business.  I want to give money in exchange for something more tangible than a reading "experience."  But that may be too expensive in the reality that is the world's economy and the whims of Japanese publishers.

I use my money now to buy legal, physical and electronic copies of manga, and I will continue to do so because I recognize the importance of supporting something you love by voting with your economic clout (the dollar).  I will continue to do so as more publishers rise and fall, as series I love are cancelled in mid-stride or one volume from the end, and as my dedication is tested time and again by that seductive lie that I should just give up and download illegal stuff for free because no one will publish what I want to give them money for anyway. 

I own a lot of manga in physical and electronic formats, and I re-read frequently.  I have a lot to be thankful for.  And I'll know better next time that if it's something I really want to read, even if I have to wrestle with the budget, even if it's not really mine to keep in any way, if I really want to read it, the time is now, today.  Because there may not be a tomorrow.