We thank our member kayue for suggesting this week's poll. What if a manga publisher had some kind of model (similar to Crunchroll or Netflix) where you could pay a (fairly cheap) monthly subscription for access to their digital library of translated manga, would you actually subscribe to such a thing? A bit long-winded, and it's just a yes/no choice, but it's a good marketing research question! (Not that any publisher asked us to have this poll)

You can submit poll ideas here (and try to keep them manga/anime-related)
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Which demographic do you hate the most?
Choices:
Shoujo - votes: 1306 (8.3%)
Shounen - votes: 621 (4%)
Seinen - votes: 521 (3.3%)
Josei - votes: 527 (3.4%)
Shoujo ai - votes: 461 (2.9%)
Shounen ai - votes: 844 (5.4%)
Yaoi - votes: 6239 (39.8%)
Yuri - votes: 1988 (12.7%)
Hentai - votes: 3171 (20.2%)
There were 15678 total votes.
The poll ended: March 9th 2013

Yaoi also won our "Favorite demographic" poll back in October 2008. I guess you either love it or you hate it?

A just ruler amongst tyrants

Why pay for one specific publisher...?
Although I wouldn't pay otherwise anyway.

"I'll shut your mouth~~~~~ with mine~~~"

二息歩行

The hypothetical company would probably have quicker and better quality work. Also, they may have works that aren't available online (due to copyright, etc.)

For me, I guess it really depends on how much content a publisher has. However, I would definitely be willing to shell out ~$10 for a monthly subscription if there a lot of content that interests me (like as in at least 10+ new chapters per week). Unfortunately, I don't think this is very likely because of the huge effort it would take to translate such a wide spread of content that it would satisfy most people.

Why pay a middleman when you can give donations directly to the artist(s) you actually liked?
What we need is to create a system that allows to allocate those same 10$/month towards donations, to be distributed automatically amongst all the works that you "Like"d in that month, not another leech support scheme.

I prefer hard copies. If it was something like a magazine subscription, I would definitely say yes.

[url=http:////www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=42718][img]http://i366.photobucket.com/albums/oo105/CatzCradle64/Avis-Sigs/FunghiPower_zps2a00ba56copy_zpsfc03990e.png[/img][/url]

How about you can subscribe to a particular manga, where in the end you just end up paying for the tanbokons before they are released and by that get the right to read the newest chapters each week?

E.g. you pay the price for one book for some weekly manga, then you get to read the next ten translated chapters as they get released in Japan and when they are released in a book, you just need to add the shipping and you will essentially get it for free.

I mean, the foreign publishers are bound to have a digital version of the manga they release anyways, it's not as if releasing it online would cause that much more trouble.

Depends...
if they had some good manga you can't read elsewhere in their library and if it helped to scanlate some interesting manga, maybe I would. Though I couldn't afford even that atm. 🤢
Where I live manga is slowly getting more common, I feel. Some manga I discovered ages ago on this site were finally published as a hard copy. But somehow my favorites never make it over here. They hardly do in english... So if this publisher scanlated some good stuff I'd be at least interested, though I'd also prefere a hard copy of it then, I guess.

There's nothing to see here. Proceed with what you were doing or throw rainbows at random pedestrians.

There's something like this already outout by the name of JManga, so all of you that vote "Yes," check it out.

A work cannot find its way to you because of the artist alone. There are, most importantly, publisher. They publish works so that they can reach wider market. That is their job. Unless the artist also put some effort as publisher of her own work, your sentiment is cannot be justified.

grammar mistake is intentional, grammar nazis need their entertainment.

Quote from dosetsu

There's something like this already outout by the name of JManga[/url], so all of you that vote "Yes," check it out.

But as far as I can read, it's still a limited service. The highest subscription per month ($19.99) gives you 2500 "reading points", and a volume seems to cost around 500-1000 "reading points," meaning that you'd be limited to only reading (at best) 5 volumes per month(?) - correct me if I'm wrong.

In that way, it really doesn't work like services like Netflix, where you can watch as much as you want for a steady sum per month. 😐 IF there was such a service, I'd support it.

But would it be in English? Personally, thats my biggest issue.

I don't care about "supporting the mangaka" or "supporting the industry". I'm not going to buy a book/comic/manga if I can't read the damned thing!

I would have to go no on this one. I buy the hard copies of the mangakas that I follow (slowly and surely that is), but the way the question is asked gives me the impression that it would be the same as current manga hosting sites available to us (for free, I might add). It seems that a model like this still wouldn't support mangakas, but rather the publishing company which hosts the digital library.

Another issue as some have already suggested, is that this library may not cater to the preferences of everyone. For example, I love my shoujo and josei, but I feel this kind of system, if I were to pay for it, would be targeted at people whom prefer shounen/seinen demographics, which is a problem I currently have in buying hard copies, because there is not as high demand for them.

My Blog: http://himexcherry.blogspot.com.au/

There is Jmanga7. Granted, their library is limited at the moment, but it's free.

Most series are properties done by a couple of top publishers:
http://www.mangaupdates.com/publishers.html?orderby=series

Have you visited Jmanga? They are primarily targeted to an adult audience. Granted, their definition of "josei" might be a bit loose, but they have a pretty considerable inventory:

http://www.jmanga.com/list/genre/josei