Part II: Issues around Publishing (A)

This article is prepared for MangaCast as part of the What Manga is Like in Indonesia series. [Part I: History]

Does steady growth indicates a matured market for the publisher? On the surface, manga business in Indonesia seems to be good. Fans grabbed popular manga from newsstands, flocked manga rentals and the the largest Jakarta branch of Kinokuniya have around a dozen manga shelves, not counting the English and Chinese editions. Kids would spend most of their allowance on manga and adults splurged their hard-earned salaries for ridiculously priced paraphernalia.

Underneath, we have problems. For publishers a major problem is the speed of issuing a manga. Scanlations from other countries are fostering a culture based on pirated copies of manga. Fans give little consideration to supporting manga artists, and legal copies are facing hard times as they play catch-up with the super-fast release frequencies of pirated manga. And of course there are minor issues like market share, availability, translation quality, publishing format, and varieties of genres available.

On the fans side, it’s the lack of information. Big time players like Elex and M&C only post titles to be published, no summaries, no reviews, and no introductions. Ads, for that matter, are non-existent. ^[1] How can the fans tell what manga they should buy? And it seems like sales figures do not translate income as profit either. Cheap book fair banners appear as regular as my magazine subscription.

What sort of anomaly have we got here? How is it possible that a product with almost zero advertising effort can still make a bundle of money?

Monopoly: Being dominant makes one confident?

I discussed M&C, Level and Elex in the first part of this series. All three are prominent manga publishers, and yet they all belong to the same publishing group: Kompas-Gramedia. As a result, they still share the same printing companies and distribution line. Nevertheless, they are independent of each other, operating in different offices. (Though M&C is still Gramedia’s direct imprint for magazines and comics, including manga and manhwa.)

Since 2000 some new publishers emerged, but they are limited to publishing specific titles or authors only, while keeping licensing to a minimum. Among these are: 3L Comics (Tiga Lancar Semesta, publishing Takada Rie’s books), Indorestu Pacific (Crayon Shinchan), Pentamedia (Chrno Crusade), Acolyte (Chobits), and KPG (Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, publishing TEZUKA Osamu’s Buddha, from the English version).
It is safe to say that Elex and M&C are the prominent manga publishers today. The two publish 10 times more manga than other publishers combined and have better access to distribution, thus share the bigger piece of the pie.

Given that they control most of the market, they have established a sense of monopoly, when one raises price the other will match it on the similar range of price. At this point, both publishers will no worry about the lack of the customers.

Availability

In the 90s, manga by Elex and M&C were available nation-wide in prominent local book stores. Taken into consideration was the fact that Indonesia is a big archipelago so books were shelved with varied display periods. Nowadays, popular and newer titles are available in newsstands on the respected day of issue, especially those located near schools or university campus.

It is a pity that some of the lesser known publishers find it hard to compete with Elex, Level and M&C distribution line. In exception of KPG—that is also a part of Kompas-Gramedia group, you will find it hard to buy Gen si Kaki Ayam (Barefoot Gen, Yayasan Obor) or Chobits (Acolyte) if you don’t live in around Java Island.

There is also an option to shop on several online bookstores. Neither Elex nor M&C have an online shop. But if you live in major cities across the archipelago, there’s a pre-order and delivery service from both publisher. There are many ways to obtain manga, the only problem is whether the manga would arrive at your place in time when they are supposed to be available on the market.

Vicious Circle of Pirated Manga

Indonesians love freebies and cheap stuff. Even though they scold and beat off chicken thieves, they feel that it is okay to buy pirated DVDs. Same goes for pirated manga. Much heated discussion has emerged on this subject. Both sides clash with each other from time to time - those who buy and those who choose not to buy them. Even with the crappy translations, blurry printing, and easy to tear bindings! Why we still love them? Because it is faster and cheaper! Actually, even legal ones have some bad translations, black ink occasionally smears, and books turn yellow after 10 months.

The licensing process is time consuming. Publishers often need to deal with Japanese companies concerns about how morally-acceptable a title is to the current market. If and when this is dealt with, legal publishers then has to go through the process of translation, editing, editorial check, quality control, lay outing, and then printing, binding, and distribution. All a waste of time to the impatient piracy supporters.

Concerns about pirated manga have been expressed since they first emerged on newsstands. The first wave of pirated manga was visually stimulating and disturbing manga. Things that even Level would not be able to publish in this decade. Parents ranted about it, since illegal manga (most likely) would not censor anything. (Ratings are discussed further in Part III, since Indonesian culture plays a lot of contribution on norm and taboos.) And the media focused on the word manga instead of hentai manga. This took the promotion manga one step back in Indonesia.

In time, the pirates begin targeting shojo. In many cases pirated version are available just prior to official Elex and M&C releases. Hikaru no Go, Death Note, and Bleach each popular shonen manga with complicated licensing issues were all pirated before the official versions were available.

Supporters of legal manga grew more conscious about the titles they purchased, since they are aware that buying pirated manga would hurt the industry in the long run. However, the rest do not care. They want to get great stories, no matter how, even if that means robbing mangaka of what they should earn for their hard work. Somehow they fail to see this (and insist to close their eyes on the fact) but claiming that they adore the work and the author. Very contradictive! But that’s how most manga fans in Indonesia think.

All things considered, fans support the piracy with a number of reasons:

Censorship

Pirate publishing companies do not censor manga. They do not have to, no one is going to sue them, because they do not publish their address.

Fast Availability

Pirates do not have to deal with licensing, quality control, and approvals, essentially all the messy process legal publishers have to go through. They just pick mangascans and print them (Note to the entire scanlations group out there: Please watermark, at all times!)

Internet Availability

Internet access is slow and expensive in Indonesia. Therefore instead of downloading mangascans, many prefer to buy pirated books or DVD/CD scans.

They don’t understand (or don’t want to understand) how hard it is for the mangaka to produce a page and how difficult it is for a publisher to get a title licensed and published smoothly. The ideas, the hard work, all the efforts of the mangaka—whose works they love—were stolen by pirates and these fans who supported piracy!

They argue about censorship and time of releases. They want less censorship and faster releases. I say it’s ridiculous, who would want to sacrifice the freedom of having manga in your hands weekly? We still needs censorship, even the US manga publishers still censor some stuffs. On the other hand, Elex censorship is less preferred aesthetically, and M&C censorship quality has decline over the years. Faster releases also mean low-quality translation and graphic editing. For the releases frequency, you can go to any manga forum—let me repeat that again: ANY manga forum, and you will see hundreds of similar comments with the pattern: Why is manga ABC not out yet?

They don’t want to hear about how long it is for a Japanese manga fan has to wait for a tankobon. In Indonesia, local publishers publish a volume of a certain series every month, except when they almost head to head with the current issue in Japan (Nodame was slowed down after it reached vol. 10) or have a publishing quota (Level only releases 15 titles per month). Nor do they care about the behind-the-scene process (Can Elex or M&C arrange us to cover a story for this process?), they just want the manga out NOW! I think that’s so selfish, demanding, and childish. If any of you out there have a solution for this, let me know.
And I am afraid no, we cannot sue the piracy publishing companies. Even though Indonesian law has a great legally-binding Copyrights Act, it’s no secret that the law in Indonesia is bendable.

It has become a vicious circle, we can bust our lungs out and campaign say no to piracy, but the pirates are not punished. It is also a dilemma for the Japanese companies, since they cannot cut off Indonesia completely. If they do, piracy will become more rampant than ever. Indonesian manga market is also too big to be ignored. (I will discussed numbers and figures in another article.)

But, why do fans and publishers still love this market? (To be continued)

Endnote:
[1] Lately, this situation has changed for Elex, as the community in their online forum grows the marketing team use popular social networking sites to get the information across.

Sorry for the cliffhanger, but as a friend would say, these articles are not supposed to be longer than two Word pages, to keep those who suffer from short attention span to be back and do some real work. If you are wondering… It’s two and a half.

As always, if you noted some mistakes and want to send me some feedbacks email or leave me a comment. It’s more constructive that way.—Pea Rea (reapea@gmail.com)