Last year's predictions are here.
And as for 2011 . . .
manga
Manga, Middlemen and Migration of Power
As we mentioned last week 37 Japanese publishers are working together on the J Manga Portal, a joint portal site for North American anime fans this year. A way to get titles, and of course news.
This is something Bonnie and I have been talking about for months: that Japanese companies and any manga company is best off going to the web and going electronic to both reach people faster, provide content, and to provide competition to scanilations. After all if they don't want people scanilating, then they need to get stuff out fast and cheap (or free).
However this goes beyond my predictions – it's a gigantic group effort by a large number of companies, some of whom I'm quite sure don't necessarily like each other. This isn't one company here or one company there, this is basically major representatives of an entire industry making a universal shared content and news portal. This is huge.
Go Farther: Old comics and manga
Time for another "Go Farther" – looking at things we want to see in the geekonomy and general fannish and cool stuff.
I've mentioned this several times in the podcast and in the daily posts, but it bears repeating: I think companies with manga and comic properties need to seriously consider releasing older titles and issues online or on print-on-demand.
There's
a lot of properties out there that would interest people for reasons of
history, curiosity, research, retro interests, etc. The problem isgauging interests of people to see if it's worth dropping the cash to do a hard-copy publication.
My solution? Twofold.