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Aurora's Former Staffers Launch Manga Factory
posted on by Egan Loo
The former staffers of Aurora Publishing have announced that they are launching Manga Factory, a new publishing company for manga in the United States. According the staffers, Manga Factory is not a Japanese subsidiary as Ohzora Publishing's Aurora was, but "an all-American manga publishing company owned & operated by the same people" who worked on Aurora's Deux Press, Luv Luv Press, and Aurora imprints.
Manga Factory advertises Naoyuki Sakai and Hisao Tamaki's Teen Apocalypse: Guilstein manga from Wowmax Media on Amazon's Kindle Store for electronic books. Wowmax Media had licensed this manga for mobile phones in 2006. A separate company, Animate USA, has been releasing several former Aurora-published manga titles on the Kindle Store.
Manga Factory is offering a sale on the same selection of Aurora's remaining printed book stocks that Aurora itself has been offering. The new company's website also says that it provides "digital and print production services, as well as mobile device development for iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle and more."
Manga Factory will be exhibiting at Anime Expo in Los Angeles this week, and the company says that it will bring "shōjo, fantasy, yaoi, and josei manga" for sale.
The online graphic novel distributor Netcomics.com announced in April that it will remove "all series from Aurora Publishing, including those under Deux Press and Luv Luv Press imprints," on April 14. The listed phone numbers of Aurora are no longer in service in Torrance, California. Another company, A.D. Vision, filed for the trademark "Manga Factory" in the United States in 2003, but the trademark was officially abandoned in 2005. The Internet domains of mangafactory.net and aurora-publishing.com currently share the same domain servers.
