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New Manga Launch on U.S. Kindle, iPhone, Nokia Ovi
posted on by Heather Skinner
Animate USA released its September lineup for the Amazon Kindle Store with five boys-love titles including one Kindle exclusive, Youka Nitta's Kiss Ariki - Episode 1. The other works are Nitta's Sound of My Voice - Golden Goose Part 3, Shiuko Kano's P.B.B. Play Boy Blues - Act 3, and the Japanese versions of Makoto Tateno's See You in the School of the Muse Vol.3 and Hinako Takanaga's Awkward Silence (Bukiyou na Silent) - Vol.1.
Kindle Books can be read on Amazon's own Kindle devices (in several different versions); via a free App for iOS, Android, BlackBerry mobile devices; and via the free Kindle application for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.
The Japanese company Recruit announced that it developed an iPhone app called Manga From Japan for displaying manga in English. The app was released in Apple's App Store in the United States on August 16. Currently, the only series available is In the Drawer by Kaori Tsurutani, the winner of the Tetsuya Chiba Prize for new manga artists in Weekly Young Magazine and Morning magazine.
In the Drawer is a story about Saemi, who takes a glass button from her older sister's box of treasures. Saemi soon discovers that the button takes on a life of its own and is endowed with Saemi's secrets along with the other things hidden within her drawer.
NTT Solmare has also announced that it has several manga titles available through the Nokia Ovi store this month. Added titles include seven volumes of both Masamune Shirow's Appleseed and Shōtarō Ishinomori's Cyborg 009. The first two volumes of Solaruru's Always by Your Side are also available.
Crunchyroll confirmed in July that it has a partnership with Bitway, a Japanese digital comic distributor, to open an international venue for online manga. In an interview with Deb Aoki of About.com's manga section, Crunchyroll CEO Kun Gao explained the service in more detail.
Crunchyroll and Bitway will not directly publish works of manga, but will offer a service for other publishers to have a means of distribution. The service has no launch date yet, but is planned be as accessible as possible through popular devices such as cell phones, Kindles and iPads. It is possible the manga may have multimedia features such as motion or sounds. Crunchyroll is also allowing many decisions to be made by the publishers; they will decide the age that works are geared toward, price, the option of rentals or purchases, and the possibility of simultaneously publishing a work online when it is published in Japan.
