The Anime and Manga industry has changed in the past few years for the West. Tokyopop closed their offices in 2011 but later re-open the next year with a new website and fewer employees.  Bandai Entertainment announced in 2012 that they will no longer release anime and manga. And Viz Media took down MangaStream due to their illegal distribution of online manga. Certainly a lot of negative events have occurred in the past yet there is still a chance to improve and grow the industry.

 

 

Naturally there are a lot of things that come to mind for improvement. For one thing, the English Manga publishers need to publish manga chapters online about the same time they are released in Japan otherwise they lose out on potential revenue. Moreover they need to publish more light novels if they have the rights to the license of the manga to better promote their products and please fans. The greatest improvement though, is to have a monthly subscription model to read manga online and on mobile devices. However, all of these changes focus mostly on the current services provided by manga publishers.

 

Many of the manga publishers could for the most part gain substantial amount of growth by using more online content. Naver, one of the most popular Korean web comics, has been very successful at producing web comics online for free but still generate cash. Therefore the manga publishers in Japan will make a great amount of growth if they did this model as well. What’s more they can even allow some small time authors to publish with them online other than just the big named authors such as Tite Kubo. Its not just he manga industry that have to improve their services

 

 

The west anime industry too needs to improve their quality of services. One way is to form a partnership with the people who own the manga license that way they can increase awareness over their products. Another idea can be forming new partnerships between other anime publishers to produce an anime like tv service similar to Neon alley, primary focusing on new releases. On the other hand this does not mean that they should mainly have their attention on the tv service rather they should only have new releases be the primary focus of the tv service and the older episodes brought on an online service similar to CrunchyRoll. All in all there is only so much an American publisher can do versus their Japanese counterpart.

Japanese publishers by contrast have a greater opportunity to increase growth. For instance they have the ability to tell the studios to not just produce short anime series in 12-13 episodes but produce more tv series consisting of at least 24-26 episodes.  Plus, there is a real strong need to not have so many filler episodes and make them more seasonal where they don’t need to produce episodes all the time. It would also be nice to have more fan service produced towards the female audience such as free.  Japanese publishers in addition to all of the above, need to encourage more independent anime films as well as help them out every once in a while. That way they can cause growth in the industry. Other than that, there are pressing concerns about the industry.

 

Many people on both sides of the track have concerns about piracy but let’s face the facts. If a person is viewing manga on websites such as Mangafox or Mangareader then they are not supporting the industry at all. Same is applied to those websites that host links or downloads to anime videos such as animefreak. True the argument has been that they are promoting Japanese content to the general audience; nevertheless they are not supporting the authors in any shape or form. Plus, if these sites are actually making revenue through advertisements and by using the authors work then they should be playing by the same rules and have to deal with licenses. Otherwise just about anyone can publish manga or anime they don’t have licenses to anyone. Of course most of these concern with piracy have to deal with an overall service issue. However, if the fans do not purchase Manga or Anime then there is really no point in trying to publish Anime and Manga. None of the creators of Anime or Manga are truly rich but maybe only the big three are doing really well.

 

 

So, then what could fans do? For starters they should purchase the manga or anime to support the authors. Also, send messages both to the anime and manga publishers if you really want something in English dub and a Manga released in English format by starting twitter campaigns or general talk among fans. For example, the tales of Xilla was only brought to America because the amount of fans kept asking Bandai to bring it on over to the states. The same motivation that brought the tales of Xilla could certainly improve more anime being produced.  Also, both of the anime and manga industry will disappear forever if the fans aren't motivated or do not do anything to help push products out the door.