JManga is open to North America! Head on over and check it out!
My observations:
My observations:
- Pricing -- Chapters range from ~$1 - $3 each or ~$9 per volume. They use a point system to purchase material. The base level is 1000 points per month for $10. Of the materials I looked at the prices were 120 - 290-pts per chapter or 865 points for the entire volume. You can purchase as many points as you need after to sign up for the $10 subscription.
- Most of the titles listed are not actually available yet.
- There were many titles that weren't even translated into English
- The sound effects of the titles I looked at were not translated. The typesetting was also done poorly, and one of them was translated by a person with a poor grasp of English :(. But these are limited to a small number of the titles that were never published in English.
- See "My Sadistic Boyfriend" and "A Kiss on Tearful Cheeks" (this one is a crying shame since they decided to leave the Japanese instead of having someone do the redrawing.)
- The "free" material consider of 5-pages or the first chapter, which includes the title pages and the table of contents.
- The reader is Flashe based so iOS users are SOL.
- Yaoi and Yuri are not separated out. The are put under the genres of Shoujo, Josei, and Seinen. This may pose a problem in countries that forbid the portray of such relationships, including the US if news of this reaches conservatives.
- There are errors in the website that take you to server land, so be careful. This also indicates to me that the website is not really for "prime time" and they may be some big security holes in it.
- No confirmation e-mail was sent out after I registered for the service. I'm not sure how safe the registration process is. My feeling now is to not give any information out that you don't want to share with the world. I recommend not giving them any credit card information until the site is more mature. Also, use a password that you haven't used on any of your other accounts.
- They are very responsive to comments and suggestions despite the what the pop-up says after submitting a suggestion. So if you want something changed, then please go make your thoughts known to JManga.
