That’s a real bummer. It’s really too many international copyright issues prevent TPUK from operating as just an extension of the US branch rather than a completely separate international branch. I imagine that would make things about ten times easier on them. :\

Oddly TP dosen’t have the copyright issues some publishers seem to have. Granted some of their initial releases did, but the vast magority of their current titles are valid for the UK, US, CAD, OZ, and NZ. They simply don’t want to put the time and effort into them.

It’s sad, but to them the UK market has never been anything more than an after thought. Yet they do get all high and mighty with shops that don’t buy the official releases hehe.

Huh. Well, that’s just puzzling then. If they use the same translations, etc, as the American releases, then all they have to worry about is distribution, which seriously can’t be that hard, can it?

That’s been the whole argument from the outset. TP say that it costs more since they have to change the covers for regional releases. And they also do regional translations, such as UK titles are done in UK english.

It’s pure crap IMO. There’s no reason to reprint covers regionally, just do 1 cover for all. Yen Press do that and it works for them. As for the translations, again it’s pure crap. The regional use of language is minor (colour and color for example). IMO it dosent matter which you use do long as it’s readable.

But both TP and Viz have always claimed there’s no manga market in the UK, at least not one strong enough to support an independant venture.

Eh? If their argument is that changing the cover costs money thats a rather poor one The covers don’t actually change, they just slap a price in £’s below the US and Canadian dollars. Theres no real reason they couldn’t just do that on their initial printings and be done with it
(Well, thats a lie. I guess if they were entirely identical it would be less easy to track when a UK official release was on the shelves and when an imported US one was, maybe? x_x)
The regional translations thing is sort of interesting though. I don’t remember seeing any releases written in UK english either, although I also wasn’t really looking. I guess I normally notice things like characters names mysteriously changing instead.
Any ideas if any specific titles did though? I’m rather tempted to go hunt out volumes looking for s-es instead of z-s and colours instead of colors. I got out my UK release of Ecole du Ciel V1 and flicked through it looking for distinguishing words: on page 24 (or well, page 16 of the actual story) the word “flavor” is still there. I stopped counting pages because thats annoying, and a chapter or so further in I spotted the word “labor” too.

In light of the recent cutting back on volumes published, both in the US and the UK, I am curious what criteria they used for the manga they decided they felt like releasing in the UK anyway.
Using Ecole du Ciel again, its one of my favourite series and its one that I actually started reading with the UK release (although, when I checked, only my Vol1 and 2 are UK releases, 3-8 are all American ones. I guess I’m part of their sales problem then).
Since everything broke though, the 9th volume got pushed back from its Oct 08 (US) release and now doesn’t seem to be on its 2009 release schedule at all. I’d assumed most of their indefinately delayed titles were low sales related.
Before that I’d also assumed that the titles they actually got around to releasing in the UK were ones they expected to sell… but the two don’t quite tally