Sadly Tokyopop decided to shut down their North American Printing Operations, which is truly sad because they represented a large proportion of the market. A post Tokyopop world will be a smaller world for Anime and Manga. We are lucky that there is still VIZ, Yen Press, and some of the smaller houses like Kodansha, and Square Enix that are going the direct translation route. Another good part of this is that the rights will revert back to the authors rather than sitting in limbo while the company works out what they want to do next.
I hate to see the end of publishing companies, and yes the recession has been very difficult. It is also very hard to sell new Tokyopop manga when the going rate online is somewhere around 2 or 3 dollars per book, rather than the 9 to 12 dollars retail. There were a lot of things that lead to Tokyopop shutting down, and some of hit also involved the Borders bankruptcy. When your major retail point goes under, and the prices are better online, it is going to hurt. Borders bankruptcy is going to have a lot of distribution companies changing the rules, you can see that already with some of the smaller distributors. Many of the distributors that we know are going cash and carry, no credit, no terms, sale at the time of order pay up now.
So what happens to anime and manga? Well it isn’t dead yet, nor will it be dead any time soon. The market has contracted, but that also means that the Anime boom is over with. Sadly Tokyopop is a casualty of that, along with many artists who relied on Tokyopop. Manga fans will always be able to find what they are looking for, either legitimately online or in bookstores, or not legitimately online. This is just a fact, it will happen regardless of what country you live in.
Many factors including management, leadership, market, the aging the Manga/Anime community, file sharing, Borders, depressed prices online, poor business choices, lack of visibility for the Otaku Culture on TV, the recession, all of these have contributed to the demise of Tokyopop. I don’t think that there is any one thing that happened, just all of these hitting hard within a short period of time is going to be a body shock that in this case, Tokyopop could not overcome. There has been a short sharp correction in the Anime Market; the question is what remains with fewer choices? Viz and Yen Press will make out if they can take advantage of Tokyopop’s demise by picking up authors, lines of products, and/or can otherwise pick up the awesome titles that Tokyopop had. The smaller presses might just be able to get some of the other titles that are out there without a lot of upfront money to see if they can pay off.
Fans will still be fans, conventions will still happen, people will still cosplay, watch movies, read books, talk about characters and get into arguments. The only sad part of this is that it will be without Tokyopop. After 17 years, we lose one of the pillars of the community, it will be up to all of us fans to help rebuild the community, and Anime/Manga is well worth rebuilding.
