Hikaru Sasahara, CEO of Digital Manga Publishing, first floated the idea of the Digital Manga Guild—recruiting
manga fans to work in teams as translators—less than six months ago, and the idea is starting to take concrete shape. Sasahara said last week that he has acquired 508 manga titles, and hopes to start signing agreements with localization groups as early as this week. Once that is done, the groups can get to work translating, editing, and lettering the manga so it can be posted online at DMP’s eManga.com site as well as being distributed via the Kindle and Nook devices.
Sasahara said he is finalizing the contract for the translation/localization groups and he could start sending them files to as early as the end of April. “All the digital files will start coming in next week from Tokyo,” he said last Friday. “Those files are finished, so they could go straight to the localizers and they can start work on translating and typesetting. Hopefully they will wrap up 20 or 30 titles a month and send back all the digital files to us, and then we will put them first on eManga.com and then hopefully other platforms like the Nook and Kindle, and if they are appropriate for the
iPhone and iPad, then we will obviously do that.”
