Dear Gramedia, Please Take My Money and Allow Me to Buy Your Manga Online
I really like Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit”, a show about competitive chess. It reminds me of an old manga called “Hikaru no Go”, which, as the title implied, was about go instead of chess. In fact, a sudden wave of nostalgia hit me so hard that made me really want to read the manga like right now! But alas, here in Indonesia, there is now way to read manga legally other than to scour bookstores for the physical copies. Good luck with that. 1) there is a pandemic going on, 2) old titles are often not in stock, 3) even if they are in stock, it will be impossible to find a complete set, 4) even if you do find them, they will be too expensive to warrant the effort.
As a law-abiding citizen, the solution seems very obvious for me: I should be able to buy them legally online! But alas again, there is no way to do that in Indonesia. Which baffled me because in Indonesia manga distribution was practically monopolized by one company: Kompas Gramedia. Surely they have the resources to create an online manga store? Are there legal or economic hurdles for this to happen? Or was the company just too archaic to care? I don’t know. But in this article I would like to imagine my ideal version of the world where we here in Indonesia can easily buy manga online.
I think in the beginning, the most straightforward way is to just sell the manga online individually, with discounts for older titles. The app must allow for offline reading. It also needs a similar technology like Comixology’s guided view (where you can zoom in on a tile to make it easier to read on a smaller screen). The payment methods should include e-wallets like Ovo and Gopay or even phone credits. And the app should have family friendly features like parental control and wallet for individual family members. For example, a parent can give a budget of 100,000 IDR to their children so that the children can choose the comic by themselves through their own gadgets. (with the pandemic, a lot of children were given their first smartphones or tablets).
But ultimately, a subscription model is preferable. The subscription can cover all the back-issues; however for new issues the user will still need to pay. A subscription model like Audible could be considered, where each month the subscriber gets 1 credit to be used to purchase any book, along with some “free” older titles. So for example: by paying 50k IDR per month, I can read as many Doraemon manga that I want, and I can choose 1-3 new titles to subscribe for the latest chapter. That’s another thing too, by going for an online model, we can get same day release like in Japan. It’s ridiculous in this day and age, I have to wait one year to read the latest One Piece chapter!
What about the physical copies? Will this kill physical bookstores? My suspicion is that this is one of the reasons why Kompas has not done this; since they own the biggest brick-and-mortar bookstore chain in the country. They might be afraid to jeopardize their stores if they make it too easy to purchase books online. But there are two flaws in this thinking:
- People are already getting their manga fix online! And with this country’s lack of cyber enforcement, it is hard to trample the pirated manga ecosystem. Instead of fighting the current, Kompas should instead make it easy for people to legally access the manga online.
- In the US, apps like Comixology and Marvel already have this online model. And as far as I know, physical comic stores still exist there. I think online and offline models can co-exist. But first, Kompas Gramedia should increase the quality of their manga. I often envy the Japanese version of manga which are bigger, have better papers, and can have beautiful color spreads. Imagine if there is an Indonesian version of that! The price will be higher than the current version, but should still be cheaper than if you buy the Japanese or English version.
At least for me, I can see myself subscribing to the online store to get access to the latest chapters and to read old manga, while still buying physical copies of my most favorite manga titles. I will still want to buy the nicer version of the physical copies to be put on my shelf and be read by my children and grandchildren.
What is frustrating for me in all of this is that because manga distribution in Indonesia is practically a monopoly, we can’t hope for competition to fix the situation. We have to depend on a monolithic, family-owned, old-fashioned company to come to their senses.
Look, when I was a kid, my favourite time of the week was when my father brought me and my siblings to a small comic book store not far from our house. (My favourite manga was all titles by Fujiko F. Fujio. One comic book was priced at 3,800 IDR (~$50c in 1990s rate)!). So I certainly don’t want physical bookstores to disappear. But online books are here to stay, and it’s not a good business sense to leave money on the table.
