How do you feel about English light novel publishers
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@aruseus493 Yen Press actually went back and fixed Mr. Kirito in the newer versions.
Silica calls him Kirito now.
They seemed to have stopped blanket translating -san as Mr/Miss now in their newer series.
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J novel club
Few complaints, have some good series I’m also glad they’ve started to do print releases. Plus they licensed Bookworm so massive ups for that. Though I feel they have gotten less reliable in terms of both weekly part releases and moving on to the next volume lately.
Yen press
Good licenses and baring some obvious and well known delays have a very steady 4 month release cycle for their LN.
Seven seas
Good licenses and decent release schedule. Really disappointing quality of print releases, easily the lowest of any of the physical release companies.
Sol press
Horrendous company, delays on all releases and even months after release their LN aren’t available on all platforms (saving 80,000) has been coming to IBooks soon since April.
Cross Infinite
I like their novels and really interesting that they are going straight to the source and publishing WN. I hate that they have a tendency to drop series after one volume, to the point that I’ll no longer purchase their LN if I see it’s part of a series I only get the one shots. They absolutely have to start releasing 2nd volumes or I’ll lose all faith in them as a publisher.
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@catstorm Seven Seas does have better looking physical editions now than before. Mushoku Tensei, Restaurant in Another World and Skeleton Knight all look waaaaay better than their earlier. A smaller size and better typeface. The actual printing isn’t as good quality as JNC or Yen but acceptable to me.
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@the-green-death I don't agree. New Seven Seas releases are awful. Smaller size doesn't provide any advantages due to how bloated it made the books (and really, MT covers deserve being printed at the size where one can actually see details) due to huge waste of paper space inside. They even increased font size compared to their "bigger" books. Print quality is also terrible, especially on colour illustrations.
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I like both Yen Press and J-Novel Club just fine. They both have several series I enjoy. Their releases aren't always error free, but what I've encountered with them hasn't been egregious; generally a few typos in a single book, and not every book has that problem. I'm aware of the issues others have had with Yen Press, but I'm only speaking of my own experiences.
As for Seven Seas, after Monster Girl Doctor's first volume, I only buy digital from them. The amount of issues with that book was...wow. Some of their other releases weren't much better, as both Perfect Blue and The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku had plenty of typos throughout. At least with a digital release they can push out an update without my having to buy a new copy. I suppose if I had experienced what No Game, No Life's initial release was like, I'd be wary of Yen Press. That happened with me with Seven Seas. Which is a shame.
I like otome games, so Cross Infinite World tends to scratch that particular itch. I'm wondering when they'll release follow up volumes for some of their titles. I assume they're waiting for more material, but who knows.
I've only read one book from Sol Press, so I can't really speak to the quality of their releases (I remember 80,000 Gold being fine). Sol Press strikes me as trying to do too much at once with not enough personnel to handle everything. Their licensing of Busy Wizard is an interesting one; maybe they'll pick up other R-18 works.
I haven't read anything from One Peace Books. It looking like they dropped a series (or two) doesn't exactly give a good impression.
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I started reading LN first with YP series like DanMachi and NGNL specifically in digital format, but all of a sudden one day all the YP ebooks were taken away from all the marketplaces in India. I am very angry with YP due to this as I now have incomplete series in my ebook collection and have to scrounge the internet to get the pirated copies of those ebooks.
I am very happy with JNC for most of the part. Only complain I have about them is about the site which doesn't look appealing to me
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@rasray All of Yen Press' light novels are for sale digitally on Kobo in India, if it's any help.
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@rasray Have you tried bookwalker global? As last resort, you can use a EU/US proxy to fake your current location.
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I'm just happy to get any titles that I have any interest in translated. Problem is they are translating so many of them I don't have enough time to read them all. I'm also more into digital now than hard copies due to the fact that I've run out of space to put all the hard copies to all of the series that I'm reading. This includes manga as well as light novels.
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@legitpancake Thanks for the info, I just checked them but they are way too overpriced at $14 for each book.
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@zing That is an option I hadn't looked into. Aside from having another ebook reader on my phone I don't find any drawbacks on bookwalker. Thanks for the suggestion.
I just wonder what problem does YP have on listing its catalog on Amazon or Play store in India.
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Going by that recent ANN interview I might have jumped the gun on this topic when I included Square Enix considering right now they only plan on releasing one novel and the rest of their library is manga. Oh well I only included them as a joke anyways.
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J-Novel Club is awesome and great, especially with the slew of new licences in this past year. (That I'm commenting as such on the JNC forums is probably a sign of how much I like them.) I don't read all of their releases, but that's just because the variety of genres is wide enough that I simply prefer some over others. Which means people with different tastes can read those other genres. The primary criticism is that the reader app is tremendously buggy; not yet to the point of literal unusability, but more incredibly annoying quirks like having to log in and out several times just to get my login token to stick. (Which is probably more annoying due to my using a random password from Lastpass, so I have to re-authenticate to Lastpass every time.)
Yen Press is on my semi-serious shitlist for region-locking a lot of their digital releases. Semi-serious in that I assume it's part of their contracts that they feel it's not worth renegotiating, but it doesn't solve the issue that I don't want to make room for physical copies of books and pay for shipping.
Seven Seas also has some issues on the regional licencing front, but now that I think about it I can't actually name any examples, so I might need to come back and review my opinions of them. A few odder translation choices for particularly Japanese/anime-culture terms, but I can tell that the translators tried their best in the circumstances available.
The best I can say about Sol Press is that they're "getting better", in that their more recent releases are at least more proofread and less error-filled than their earlier ones. It's not good yet, but at least I can see a trend of improvement, so I hope they continue it, preferably with a quicker pace.
Cross Infinite World caters to a very niche set of genres, but they're decent enough in it, and I appreciate that someone is bringing it over to English. Apparently they directly contact authors of webnovels, so the Cross Infinite World releases are the first time these stories have gotten an official "print" (whether physical or digital). One weird part is that whoever writes the blurbs makes the stories sound a lot more dramatic and dark than they really are, so often I don't know if a given story is really that dark and depressing, or if it's just the blurb writer going overboard again.
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@rasray said in How do you feel about English light novel publishers:
@legitpancake Thanks for the info, I just checked them but they are way too overpriced at $14 for each book.
Just an idea, but you could buy half of the volumes that you're reading by ... other means ... to support the author and publishers. That would only cost $7.
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@rasray said in How do you feel about English light novel publishers:
@zing That is an option I hadn't looked into. Aside from having another ebook reader on my phone I don't find any drawbacks on bookwalker. Thanks for the suggestion.
I just wonder what problem does YP have on listing its catalog on Amazon or Play store in India.
I went for a samsung galaxy pad instead of kindle because I could not find most of the novels I want to read in digital form. YP is especially notorious for having dead links to digital releases. Had 0 issues with bookwalker so far aside from the app not keeping my phone from dimming the screen. But that can be fixed by extending the timer in phones settings.
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@harmlessdave I just faked my location as US on Kobo with a random real address, problem solved. (No need for a proxy or US card)
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Does Seven Seas have a page that shows which Light Novels they have licensed? When I visit their series page it seems like they put all of their manga and light novel series onto the same page which makes it confusing.
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