Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.
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Fantastic that they are fixing their mistakes.
F**ked for those of us that bought these on release day and now have 9 volumes of books that are now "The Censored Version". Yes, even the one that is released in 3 days requires to be revised.
For me that is about $200 worth of books that now need to be rebought, because I can't see any retailor taking back books because a "revision" has been released. -
Good news for Mushoku Tensei fans and this also brings hope that maybe they'll also fix their other series that they censored.
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@timmaaah said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
Fantastic that they are fixing their mistakes.
F**ked for those of us that bought these on release day and now have 9 volumes of books that are now "The Censored Version". Yes, even the one that is released in 3 days requires to be revised.
For me that is about $200 worth of books that now need to be rebought, because I can't see any retailor taking back books because a "revision" has been released.Yeah, the fact that I have eight (at minimum, because who knows how many books are going to be implicated by the end) censored/abridged physical volumes that their response to is basically "good luck dealing with whoever you bought them from" is really galling. I know they don't want to have to deal with the issue themselves, but this is a bed they made. They're passing the buck on the more expensive version of their product, and they know that most retailers are going to be uncooperative on the returns at all, much less ensuring that the customer gets a new 'Revised' marked copy if they're actually willing to do an exchange. I have zero faith that Amazon will want to deal with any of this, which means that in reality, this might actually make them a profit from people re-buying new copies of the books if they really care about it.
Is it positive that they at least claim they're going to change policies going forward? Yes, and it's good that eBook buyers are getting revisions pushed out, but they're not making anything right for the chunk of their audience that requires more than just labor and a digital update. Between the lack of accountability on the physical side, and the increasing number of series found to be effected by editing policies that were immensely disrespectful and should never have been implemented to begin with, my trust in this company is effectively shattered. I don't see myself buying ANYTHING from them now until I read online that there are no issues with it, even if that means waiting until every book in the series has come out to do so.
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Great so now I have 8 printed volumes that there is no chance in hell will be replaced by the retailer while seven seas waves their hands of it.
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I can understand why they aren't offering print replacements. Seven Seas probably does not have deep enough pockets to eat that loss and stay in business. If you give a company a choice between either taking a hit to their reputation (and losing a bunch of customers), or going out of business completely, most companies will choose to stay in business with less customers.
Still, I hope that they can fix it somehow so that the people who previously bought physical copies can at least read the corrected versions. Errata-pages is probably a no-go since these corrections probably change page lengths which would lead to needing to errata-page entire chapters. The most straightforward way would be to give everyone who previously bought a physical copy a digital copy for free.
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@catstorm Yeah same.
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I don't have the prints of these...but if I did and they came from Amazon... Since all my prints are pretty much like new condition, while morally questionable, I'd consider buying the revisions and then do a return and send back the censored one.
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@khaos
That would be amazing if you could get away with that.I don't buy physical books due to the shipping cost but from what I know books should have a barcode on them and if Amazon is not stupid they should be checking if the barcode on the book that was returned was the same as the one that was delivered.
JNC LN Ranking:
1st - Rokujouma
2nd - Realist Hero
3rd - Bookworm -
God, never was I so relieved by not doing something I had decided to do. Back when they announced MT, I pretty much promised myself I'd get the physical versions, but in the end just got the digital versions and told myself I'd get them in bulks once at least 10 books were released (to ease shipping costs, international shipping can ramp up fast). I guess I'll have to wait a few months.
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While I'm happy to see Mushoku Tensei getting fixed I do hope they commit to fixing Classroom of the Elite one day since that was something I intended to read.
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@bartzbb That might work if the new version of the book is published with the same ISBN as the original release, but if it gets a new number Amazon will likely reject it due to the reason you stated.
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@paulnamida
You also must take into account how much of the old stock the retailers have left, and for how long. They might not even order the new ones until that runs out. And by 'running out', I don't mean throwing into garbage... -
@korppi indeed. It's going to be a pain disposing of my old versions without binning them.. Time to donate to charity shops I guess...
Seven Seas, saving the planet one chopped down tree at a time... I hope retailers can differentiate between old and new else even more books go to landfill
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Something I've been wondering for a while: has Seven Seas actually acknowledged fault? Thus far the statements I've seen (mostly from the ANN articles linked) make it sound like they're more trying to justify the changes, and the only acknowledgement is "maybe the fans disagree with our editing, so we'll magnanimously change the editorial process just for them".
I've not yet seen a statement which has the message "we were wrong, and we will try not to do this in the future". Which makes me wonder if Seven Seas even considers this wholesale removal of important portions of the text as "wrong", or just "differences in opinion".
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@unsynchedcheese
I agree with you that Seven Seas should acknowledge that what they did was wrong and apologize but I highly doubt that will ever happen.Admitting to it would mean that this "editorial" policy that they have has been in effect since long ago and that would mean that all of the books that they have ever released has a chance of having these "editorial" changes. This would just anger the community and they would lose their trust even more.
They should first show their sincerity by fixing every affected book that they have ever released and then apologize. With this they could at least minimize the backlash from the community. However, this is unlikely to happen since even now it's the fans of the series that are finding these changes and reporting them.
It's hard to trust a company when they aren't even showing any sign of fixing the problem and are just waiting for their customer to complain. I would understand if the problem was just grammatical errors, wrong images, and other minor mistakes. But for this kind of mistake it's the company who should be proactive not the customers.
JNC LN Ranking:
1st - Rokujouma
2nd - Realist Hero
3rd - Bookworm -
@bartzbb said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
Admitting to it would mean that this "editorial" policy that they have has been in effect since long ago and that would mean that all of the books that they have ever released has a chance of having these "editorial" changes. This would just anger the community and they would lose their trust even more.
Wonder if any of the editors/staff who worked at TokyoPop around ~2010s when they went bust went on to work for Seven Seas who were rising at the time? TP also had extensive changes in the novels they released, and the work field is certainly a bit niche...
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While I am not able to provide specifics, I can say that, based on our internal investigation, there was not one singular cause for the issues fans have reported with a handful of Seven Seas' Airship titles, as these books were worked on over a wide span of time. It only comes across like there is a pattern because several unrelated problems were being reported at the same time. --AA
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@sevenseas
Not to be rude or anything but since this is the internet anyone can claim to be someone that they are not so if you really are a part of Seven Seas then I think you should announce what you've said publicly and not here in the JNC Forums since the only one who would know would be those of us here in JNC and not everyone else.But it's good to hear that you can at least ensure the book in the Airship label are safe. Although some would still be skeptical about it and some random fan would probably try to challenge your claim and still compare the books from the Japanese version. It's still a good news for some.
JNC LN Ranking:
1st - Rokujouma
2nd - Realist Hero
3rd - Bookworm -
@bartzbb I'm skeptical at this point. First it was localization issues, then it was an editorial process that is no longer in place. So...Now it would be unrelated incidents.....
I think, as you say, a more official channel for this information is in order. Hard to believe anyway.
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@sevenseas said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
While I am not able to provide specifics, I can say that, based on our internal investigation, there was not one singular cause for the issues fans have reported with a handful of Seven Seas' Airship titles, as these books were worked on over a wide span of time. It only comes across like there is a pattern because several unrelated problems were being reported at the same time.
I appreciate the transparency here. (Assuming that you are indeed a representative of Seven Seas Entertainment, speaking in the capacity of your position. If you're just an employee speaking their mind, I would recommend more clearly representing yourself as such rather than using the company brand, and probably not making comments like that at all so that your employer can control their messaging.)
I will say that it looks different from my perspective as a reader. While the big ones that drew large complaints (MT, CotE, ILV) may have all come from different causes, I do think there's an underlying problem here that Seven Seas' (previous?) editing process deleted too much, and it seems like it did so even when it was functioning correctly.
Earlier in this thread, @DragooMind posted about some additional removals from MT and @Macadate posted about some removals from Bloom Into You. The best thing that can be said about these omissions is that they're harmless. The stories are still comprehensible without those passages. By some measures, one could say those passages are "unnecessary," in that they just spell out things that were elsewhere implied, or are "only" worldbuilding in the case of the MT passage - but your customers were both surprised and unhappy to learn that such removals were made at all.
There's a lot of uncertainty right now about how Seven Seas will draw the line in the future. People don't know if you'd stand by those sorts of harmless omissions as policy (perhaps to try to get the page count down as low as possible while still delivering the story) or if we should expect faithful translations, warts-and-all, even if the author goes off on a tangent for a paragraph in the middle of a conversation.
It may even be that you have two customer bases who want different things, but even in that case, I think it would help everyone if you clarified what your mission is when you adapt a work, so that people know what to expect when buying something from Seven Seas.
