Part of the point of the Industry panel was to say they need to reach out beyond Teens. That means making some changes in the way they’ve been doing things. Don’t get stuck on the idea that it’s only teens that need to be marketed to. They don’t. They have the social networks to find things. Parents and young kids don’t.

I’m not surprised that you purchased a book that you’d sampled online because I’ve done the same thing. But again, I think that’s a function of our age–we like books, and are willing to spend money on them for the sake of actually having physical copies. When kids have so many avenues for sampling these books for free (i.e. scanlations, squatting in Barnes and Noble), I can see why publishers are reluctant to invest the time, money, and energy into posting significant amounts of material online. It’s a significant IT investment.

Yes, exactly. By making the volumes available for free, they upped the hits and site traffic on Loveless over other titles. You can see the same pattern with Fool’s Gold vol 1, Pantheon High vol 1, and My Cat Loki vol 1, all of which were made available for free to read online. The question would be, did making these volumes free to read up their sales as well? I would say so, since I bought vol 1 of Loki after reading it online.

The problem is we won’t know how much it will help unless we get some of that information from the publishers, and they don’t see too forthcoming with it. I would disagree that teens don’t look online. The teens of today are spending more and more time online, and are coming to expect to find content online. They are already doing it with CDs, movies and TV. It stands to reason that they would be the same with their books. The advantage books have over music and video, is that the physical experience is still better than the digital. That’s why I think online manga would still work.

I do think, however, that making “C list” titles available online probably won’t help much, at least for titles aimed at the teen market. If you compare the number of hits on the various Loveless pages at Tokyopop with those on less popular pages, you’ll notice a significant difference in the amount of site traffic. For titles aimed at a more mature audience–say, DMP’s newly acquired Swallowing the Earth–I think your suggestion makes more sense, as these are the folks most likely to use the Internet to actually research a book as opposed to, say, finding pictures of hot male characters from the book.