PinkuBentoBox

A few years back, I was recommended a little anime series called Boogiepop Phantom by a friend here in Australia. After spying the first volume on the cheap in HMV, I decided I’d give it a look, and I was very glad I did. Delightfully creepy and masterfully written, each episode switched to a different character and highlighted another facet of the overall plot. I really enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone looking for something a bit more cerebral in their anime.

But this isn’t a rant about how good the anime is. Instead, I want to whine about the novels. Nagi (who is also a big fan of the series) and I were both very excited to hear that small-time manga publisher Seven Seas had picked up the novels and were translating them. I waited, and then waited, then waited some more. Then a stunning chain of events occurred, leaving me quite bitter towards Seven Seas, along with partners in crime Borders.

Angry rant ahead. You have been warned.

The world has quite cleverly conspired against me ever getting hold of these novels without having to bend over backwards to jump through several dozen hoops while cutting red tape and having my poor wallet repeatedly violated. Eventually I came to a conclusion over the whole matter: either Seven Seas hates Australians, or they want to see the novels fail.

The first problem is the issue from which everything else that’s gone on hinges. Seven Seas signed a deal with retailer Borders, giving Borders exclusive rights to the novels for the first 6 months. I’m unsure what Seven Seas get out of a deal like that - apparently it means Borders will ‘promote’ it, and I imagine that boils down to putting it in their shitty monthly brochure somewhere.

Regardless, I didn’t think this was too bad a deal. Borders are a big international chain, they’re in the US, Canada, the UK, Singapore and Australia. In fact, there’s a Borders about 5 minutes from my house. I quite liked going there, since the place is huge and carries an extremely wide range of stuff - it’s the only bookstore chain I know of to stock Tabletop RPG materials, for example, and they ususally have a wide variety of manga as well. So initially I thought, “great, I’ll just wait for their stock to arrive!”

Of course, things are never that easy. It turns out that the exclusivity deal extends to Borders in Canada, the USA, the UK… but not Australia. Why this is, I don’t exactly know. It’s actually quite puzzling, as one of Seven Seas’ big things is western-made ‘World Manga’, and several of their best-selling titles are drawn by Australians. I assume that they don’t have a similar agreement for that. Not that I really care, since as a jaded elitist anime asshole, I consider manga to only be manga if it’s been made in Japan.

So anyway, this means that I’ve got a 6-month wait before I can purchase the book. Highly annoying, but it could be worse. Unfortunately, it does get worse. The first thing I did upon learning that the exclusivity deal neglected Australia was to hop onto Borders’ website and see if they had any method for purchasing books online, since that way I could avoid waiting for the six months extra. Well, it turns out that they do have that capability. Borders partners with Amazon.com to sell books online. Which is an utter crock of shit, it turns out, because Borders’ exclusive items are not available to purchase via Amazon, because Amazon is not Borders, despite Amazon handling all of Borders’ online sales…

At this point, the novel had actually been out for several weeks in the US, so I had three options. All of them extremely inconvenient. Either I wait for the plebes to get the books, or I buy a ludicrously overpriced import copy from a place in Melbourne city (side note: getting into that place would require 20 minutes by car followed by 45 minutes on the train followed by about 20 on foot) or finally I could have gotten Nagi to buy me a copy and mail it at obscene prices. Books tend to be extremely expensive to ship here, due to the weight.

Well, having no feasible way to get money to Nagi, and not really wanting to have to pay insane prices for someone who purchased a book from Borders USA, imported and then resold it for a profit on top of that, I decided I’d file a preorder with Amazon and wait. For six months.

So I thought that would be the end of it. At this point, there’s nothing much to warrant ranting over… but things progress from there. You see, Seven Seas are fucking stupid. If you go to their website, you will see that they list ’street dates’ for the Boogiepop books. These are totally incorrect. They’re the dates that Borders get them, not the dates that everyone else get them. I don’t know about everyone else, but that doesn’t seem like a street date to me. That’s more like a Borders-exclusive advance date. Big retailers like Amazon agree, if you list a street date for a book, Amazon expect to be able to get that book around about that date, so that they can then sell the book.

I placed my order at Amazon well before the exclusive date. Anyone want to hazard a guess what happens at Amazon when they’ve been waiting for a book to arrive for four months after the date, and haven’t seen stock? Of course, they do what any sane retailer would do in the case of an obscure book from a small-time publisher - they assume that the book had a limited print run and is out of print, and they can’t source it. Then they cancel your order.

So I wake up one morning to an Amazon email. At the time, I had been waiting for ages for Robot vol. 2 to ship (side note: buy these!) and I thought I was finally getting it. No such luck. “Hay dood, looks like we can’t get this book. Your order’s cancelled, dood!” Except the email was not sent by a Prinny. I’m like “what the fuck?” and so I contact Seven Seas.

Their response is exactly what I wasn’t hoping for. I was told - not in as much words, and very politely mind you - essentially to fuck off and stop complaining. They hadn’t heard anything about Amazon not stocking the book, since it wasn’t even available for them to sell at that point, after all, so there was clearly no problems at all. Shut up and sit in your fucking corner, stop complaining about the borders exclusive that cut your country out. God, these fucking Australians, always causing trouble. I swear, if they stir up shit again I’m going to travel down to that godforsaken shitsplat and rape your fucking dog.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was a small publisher, this is not the response I would give. If I were a small publisher, I’d be wanting to smooth a few feathers, not ruffle them more. One of your (potential) customers who wasn’t already turned off by having to wait an additional six months for your product, and who was ready and willing to pony up about $25 USD to get your book (shipping is a bitch to Australia) had their order cancelled by the biggest online retailer in your industry, because they couldn’t source the book. Regardless of whether it’s a mistake or oversight by the retailer, the customer is coming to you, because that’s where the buck stops. They want your product, but they can’t get your product, so you tell them to go back to waiting, just place another order, everything’s fine, we can’t hear you, la la la… They don’t seem to have quite grasped the problem. The response I got would have been appropriate given to “Hey, I live in Eromanga, Queensland. Our town of 50 has a book store, Bumfuck Books, and they can’t manage to get a copy of your book and had to cancel my order!” But this is fucking Amazon cancelling orders.

This kept me angry for quite a while. Then last night, I was talking on IRC about translated anime novels. Seven Seas aren’t the only fish in the pond. In fact, there’s a huge fucking shark floating around in there too, called Tokyopop. Tokyopop have a couple of interesting licenses. Banner of the Stars and Twelve Kingdoms. You know, stuff that fans have been lusting over for years… and guess what? I can buy those. When they release, they’ll be in my local Borders a month or so after. I’ll be able to buy them from Amazon, too. In fact, I have the first Seikai novel ordered already. Tokyopop keep Amazon up to date with changes too, like the recent 1-month delay of aforementioned novels. They also have a terrible reputation for bad grammar, but at this point, I don’t really care. Unlike Boogiepop, I can actually get Tokyopop’s releases without having to bend over backwards. They’re cheaper, too.

So I ended up sort of thinking, maybe I was just being difficult. I’d been harbouring a bit of a grudge, resolved never to buy anything from Seven Seas, or to ever shop at Borders again - they’re just as complicit in things. I sort of knew I was being a bit unreasonable, and I really do want to read Boogiepop. So I went to Amazon to have a look for it.

Gaze upon the entry. Isn’t it grand? I love how nowhere on the page is there any capability to buy a new copy from Amazon. Yeah, Seven Seas, you’re right. They sure are stocking it. Must be selling thousands of copies. Though all I see at the moment is a single used copy being sold by someone in the UK… I bet that Seven Seas would still say that they stand by their Borders exclusive. I’ve also done some digging, and it seems even Seven Seas themselves have no fucking clue when they’re supposed to release the thing - one page says August, another says October, the street date says February… regardless, I can’t order it, I can’t preorder it, I can’t fucking buy it. I have my money here to purchase it and they can’t take it because Seven Fucking Seas are too fucking retarded for the right hand to figure out what the left hand is fucking doing.

The thing is, they’ve only licensed the first three novels. They had to sell well before Seven Seas bothered to license more. Amazon is not carrying the book, and fans throughout the world couldn’t buy it until it was so much later as to be a non-issue. Borders’ exclusive deal didn’t even extend to all their international stores (and Australia has nearly 30, in case you’re thinking it might just be one or two.) So, are they deliberately sabotaging their efforts so that they can pull out of a money-wasting idea without pulling an ADV and just stopping, or is it that they have some kind of hate for people outside the US? It’s pretty hard to feel like supporting a company who
clearly doesn’t give a rat’s ass about their customers. Nagi speculated earlier that it might even be a stupid publicity stunt - they deliberately sabotage their sales, then announce that they’re dropping it, because the ‘fans didn’t support it’ and it ‘didn’t sell’. Then they point out that their craptastic Webcomic World Manga sells better than a well-known Japanese series… Time to make some tinfoil hats.

I’m sure that if they were to appear here and comment, Seven Seas will say that all my complaints are Borders’ fault, not theirs, conveniently passing the buck. This is pure bullshit. It’s not as if Borders sent out hired goons to kidnap Seven Seas’ families to hold at gunpoint until they signed that exclusivity deal. How many sales did they actually gain? How many did they piss off and eventually lose? Maybe it doesn’t matter, and I’m part of such a small minority that they don’t care. Maybe I’m just not dedicated enough a fan, I mean, if I really wanted it I’d have gotten it somehow, after all. That’s probably true, actually - I don’t want to have to jump through arbitrary hoops to get hold of a ~300 page novel for the equivalent in price of two locally-released paperbacks.

Fuck you, Borders. You too, Seven Seas. Fuck you right through the knickers. I’ll take my money to your competitors, since I can actually buy their products.