Jmanga just announced it’ll be pining for the fjords in the near future, and since it’s basically a viewer that lets you read but not download manga that means all the money people have spent on it “buying” manga is going to go away, along with the manga they supposedly bought. No surprise then that folks are looking at other digital manga (and comics) outfits they’ve bought into or been looking at and wondering if they’re all as ephemeral. They aren’t – I see 3 different groups here: Good Guys (who actually sell you something that you own regardless of what happens to the service afterward), Hearts of Gold (who also sell you something you own and can keep using…if you’ll just jump through a few hoops), and Problem Children (who make it as hard as possible to actually own what you’ve bought). I’ll only discuss the first group this time around.

Incidentally, I don’t think any of these lists is complete as-is: if you’re aware of more services that belong on any of them let me know and I’ll see about updating them.

The Good Guys
These companies or services sell you a set of files that are independent of their service; once you’ve made your purchase you can download these files and from then on even if the publisher loses the license or completely ceases to exist your comics are unaffected. This means that you don’t need to rely on any particular comic-reader app (though some might offer a better experience). Many of these services try to combat piracy by incorporating some sort of tracking information in the files they sell, so if one of their titles ends up being distributed illicitly they can try to identify the culprit. Companies that fall into this category include:

• Digital Manga Publishing’s emanga.com these are sold in a variety of formats (so as to work on as wide a variety of devices as possible; PDF is an available format
• SuBLime Manga (a BL/yaoi publisher) makes all their ebooks available as PDFs.
• Gen Manga (a publisher of independent manga titles) makes all their books available as PDFs, in addition to the DRM’d iBooks and Kindle versions.
• Drive Thru Comics sells PDFs that are watermarked with the purchaser’s name and order number, as do all the drivethrustuff stores (DriveThruRPG, etc.)
• 1 Dollar Scan (or a number of other scanning services, no doubt) – these companies don’t sell comics, but they do sell the service of digitizing the ones you have. In the case of 1 Dollar Scan, the physical book is destroyed as part of the scanning process, but you end up with a completely unencumbered PDF. One downside: these files are larger than the digital manga you buy from other publishers.