Part 1 discussed the Good Guys, digital comic services that let you own what you buy; part 2 covered services that let you take ownership of your purchases if you’re willing to do a little work (though maybe they don’t intend for things to work that way). What remains are the services that make it genuinely hard to actually own what you pay for; sadly that seems to be a lot of these services – too many for me to cover in one post. So this time I’ll talk about just one (even thought the backup technique I describe will be useful for a number of others) – the whole reason I’m rushing to write this series now: Jmanga.

Why is Jmanga the motivation for me to write all this down right now? Well, they’re a digital manga provider that 1) gave people access to a lot of titles we weren’t and aren’t likely to get otherwise, 2) provided access to read their comics only through a Flash app on their website (so there was no local download and no real mobile applications, and 3) announced 2 weeks back without any warning that they’re shutting down. In other words, this is suddenly kind of urgent. How urgent? Well, Jmanga required you to buy points with money and spend points to buy manga. Their shutdown dates are:

• 3/13 no longer able to buy more points
• 3/26 last day to spend points on new manga purchases; any remaining points after this date will be refunded as an Amazon gift card
• 5/30 last day to read comics on the service

Yeah, “shutting down” means all the stuff you purchased goes away. Unless there’s a way to back stuff up. Also, if there’s a way to keep from losing access to the manga you bought, it might actually be worthwhile to spend your remaining Jmanga points instead of wait and get the gift card. But the time to make that decision is, uh, right now.

So there’s the question: is there a reasonable way to hold on to your Jmanga purchases? And the answer here applies to a lot of these digital comic services: yeah, kind of. UPDATE: the answer is “yes, install Python and use the script at http://pastebin.com/gbzdbaN7” (I’ll be testing it later). The process below may continue to be useful for other services.

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