more light novels coming to the us
Categories: anime news, manga, snipe
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I know I whine about this a lot, but Tokyopop seems serious about bringing light novels over to the US… they just announced Kino‘s and 12 Kingdom‘s light novels in addition to the much anticipated (at least by me) Crest of the Stars, which comes out in September.
8 Responses to “more light novels coming to the us”
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Ooooho 12 Kingdoms… I enjoyed the anime and apparently the novels are even better. Hopefully they’ll be released here in Australia.
Well, hot damn.
I demand moar light novels.
Not that I don’t have a lot to read, but, Damn.
We need someone bringing over Kara no Kyokai and DDD.
It’s kind of funny that a year ago I was dreaming of Seikai, 12K, Scrapped Princess and Boogiepop getting translated. Now all of them are being translated.
Everything would be perfect if Kara no Kyokai, Hantsuki, Haruhi and Shana would also get a official translation. I think that Haruhi and Shana could get translated if the animes sell well.
I have a suspicion that the rapid online translation of Suzumiya Haruhi is the reason behind this venture by Tokyopop. They realize that if they tarry too long, many of the good novels are going to be translated and offered free over the internet instead of them making some profit from it. This is very similar to what happened in Korea about 10 years ago. Almost all the Japanese best sellers were being translated by on-line community, so book sellers in Japan and Korea had to market new book translations aggressively or risk losing even more market share. Now days, since Koreans can easily buy authorized translations at their local bookstores, there isn’t much on-line translations going on, save for some new hot series yet to be licensed. If the Tokyopop’s response is a reaction to Suzumiya Haruhi translation project, as I suspect, then we can truely say that Haruhi is changing the world.
TokyoPop announced Kino’s Journey, the Sekai novels, and Scrapped Princess months ago (along with most of these other titles — 12 Kingdoms is one of the only surprises), so I doubt the online translation of the Haruhi novels has much to do with it.
May be so, but if we see some other announcements in following few weeks, you have to suspect it. Japanese publishers lost out on some big money in Korea because they licensed some of their best sellers too late. If they suspect similar thing can happen in USA, they will mobilize their resources.
12K was apparently licensed about a year and a half ago, they just haven’t been able to announce it.
I may actually buy any and all of these, even the non-Japanese ones; they’ll probably be overpriced, but I really want to check out Kino and 12K in particular.
my bad you already know that information, don’t check the rest of your blog, but please tell go out by the novels.