Originally, this was supposed to be an article about self-awareness and how it could be the key to help saving the manga industry. And then out of the blue, the big digital manga initiative that was considered to be a “savior of manga”, JManga goes kaput. So what now and does Japan even care?
When was JManga ever called the "savior of manga?" It barely was a drop in the bucket and I heard absolutely nothing about the service since it was announced until it's closure.
Looking at some of the stuff they have on there, it most likely was the lack of worthwhile series that caused their failure. Sure there is an audience out there for some of those obscure manga, but without any of the big dogs coming to the party, people will go elsewhere.
Viz Media is the only other company that does it legally online like that, and they now have English translations of some of the biggest series only a couple days after illegal versions are released, meaning it is viable to invest money into their Weekly Shonen Jump service. But even then many people simply get faster and arguably better translations online.
For example, Viz's cleaning of a series has shown a drastic disregard for redrawing as you'll see in this image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media...
I give props to VIZ Media for trying. They're doing something right. Though it makes me wonder if Shueisha is the only Japanese manga publisher that seems to care since they are interested in what their baby, VIZ, is doing.
The most disappointing thing about all this is simply that those who did legally purchase their manga from JManga will have no way to retrieve these in future. I presume it's possible to save everything one page at a time (unless they've got some stupid kind of DRM on them), but that's got to be prohibitively time consuming for anyone with a big collection.
^That's the problem. They did implement DRM on their content.
Japanese business culture had no chance against the fast-changing internet age. They just cannot keep up or innovate, and are so far behind I am afraid about the future of their country.