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?
100°
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...
Instead they simply inserted giant black bubbles and put the text in them. For example, another version of the page cleaned and put into English: http://z.mhcdn.net/store/ma...
All three pictures look exactly the same to me. I do see black boxes in the second panel. But I see that on all of the different versions. Can you be a bit more specific, like which panel exactly and what text?
... to just download the manga you love illegally online, and if you really like it, then buy the official book in the store.
Once an online-only service fails and goes down, and there's DRM involved, you'll end up having lost a huge investment, and the industry simply doesn't care about you, cause they already received your money.