Anyone know why there are a number of eroge artbooks are all in western-style (left-to-right) format even when they are targeted at a Japanese readership?
First my Popotan artbook and now after I snagged cheap LE copy of Kimi ga Yobu Megiddo no Oka de. I think there was another one as well, but I can’t remember the title offhand. My non-eroge artbooks still read right-to-left so I’m not sure what’s going on here.
Cool factor. They do it the Western way, just for being exotic.
It’s like how some officially translated manga sold in the West, are published the Japanese way. Do you really need to that manga in a right-to-left format? Of course not. But it seems more exotic -more “authentic” if it’s done that way - despite having zero impact on the actual interpretation of the material.
I also notice how many eroge use English - or rather Engrish - in their advertising or intro movies. Why not just use Japanese? It wouldn’t look as cool (for the Japanese of course). Murdering German, Italian, and Latin also seems to be popular as well. Although the Japanese do get Latin right most of the time, since they just copy-paste a passage out the Bible or some famous Roman speech or something.
There was one eroge, that someone on 2chan (or was it 4chan) noticed used Excite to render Japanese to English, for their horrible Engrish segment. Forgot which one though.
Actually, as far as I know, that change was made by Tokyopop once upon a time (back when there wasn’t much of a manga market at all) because it’s cheaper to do. You can eliminate flipping all the panels, which takes time (and therefore costs money). Prior to that everybody was flipping the manga.
For a brief time, Viz experimented with some unflipped “limited edition” graphic novels when their main line was still all flipped GNs … before they just said ‘screw it’ and switched. Of course, Viz was also releasing individual issues - I think I might still have some of those. (Viz is one of the oldest players still around - about 10 years or so ago Viz was releasing individual issues once a month in standard comic book format. They even had a letters section in the back. The GNs only came out after all the issues were done, so you’d get maybe one or two graphic novels a year for a given series.)
I’ve heard that argument before, but it doesn’t make sense with modern imaging manipulation software being a standard.
Mirror image. Bam. Done.
Need to do 1000? No problem. Run the wizard. Bam x1000 . Done x1000. Actually takes more time to open the image.
Commercial publishers get the .PSD (or whatever program was used), from the original publishers. If they’re still scanning pages torn from a book, and performing cleanup, they’re doing it wrong. 
If they’re worried about 45 seconds of time being wasted, to flip all the pages at once, there’s something seriously wrong. 
It’s actually more of a strain on the printing company, to do them backwards, since 99.99% of everything else they print and bind goes the other way. So I’d argue it cost MORE to flip them Japanese style: I’d charge more to do something different, since it falls under “customized” or non-industry standard, if I were a print company (i.e. more work for the people I have; reprogramming the settings on the printer to do it backwards for TokyoPop and only TokyoPop).
Depends on how its done. A cover is still a cover whether its front or back and a page is still a page. So when they print, they might come out of the press upside down, but you just have the packer flip them over…or not. I’ve done printings for both and it doesn’t matter to the printing company. Hell we’ve had one of those that reads left to right half way through and then right-to-left the other half and it didn’t affect printing or binding,
I got a volume of manga once that was cut maybe a third of an inch off, so it had more white space at the bottom than usual. And it had a filename at the bottom of a small number of the pages. Exactly the kind that gets printed by common computer publishing software. So I actually have evidence that this happens 
However, this practice was started around 2002-2003. That was years ago, and I’m not sure how it was done back then. And while I can’t remember where I heard that exactly, I remember hearing it from industry sources (which unfortunately, I can’t remember exactly what sources … but I remember it being from panelists at ACen) that the reason Tokyopop made the change was … actually - it was either a) cheaper, or b) faster to do it that way. (Can’t remember which anymore.) And certainly, before Tokyopop did their thing, nobody was putting out near the quantity of books they were.
I do agree that it doesn’t make much sense anymore, but the market has proven that it is willing to accept the product that way, so nobody messes with it. Especially after Tokyopop chose to portray it in the marketing as being “more authentic”.
Not exactly, or at least the publishers here in Italy had a different reason when they started the right-to-left format in 1995.
In those years, our http://www.starcomics.com/ had got the rights for many manga from http://www.shueisha.co.jp/ , but oftentimes they also lamented the persistence of Shueisha in refusing the rights for the Dragon Ball manga if not published in the right-to-left format (I do not know/remember why), so in 1995 they released that manga in the Japanese way as a sort of commercial ‘experiment’ (first time someone dared that format in Italy).
Fortunately the sales were a big success, and now many (if not most) manga published in Italy use the right-to-left format (which I prefer for Japanese stuff, even if translated).
It’s become so much ingrained now that I’m not certain if a company flipped it that it would sell.