Have you guys ever considered releasing light-novels in english? Copies would probably be very limited, BUT it would be very cool to have some professional quality translations around.
All we currently have is crap at BakaTsuki.
just as an interesting side note: Over the past year of so I’ve been busily cataloging a number of untranslated light novels which were donated to the library where I work. Let’s see…there was a Haruhi title, Strike Witches, some Eva books, Battleship Yamato, Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society, Garden of Sinners, and a bunch more I’m not very familiar with. Looks like I’m going to have to get off my ass and benkyo shimasu.
I like the idea, personally. But how large is the market? And how large would it be if the novels were digital only?
Well, the Haruhi and Spice and Wolf novels have been on the market in english. I know Tokyopop released some of the Full Metal Panic novels before it went out of business.
I’d certanly get the Baccano!, Durarara, and Fate/Zero novels if they were ever released in english. Baccano! most of all since I want to see what happens after the anime
I’m the spoilsport that voted “no”. I’ve got no particular interest in light novels.
I’d be honest, I don’t have interest in light novels, i prefer manga personally. therefore, i won’t buy a light novel even if there were one available. Well, i did buy one-two of them but that was before i was even aware of the light novels i thought they were mangas and i got confused when i got home and read them. Ended up reading a couple but, eh, don’t care really, i rather enjoy the art that’s available in the manga. I moved on long time ago from the novel scene. bored of nothing but text, text everywhere.
Digital would probably be the safest bet. It would probably depend on the title too. Might be best to pick stuff that has anime adaptions first…
I would be pretty interested in KnK, Jintai, Horizon(have fun with that), Katanagatari, Seitokai no Ichizon, and Dantalian no Shoka.
The idea is good… I like it.
I think the market for light novels would definitely be lesser than the one for manga. Unless the author or the series was famous, it’d be tough for someone to know about the work.
How about using fan translation groups and produce already translated light novels.
Personally, the ones I’d like the most will be Type Moon stuff like KNK, Fate Zero Romeo Tanaka’s Jintai.
I’ve always found light novels a lot easier to read than manga personally- manga I find to be too visually busy and distracting. I definitely think JAST should look into this even if it is digital-only at first.
And, if you’re going digital, I’d personally like to see them released in ebook-friendly formats like epub, azw, mobi etc. I occasionally grab light novels off DLSite but they’re often PDF which, while ebook readers can handle them, isn’t really the most optimal format and doesn’t really work well with changing the font size, different resolutions of ereader etc. Thankfully the PDFs are often formatted with small pages in mind but this isn’t always the case and it sucks to be forced to choose between reading at far too low a font size or needing to scroll across the page (the eink readers tend to have quite slow page refreshes making horizontal scrolling even more painful than normal)
Those “fan translation” groups are terrible
Agree, the quality is not very good. For me, they make decent translations because, probably my japanese is not good.
I liked Fate zero by baka tsuki. Others all was on-off deal 
Is Fate/apocrypha there?