Tough Time for Honest Comics Readers

JManga, a digital manga service created less than 2 years ago by 39 of the biggest publishers in Japan, is shutting down in a couple months. Most cloud services related fears became a reality when it was clear no refund or backups would be offered. Check out their “Urgent Message” for more details, but believe me when I say it can’t get any worse:

It is not possible to download manga from My Page. All digital manga content will no longer be viewable after May 30th 2013 at 11:59pm (US Pacific Time)

Everybody then wondered what would happen if ComiXology went down. And funnily enough, just the day before, ComiXology had experienced a massive blackout which left people unable to read any issues they didn’t have in their cache.

Rich Jonston from Bleeding Cool concludes:

This is the moment when the real winners are comic stores… and pirates.

As I said before, and as many others said before me: own your data. Cloud services are fine by me as long as there’s a way to easily backup my stuff on my file server, thank you very much.