Licensed Manga

[astromath]

Add a tag to show that a manga is licensed and by whom along with the link to the licensing site.

This should stop all those "but the other reading site has those chapters" whining.

P.S. I did look through the megathread and did not see this suggestion.

 

[Spitefire]

It's there though.
Indicator that a title has been licensed

 

[Plykiya]

Don't really think this is necessary. Licensing eventually goes away, company goes defunct, or they just stop selling them. At that point the licensed status doesn't matter. As long as there's a working Official English link that should be enough to tell people that it's licensed and still available to be purchased.

The people who ask about chapters are the same people who don't bother checking the MangaUpdates link on the page to tell whether or not a scanlator worked on it or if it was done by an official publisher instead.

 

[ununseti]

Implementing this sounds like it would require a lot of effort, because consider all these cases:
- licensed for multiple languages by multiple publishers in different regions (e.g. Naruto)
- licensed for the same language by multiple publishers in different regions (e.g. Pokemon Special)
- licensed by a now-defunct publisher with some volumes remaining untranslated (e.g. Gakuen Alice)
- licensed by a now-defunct publisher with some volumes remaining untranslated, and then later picked up again by a different publisher, who translated the missing volumes (e.g. Yotsuba&!)
- licensed by a now-defunct publisher and then re-issued by a different publisher (e.g. Azumanga Daioh)
- licensed by a publisher but they stopped before they translated all of the volumes (e.g. Wandering Son)

...which all actually sounds like things that happen with scanlators as well, except with the additional constraint of geographic regions. Maybe a new type similar to groups could be created for publishers? idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, I would be interested a more comprehensive way of dealing with licensing and whatnot. Right now, the "Official English" link solution feels rather brittle and Anglocentric.

From an i18n perspective, I think it'd be nice to have a centralized index of all of the different publishers for a manga, which languages that publisher publishes in, whether that licensor is defunct or not, and so on. Might be helpful for prioritizing which titles to try and get licensed next (e.g. in Seven Seas Entertainment's monthly survey). I think it'd be helpful to see the existing publishers (including the original Japanese ones) because apparently US publishers sometimes have ties to all the series of a company, so it could be helpful in deciding which US publisher is your best bet for trying to get a particular title published.

(There are actually a lot of series that I like that are licensed in French but not English... And my French is not that good :/)

Here's one use case where having a license categorization system might be helpful: Finding a list of all Yen Press shoujo ai/yuri titles. There's no easy way to do this in MU because apparently you can't search by both genre and publisher at the same time.

But yeah, putting together a fully comprehensive licensor categorization system does sound complicated, so I understand if there are higher priority tasks to be done. But I do hope that the Anglocentric "Official English" link feature gets expanded someday to be more i18n-friendly.