Amazon is the largest retailer outside of China, and it’s often the first stop for many shoppers.
So it’s not surprising that anyone who wants to sell their product will want to make it available on Amazon. And for those who want to publish digital content like an eBook, the process is rather simple.
According to Amazon, “Publishing takes less than 5 minutes and your book appears on Kindle stores worldwide within 24-48 hours.” Upload a file, add some basic information like title and price, and bam, you’re a published author on Amazon!
Of course, publishing on Amazon means following their rules. They have some generic and/or vague rules like no paid versions of already free public domain works and no “offensive content”. This latter one has caused some controversy and consternation in the animanga fanbase with several manga and light novel like How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord and No Game No Life being unavailable to purchase physically and/or digitally.
Still, with Amazon’s large catalog, there is no shortage of manga and light novels available, both from the major publishers and the smaller ones. Some Japanese creators have directly put their own works on the Kindle eBook for international readers, and a few are translated into English. A lot of these titles have been added to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription service. For $9.99 a month (or less with a longer term), readers can access more than 2 million books as well as some audiobooks and magazines.
Authors can choose to enroll in a program called KDP Select. In exchange for exclusivity, creators are given benefits like being able to make their titles Kindle Unlimited eligible.
Royalties are earned based upon the total number of pages read of an author’s work over the total amount read. So for instance, in July 2021, for a 150 page manga, if read in full, the author would have earned about $.66 per reader.
KDP Select is free, so while there are some downsides for locking into the Kindle format, Kindle Unlimited may also bring in money creators might not get in the normal pay-and-own format.
Regardless, the simplicity of self-publishing digitally means that anyone can do it. While authors who would be rejected from the established publishing outfits get a chance to put their work out there, this also means some bad-faith actors can get in on the act as well.
Case in point, this series:
Never heard of “Shadow healing Sorceress” before? Well, that may not be a surprise — after all, there are thousands of manga out there, and plus there are indie works. Here’s a sample from it:
Some of you may think it looks vaguely familiar. But yet, so many isekai stories follow the same pattern, so that could explain it.
However, if you’ve ever used the Alpha Manga app before…
Yep, the “Shadow healing Sorceress” manga series is actually Alpha Manga’s The Black Healer. The Kindle book is nothing but a fan scanlation where someone is trying to get money off of it.
The Black Healer is not the only one. Kaiten Books, for instance, has found a couple of their titles available to purchase on Amazon or read through Kindle Unlimited for free as well.
In fact, here’s the search result page when I search for “manga” on Kindle Unlimited:
Let’s take a look at some of the red flags:
- Lots of Japanese-looking fiction with non-Japanese sounding names
- Cover images not in the standard dimension or orientation
- No names on the covers
- Using the same cover for every volume
By the time this article goes live, some of these may be pulled. But there has been a large rise in these fan scanlations put up for purchase or free to borrow. Most seem to slightly change its official or well-known title to avoid being flagged, like the “Shadow healing Sorceress” for The Black Healer or this latest spin-off of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure which is unlicensed in English where the title doesn’t even match the cover.
Why all of these illegal uploads are on the first page of results while popular manga like Attack on Titan are lost in the crowd likely has a simple explanation: most of these that you see have only been released in the last week or two. Amazon probably thinks they’re boosting a new creator and showing off their newest additions to Kindle Unlimited.
On the other hand, it does seem ridiculous that the Kindle content team will pull legitimate titles but yet all of these pirated works are managing to be put for sale. As for why this practice seems to have exploded all of a sudden, I’m not sure. I’ve searched manga on Kindle Unlimited before, and these pirated works were not all over the place a year, year and a half ago. I guess it’s the latest scam, right after using official manga or light novel covers and then putting a note in the descriptions that this is actually a notepad. And for the scammers, it’s a low-risk attempt to gain a few bucks. Most people are going to completely read a manga volume, so even at, say, $.50 a book in royalties, all it takes is a few people to earn several dollars. And all they had to do was upload some pictures and slap together a cover in Paint.
This also may be another indication of how popular manga has become, especially since the pandemic. The market is bigger, so that means more people are willing to pay. Many fans may assume that if they’re paying for something or it’s available on Amazon, they’re supporting the industry. So unlike the scanlations or official rips on piracy sites which can look sketchy with all their ads, the Amazon name gives them a veneer of legitimacy. And, KDP Select is free, so that’s why so most of these scans and rips are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited versus just put up for sale.
Obviously, it would be impossible for the Kindle content team to double-check the rights of every graphic novel (or, even moreso, every work) that’s submitted to KDP Select, but the company does need to find a way to crack down on all of these uploads. I figured out The Black Healer by Googling the name of the heroine. The name of the lead of the “Reincarnated as the eighth Son: Another World” manga was different on the resource I used, but it was still easy to cross-reference because there aren’t too many manga with the keywords “eight/eighth” and “son” in the title. And Steel Ball Run is the actual Japanese title of that manga.
So what should you do when you see one of these illegal manga? Well, there is a link at the bottom of the page on a book to report copyright violations.
But when you click on it, the page clearly says only the copyright holder(s) and their agent(s) can use this form.
The link for buyers leads to a page about third-party sellers, which…doesn’t really help. I can understand the potential pitfall if someone angry at, say, an ex got all their friends to accuse an author of plagiarism just to cause drama. Fans can contact the English license holders to make sure they know about these uploads, but a lot of the illegal manga on Kindle aren’t available in English, so that’s impossible.
Amazon is trying to make changes recently, as with their brand new defective items policy because of the continued back-and-forth over who’s responsible for third-party products sold on Amazon — Amazon or the actual seller — but the goal here is to get these titles down ASAP instead of just having people file for refunds after. And if someone borrowed it as part of Kindle Unlimited, there’s nothing to refund, and the scammer could cash out their money before Amazon can act.
Best thing to do is to just keep raising awareness and hope the copyright holders start filing complaints against these individuals — or that Amazon steps up their game and prevents these series instead of pulling or preventing official works from being sold. But hey, perhaps some 1-star reviews couldn’t hurt, and borrowing or buying legitimate manga on Kindle would also help get the search algorithm to bury these pirated copies.