The newest incarnation of the much-maligned Tokyopop website went live last week, eliciting less comment and, seemingly, less controversy, from manga fans than previous updates. (Hat tip to Brigid Alverson for notifying the community about the site relaunch.) That silence (or is it indifference?) piqued our interest, and so we dispatched a team of manga pundits–Chloe Ferguson, Sam Kusek, Michelle Smith, and me–to check it out. We test drove the new features, then sat down to mull three questions. First, Is the new Tokyopop site design an improvement over the previous version? Second, does it promote the Tokyopop brand effectively? And third, is it still a viable social networking site for manga fans?

MICHELLE: I know that I can’t really say whether it’s an improvement over the previous one, because I gave up on their site a few tweaks ago. I miss the good old days when you could get a listing of all their series on one page and then click through to the ones you were interested in. You didn’t have to search or go through the shop. You went to school in the snow uphill both ways, and you liked it!

SAM: I feel that the new Tokyopop website does a good job at promoting the brand image of Tokyopop; however, I feel that the image itself is not a good one. Tokyopop’s new website has created a way to feed disaster with its disorganization. It was a clever idea to start a social networking site as well, but sadly, it was poorly executed. The network isn’t monitored or organized in anyway, so it is impossible to actually find anything relating to Tokyopop products. Even the discussions are geared more towards “popular” series, like Bleach and Naruto, which is funny within itself.

Altogether, the site does a good job at being bad. It feeds the negative connotation that manga is just kids’ comics, not the serious art form that it is. I was very upset by the way they handled it, creating something meaningless instead of focusing on what matters most, the books themselves.

KATE: On the whole, I think the new site design is cleaner and easier to navigate. Dispensing with the marketing-speak labels (”Life,” “Hot,” “Stars”) makes it much easier to find things on the site, as do the new pull-down menus. I also like the new manga reader–the ability to embed, say, a Manga Pilot in a blog entry appeals to me as a reviewer, as it makes it easier to illustrate an argument with concrete examples. And last but not least, I’m glad to see the social networking functions no longer dominate the front page. It’s obvious that Tokyopop is still making an effort to promote blogs, fanfics, and such, but the main page no longer seems overrun by l33t-speaking Naruto fans. (And what’s with that baffling “People” category that remains in the navigation bar? Are there really any revolutionaries left at TP?)

The catalog is something of a puzzle, however. On the plus side, each page now contains a synopsis of the plot, a biography of the creator (or creators), and basic publication information (e.g. original release date, pages, age rating). The OEL title entries also include sample chapters that can be viewed with the manga reader–another nice feature for a casual browser.

On the minus side, Tokyopop appears to list every title they’re ever published, including books that are long out of print, and books that have been licensed by other companies. Clover and Parasyte, for example, are both listed as “Available Now,” as are dozens of other books that are virtually impossible to obtain outside a library. If the goal is to be comprehensive, Tokyopop needs to provide more accurate information about the print status of ALL of its books on the main navigation pages, not just on the pages for each individual volume. I’m also disappointed that Tokyopop left the comment space for each entry; so many of these responses read more like graffiti than substantive critiques, and are of very little value in determining whether a book might interest me.

How have other people found the site navigation? Has anyone else experienced difficulty loading some of the pages? I had to switch from Firefox to Safari in order to use all the features on the site–whenever I used Firefox, I got an unresponsive script error message, making it impossible for me to use the manga reader. And is it just me, or does the new “Release Schedule” window not contain much valuable information?

MICHELLE: The site’s pretty slow for me. A page will load, but it’ll take a good ten seconds before I can actually scroll down, which is frustrating, particularly when one is browsing through an alphabetical list of volumes trying to see, for example, whether Suppli Vol. 4 is listed. I have to kind of boggle at a “Release Schedule” that does not actually tell you which volume is actually coming out. Five series are listed for September releases, but Amazon shows quite a bit more. Releases for stronger-selling titles like GetBackers and Gakuen Alice have been omitted. Are more people really interested in Castlevania?

KATE: That jives with my impression of the release calendar as well, and points to an issue Sam raised: Tokyopop isn’t doing a great job of promoting its core business. Something as basic as a release calendar ought to be more prominently featured, and should showcase the full range of titles Tokyopop publishes every month. There’s still an awful lot of space given over to “Top Fan” lists and such.

Which leads me to another point that Sam made: Tokyopop has never figured out how to make the site’s social networking functions serve its own interests. There’s very little connection between what users post at the site and the books Tokyopop publishes. By the time Tokyopop tried to create a more structured way for fans to respond to its products (e.g. user reviews), too many users were in the habit of posting diatribes about evil French teachers, stealing images from DeviantArt, and talking about other companies’ products. As I said last year, I think the basic reasoning behind the TokyoSpace features is sound: train manga lovers to visit your site every day to build awareness of your brand. But that only works when (a) the basic site design determines (and limits) HOW people interact with the site and (b) someone is actively monitoring posts, removing those that violate the basic terms of service.

Fans who want to use the blogs, art galleries, and top ten lists will notice that Tokyopop left those functions intact; the user interface is largely unchanged from the previous version of the site. Some of the bugs have been ironed out (e.g. the “Edit User Profile” feature now works), but others persist. Finding useful content amid the chatter remains a problem–there are still an awful lot of tweens and teens blogging about nothing at Tokyopop.

CHLOE: I have to agree that I’m glad to see the ambiguous labels go the way of the dinosaur. They were never much help in actually finding content, and smacked of being conceived by some “hip minded” marketing intern. I’m saddened to see they’re still reliant on the Google custom search as their only retrieval tool–it is just. Not. That. Hard to embed a better search database, as their current one is, well, pretty much useless. I do, however, still think that there’s too much social-network centric junk on the frontpage. Time to overhaul with more bookseller-esque trappings! And as for those release dates, I’ve always found them to be a bit wonky anyway, as TP’s official street dates don’t always mean books on shelves. Books are still your focus, TP… it’s time to overhaul your catalog with the correct information instead of importing old data!

That said, I’m glad to have the social site aspects neatly encapsulated under a few labels, although I still think the “Shop” aspect is both strange and unneccesary. If you want to buy a Viz book, why would you go through the TP portal if it just uses the Amazon sales mainframe anyway?? Baffling. There are also a few things banging around in their shop section that, simply put, do not belong there. TP: why are you advertising/plugging Harold Hart’s Organic Chemistry: A Short Course (and at the low, low price of $176.95) in your Tokyopop Store? This element needs some serious editorial review and a good overhaul.

KATE: I also found the “Shop” function a little odd. Frankly, I’m not sure why Tokyopop or Viz has an online store, as neither publisher offers much in the way of special discounts, hard-to-find titles, or site-exclusive merchandise. Both could take a page from the Go! Comi playbook when it comes to online retailing, as Go! Comi offers free shipping, cool web exclusives, and volume discounts on complete series. (No pun intended.)

The bottom line: the new site design is cleaner and more intuitive, but hasn’t yet achieved the right balance between promoting Tokyopop books, introducing new digital product lines, and providing manga fans a place to discuss their favorite series.