Yen Press, Hachette’s manga and conventional comics imprint, made a big step forward for digital access to its manga list announcing plans to discontinue the print edition of Yen Plus, its monthly manga magazine, and launch a digital version. Yen Plus was launched as a print magazine and offers around 400 pages a month of serialized Yen Press titles including bestselling series like the manga adaptation of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride as well as popular series like the Gossip Girl adaptation and Svetlana Chmakova’s Night School.

At the Yen Press panel at San Diego Comic-con, publishing director Kurt Hassler announced an online non-flash browser accessible with a subscription plan. Fans can subscribe to Yen Plus online (first 30 days are free) for $2.99 a month. The fans receive the full content of the nearly 400 page print magazine including fan art and publisher columns. Yen Press is among the American manga publishers who joined the recent anti-scanlation coalition with Japanese publishers, and the launch of Yen Plus online addresses many of the issues around providing legitimate online access to licensed manga.

Yen Press online seems both a positive step toward paid online access to content and a direct and nonpunitive challenge to the rise in scanlations. Access is offered on a nonterritorial basis—fans can log in from anywhere. There is no downloading and the site will offer access to two months of Yen Plus, the current issue and previous month, after which back issue content is removed. “Yes, we want to encourage you to buy our print editions,” Hassler said from the podium. Hassler said Yen Press will make more announcements in the coming months about accessing Yen Press content on handheld devices. Hassler pointed to the success of the iPad but said that they have already ruled out e-ink devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader, “our decision will be driven by quality and e-ink just isn’t there.”

While some fans (the huge hall was packed) seemed a bit dismayed that there would be no downloading, the launch seemed to generate a positive response. Japanese publishers have been nortoriously slow about providing digital access to their content and their delay has been blamed for fostering the growth of scanlation aggregators, online sites that offer free access to thousands of illegally scanned copyrighted manga editions. While U.S. based manga publishers like Viz and DMP are offering some digital access to manga, Japanese licensors are very reluctant to offer digital licenses to their American licensees. Being able to offer some Japanese content through Yen Plus is something of an industry coup. “Digital licensing is very new in Japan,” Hassler said, “but our negotiations with our Japanese publishers are evolving and we’ve got more announcements coming in the future.”