Manga on the Wired: A Proposal

http://www.otakunovideo.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/anime-computer-300x225.jpg

Imagine two things.

One is a website where manga authors (and any comic authors) can upload individual pages of their work. Each page is categorized into chapter, volume, and work. Any of those titles can be changed (so for a given work, chapters could be called issues instead). Authors can connect their account to PayPal, and specify a price per page, chapter, volume, or work. Authors can designate any part of a work as a free preview.

The other is a manga reader website. If you're not logged in or haven't paid for a comic, the covers and preview are displayed. You can choose to purchase access to a comic, in which case you choose among the options that the author set up. Some authors may only charge one big fee for the entire work; no way to buy individual pages. Whatever. The reader pays, and can read the comic.

All images are stored on Amazon S3. To start, credit card transactions are handled through PayPal. I would keep all images as straight-up PNGs, because Flash readers suck, unless enough authors convinced me otherwise. The site would automatically add an invisible digital watermark to each page image.

To combat piracy, the proprietors of this site would run regular Google Image searches, using "see related images." The proprietors would then do checksum comparisons of the images on these sites, and would send vicious attack lawyers after any offending sites.

Maybe I'm naive, but why wouldn't this work?