UPDATE (8/1/18): Yen Press titles are finally back on Google Play, and was confirmed by the company yesterday:
Word has it Google Play has our stuff back again — and now in far more territories where rights are available!
— Yen Press (@yenpress) July 31, 2018
So if you missed out on anything over the past month, now you can buy stuff from them again on that service.
Not sure when, precisely, Yen Press titles disappeared from Google Play, but at some point this month, anyone who uses that particular platform and wanted to purchase a title from them got an unfortunate surprise:
It’s not something that you see much of, but as of this article you can’t find any, if at all, Yen Press titles or purchase them. This might not have been too big an issue if there was a heads up. A decent example is Crunchyroll letting its users/fans know that there will be maintenance for a period of time. Obviously neither are the same, but Yen Press mentioning this would be great. Instead, two things happened:
- They’ve responded to a few Twitter queries so far:
Hi—thank you for reaching out. Our Google Play assets are getting updated, so several of our titles are currently in transition and may appear as 'unavailable'. We are hoping that this process will be relatively quick, and everything should be back to normal soon.
— Yen Press (@yenpress) July 12, 2018
Our series are currently getting updated by Google, and will appear as 'unavailable' until the process is over. We are hoping to have everything back up shortly.
— Yen Press (@yenpress) July 19, 2018
- This was their only statement:
Yen Press update on the status of their titles on Google Play pic.twitter.com/6BSO794Ecd
— TheOASG (@TheOASG) July 17, 2018
There’s other tweets asking what’s the status of the titles on Google Play, which went unanswered. In addition, the hope was that the process would be quick and efficient, but the statement was released July 17. It’s gonna be August soon.
After reaching out again, here’s an updated statement from Yen Press on why their titles are currently unavailable:
“We have been working to expand our international availability with Google Play. Having reached that agreement, Google Play is in the process of implementing that transition, necessitating that purchases be temporarily disabled. As soon as the process is complete on their end, the books will be reactivated with expanded international rights where available.”
For what it’s worth, I couldn’t imagine Google removed Yen Press titles just because they could, so knowing this is why they’re unavailable is nice to know. It is fair to wonder if Yen Press handled this properly though. Being upfront about what’s going on wouldn’t be a detriment — it just cuts down on odd speculations or readers asking what’s going on, so they could’ve been better regarding this situation.
Now that we do know what’s going on, let’s hope the titles eventually return at some point.