FAKKU Books New Announcements!

Yeah seems like I'll be buying everything again. :3
I'm very enthousiastic about this push for diversity, to a degree of obsession really. This list has some things that I, and many other users expected to never show up here.
Bold move by FAKKU! that I can only applaud! Big congrats on throwing that kick ass after-party at AX. Hentai is becoming big and this is all too cool to be real!

This step seems to me like becoming complete. As a medium, hentai is likely the broadest in the world. It goes from comedy all the way to the most depraved thing you're likely to ever see. One of the main reasons I still read this stuff is because it's so unrestricted.

I stayed up late for these announcements, and I almost had a heart attack. I was secretly hoping for Henshin, but seeing it pop up was like something I never felt before.

All that aside... This is still horribly lacking in tentacles and monster girls. But I heard that maybe a flood of doujinshi might fix that.

Exciting times.

Well that's honestly somewhat disappointing. I had higher hopes for this based off of Jacob's description despite not being familiar with it at all. My initial enthusiasm has been dulled quite a bit by your comment and by checking some scans to determine its veracity. I hadn't fully deluded myself into thinking that it would have some great and progressive message, being a porn title and all, but I figured it just might treat the topic with some amount of respect.

Even the very first chapter of the EX 1 book has the trans woman essentially reducing herself to a man with boobs by telling the kid to just pretend he's doing a man, which he then does...

Well, even though it's far from what I wanted it to be I guess it still brings something new to the table. Weirdly drawn trans women fetishized as well endowed men with implants is still a departure from the norm, even if it is less awesome than I had hoped it would be.

Aaawwww shit! I need that next MEME50 book on my bookshelf yesterday!

Fakcrew, it's official. You've succeeded in creating the equivalent of the Steam Summer Sale of hentai. I'm sold on 10 of titles already.

Great announcements although I missed those two books from the fakku book hinting tweet:

Elisa-sama Goyoujin! by Takatsu - A loli tsundere vampire who has the hots for her butler? Come on Jacob, you know we want and need that!

Meguri Dokoro by Mutsutake - We have Chapter 4 & Chapter 4.5, now it's time for the whole book!

Damm. I can't wait any longer.
just let me fap to these covers. lol.

Awesome selection, there's at least 3 books (Oda Non, Homonculus, and MEMME50) I want from these among others I'm curious about. You guys are coming through...so we can keep coming...back *cough*

This selection is pretty close to 'shut up and take my money' lol.

Thanks Fakku.

It's guaranteed I'm purchasing 8-9 of these...or maybe fuck it I'll purchase them all 😋

As you mention, it would be stupid to try and publish something we don't have the rights to. It would also be very obvious if we tried to use scans, and the only place we could get the source files from is the original content creators, so the idea that we don't have a deal with them is pretty absurd.

It's not entirely clear, but it seems like you're also suggesting there's a chance we reuse old scanlation translations. Producing a script is a very small part of the process, and the majority of the time—I imagine something like 70-90%—is spent on typesetting. We can't use low quality scans when printing books, so the time saved by taking someone else's translation is hardly worth it in the grand scheme of things. Never mind the fact that scanlations are all over the place when it comes to quality since you have dozens if not hundreds of different people working on it, so I think it would be more work to go through and correct someone else's translation rather than just doing a proper one from scratch. At the very least I think it would be a lot more annoying for me personally.

Like you said, English is somewhat limiting compared to Japanese (in some cases it's the other way around though). There are only so many ways to say "she's not wearing the lab coat that she usually wears," so assuming both translations are correct, you often end up with very similar results. You're only going to see any real difference when either (or both) of the translations are wrong, or if one side stuck to a literal translation and the other took some liberties.

For what it's worth, every book released so far was translated by me from scratch, and it's highly unlikely I was inspired by anyone else since I never read translations myself. Also I'm sorry if I came off as defensive, but I feel it's important to clarify these things.

This brings up a question I had about the translations. I noticed that some of the tanboukon releases have chapters from the magazines and they're translated differently. In particular, I'm thinking of "Cold Bitch Student Council President" when the president is thinking about her classmates. Are the lines different on the English end because one of the Fakku staff decided to translate the line differently (or that completely different people translated it, which is the impression I have from this post) or is the change from the Japanese end, like did Gujira decide to change the panels between the magazine and tanboukon editions.

I know that all of these things are possible and I'm very curious to know which is most likely.

Sorry to derail the conversation, but I felt like your post was calling to me to ask the question I've been itching to ask.

While the latter is a possibility, it's much more likely they were just translated differently, and this can be due to many different reasons.

The first comes down to preferences, simple as that. Everyone has their own way of translating, and you'll always see slight differences from one translation to another.

The second reason is that the QC process is much more rigorous for books. Magazine releases are digital only, and we can easily fix any potential mistakes later on. If a typo slips though to print, that's permanent until we do a new print batch. This also allows for much more fine tuning of the dialogue when it comes to books, so even if we used magazine scripts as a base, they'd likely change a lot during the QCing.

The last and I believe biggest contributor is the complexity of the text. Homunculus's dialog is often very straight forward, which is the case for most artists in my opinion. Again, "she's not wearing the lab coat that she usually wears" can only be said in so many ways and still make sense given the context. By comparison, one line I remember from Gujira would be in a very literal translation "that light novel protagonist-esque reckless courage of yours is valued highly by me!" First of all, a mostly literal translation doesn't work that well, so you ought to be a bit creative. Secondly, when you have this much information crammed into a single bubble, you actually have a lot of options on how to translate it into English. In this context, you're also working with a very eccentric character, allowing you to take some liberties with the text and go with a word like "foolhardy" over something more neutral like "reckless."


Currently there's no way for us to reuse the magazine typesetting in books (for various reasons). We could reuse the translation, but since it's such a small part of the process and would save very little time/work over all, I rather just redo that too for the sake of consistency.

This was and is my biggest gripe with scanlations. Very rarely did the same team work on an entire book from beginning to end, and what you get most of the time is a compilation of various magazine scanlations by a bunch of different people. The styles and (especially when talking about scanlations) the quality often varies a lot from one chapter to another, and I never felt like it was good enough. Consistency is king in my book, and inconsistencies have always annoyed me any media. For FAKKU, it's mainly a matter of stylistic differences than anything else though. As you probably know, we do a lot of the text by hand using tablets, and it would be impossible for us to ask everyone to use the exact same handwriting. Likewise, it's not possible to have everyone translate in the exact same way.

It doesn't matter who's involved in it, but I do think the same team (same translator, proofreader, typesetter, editor, etc.) should work on an entire book for the best result. For the time being, that means I'm going to do a new translation of the text, regardless if there already exists a scanlatied version or if we have it in our magazine service. That said, some of the upcoming books won't be translated by me, but they'll still be done by a single translator.


There is no set order for all these books right now. All we know with some degree of certainty is that the the titles listed here under "Upcoming" should be the next ones to be released, although I can't tell in what order.

Thank you so much for your explanation. It makes a lot of sense and I appreciate you sating my curiosity. Text can be interpreted a lot of ways even without trying to switch between languages. Thank you for going through so many steps to deliver the fine product you do.