Licensing Question - Can an Otaku Like Me Really be an Idol

I just wrote a review for the Kuma imprint, Can an Otaku Like Me Really be an Idol!? and I mentioned this there, but I'm really curious about the licensing of the title because I've seen another official translation of it on Renta. It's called Cherry-Poppin' Pop Star!! and I won't link to it because I'm not sure whether or not we're allowed to do that but here's the cover at any rate.



Is this like what happened with Irodori Comics predecessor where the license expired? The Kuma version hasn't been out for that long though.

I guess the issue is that I am paranoid that something uncouth happened with this title and since I want more Kuma imprints and especially future releases by this particular mangaka, I would like to know a bit more about licensing. Is it common/possible for a title to be licensed by more than one publisher within an overlapping market? How does the jurisdiction for this work?

I'm aware that some older hentai series have been retranslated by Fakku, but I was under the impression that this could only happen after a certain amount of time passed and the original publisher no longer has the rights to the title.

The second part of this is that I don't actually have an ebookrenta account and I'd been thinking about branching out and buying some of their titles but as soon as I searched crossdressing (one of my fav tags >.<) I found Cherry-Poppin' Pop Star!! and got worried that things aren't on the up and up.

Hopefully I'm just being ignorant and am about to learn more about how publishing and licensing works.

Thid should be probably should be asked to https://kuma.pub/

I work with the Kuma imprint and how it works is that licenses on digital-only websites such as Renta are not exclusive so a publisher that obtains a license for it can still print it. Hope that answers your question!

That answers it perfectly! I didn't want to think poorly of Renta and I'm glad they weren't doing anything bad. I'm still disappointed though that the title is so popular on their website. I really do think the Kuma version is better. I think the Rume-P they used is probably more true to source than Rumepi, but other than that I really dislike it when the characters all use first names in translations. It makes it impossible to notice name change differences when the characters get closer!

I thought it'd be okay to put this here because isn't Kuma part of Fakku? But I didn't know about the website and I couldn't get the question mark button to do anything other than change the color of the page. I guess I could have used twitter, but I feel awkward asking more than yes or no questions there.

Luckily I got my question answered quickly though!

PS Sorry for the double post. I didn't know if the quote would go through if I just edited the previous post and I hadn't noticed that I had two replies initially.

You were fine to post here, as for Kuma's site, that's still a work in progress and right now that's just a placeholder, sorry for the confusion!