Sol Press Discussion Thread

Korppi

@jon-mitchell said in Sol Press Discussion Thread:

@harmlessdave
yea Tentai is not fast, I'm not too surprised. They are HQ in Spain, a small operation, and the schedule shows them on hiatus in July/August (when many folks in Europe take their vacations) but at least they post a schedule and pretty much have stuck to it. Sol ONTOH...well, you know.

I believe when Sol finishes its death rattles, it'll still be months before titles are even available to be rescued

I've only had positive experience with Tentai. Yes, they're small, but honestly I don't think I've heard anything overtly negative about them, and they've been operational for quite some time now. Compare that to Sol Press...

kurosov

@harmlessdave said in Sol Press Discussion Thread:

It's been 3 weeks of the website being down, they must have lost their technical staff (who left with the passwords to everything) and/or have run out of money.

It's more entertaining to assume they moved their entire webteam to the translation department to help work on the delays.

Jon Mitchell

@korppi said in Sol Press Discussion Thread:

@jon-mitchell said in Sol Press Discussion Thread:

@harmlessdave
yea Tentai is not fast, I'm not too surprised. They are HQ in Spain, a small operation, and the schedule shows them on hiatus in July/August (when many folks in Europe take their vacations) but at least they post a schedule and pretty much have stuck to it. Sol ONTOH...well, you know.

I believe when Sol finishes its death rattles, it'll still be months before titles are even available to be rescued

I've only had positive experience with Tentai. Yes, they're small, but honestly I don't think I've heard anything overtly negative about them, and they've been operational for quite some time now. Compare that to Sol Press...

my point exactly

Timmaaah

@korppi I'm the opposite, I've only had negative experiences with Tentai. The first book that I ordered from them took almost 4 months for it to be delivered.
The second wasn't so bad, only 1.5 months.
But then the only series I'm really interested in that they have, had it's first volume released in February and the next volume isn't due till December. A ten month gap between is almost getting to Sol Press levels.

For me, the only difference between Tentai and Sol Press is that Tentai eventually got me the books I ordered, where as the Rakudai books that I ordered got cancelled.

Jon Mitchell

@timmaaah
they publish a release schedule (and for the most part) stick to it, or announce if there is a delay and update the schedule...Sol has had titles in seemingly perpetual limbo FOR.YEARS. Tentai is slow - they publish at a snail's pace compared to JNC...but SOL by comparison to Tentai is a deceitful, dishonest, snail going the wrong way on a treadmill. They get none of my dollars (I've purchased several Tentai volumes) I HOPE they are out of business (so that titles can be rescued) good riddance

Jon Mitchell

a week later - Tentai has updates (I'm told)on Discord, Twitter and their own site...and Sol website still down, nothing on Twitter since Aug 11, nothing on Facebook for a year (Discord? I don't use it so I don't know) - but still listed on Kindle store so I guess still in business(?)---ok I'm done beating this dead(?) horse

HarmlessDave

@jon-mitchell - Their Discord is still up for now. Tsmalls is just a moderator not staff I think.

Tsmalls — 08/09/2021
Shouldn’t be more than a few days now hopefully

Tsmalls — 08/20/2021
There’s multiple of us trying to get to the bottom of this stuff
Also xev is alive

Most recent response, to "Any news on the site situation?"

Tsmalls — 08/28/2021
nothing that im told yet

whyohwhy1

idk - i'm shocked any business can be run like this , I would have expected them to do more update on twitter/ discord as honestly i think sol press slow release rate / poor marketing will hurt sale of there next round of light novel releases ( most likely around December -i hope at least)

HarmlessDave

@whyohwhy1 - not even the staff (translators & editors?) and moderator on Discord seem to know what's going on.

Either management isn't bothering to even tell their own staff what's wrong, or they have but the news is something like: we're shutting down but stay quiet about it so we can get a last bit of sales from Amazon, etc.

Even if they lost all the code for their site, as long as they had the login for the domain registry they should've been able to set up a placeholder website in an hour or two. Even without that login, the owner of the domain should be able to contact the registry and get a new login in a day or two. It's been almost a month now.

Korppi

Sol Press is registered in California(according to available info), but https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/ doesn't yield any results, at least on the name 'Sol Press'. As far I know all corporations and LLCs must file a statement of information in CA so it should show up be there. Under a different name?

Nosgoroth

@korppi It did return a result for me:

alt text

Korppi

@nosgoroth Oh, I accidentally checked the corporation box, not the LLC/LP one, that's why it didn't show...

I did notice they're 3 months late on their SoI according to the page...

Geezer Weasalopes

@korppi Welp.
Just did a coogle dive and found out all sorts of stuff concerning incorporating in Delaware even if actually located in California.

The US has some really weird things going on with how the laws differ from state to state...

SomeOldGuy

@weasalopes Yes, we do. Some states make it rather hard to incorporate, but are perfectly willing to tax "foreign" corporations to operate in their state. Been there, done that. The last corporation we did was in-state, so there was only one set of paperwork (and taxes) to file.

A major source of revenue for the state of Delaware is corporate taxes AND the "representative agents" for all those corporations not based there. You must maintain a point-of-presence in the state, which is done by hiring a local agent. The cost of that actually exceeds the taxes for a lot of corporations, and their primary job is to say, "Yes, they have an office here!"

Geezer Weasalopes

@someoldguy said in Sol Press Discussion Thread:

their primary job is to say, "Yes, they have an office here!"

Sounds like... The Ideal Sponger Life

Sorry, I couldn't resist!

Geezer Weasalopes

Welp.

The Sol Press website now has an initial message saying that there isn't a web site set up at that domain, and then redirects to the nfoservers web site; I gather they're the folks who were the hosting firm.

That sure looks like Sol Press didn't pay their hosting fees.
Not a good sign.

Terabyte

@weasalopes said in Sol Press Discussion Thread:

Welp.

The Sol Press website now has an initial message saying that there isn't a web site set up at that domain, and then redirects to the nfoservers web site; I gather they're the folks who were the hosting firm.

That sure looks like Sol Press didn't pay their hosting fees.
Not a good sign.

It might actually be a good sign? Before the domain was not resolving at all (ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED). But now it resolves and points to the hosting again.

whyohwhy1

any news / update on sol press

Jon Mitchell

website is non existent
no updates on twitter (for weeks!)
no idea on discord (I'm not a user)
Wikipedia has note about them going dark...in August 2021 and nothing updated since
last 'project roundup' post on facebook is from October 2020

Sol is either dead or comatose (more so than usual)
My hope is that the licenses held by them can be liberated soon and some other localization company can work on what's next. (it isn't the fault of the original creators that the works were licensed by Sol and are now in limbo)

Jon Mitchell

@terabyte said in Sol Press Discussion Thread:

It might actually be a good sign? Before the domain was not resolving at all (ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED). But now it resolves and points to the hosting again.

I don't think so