Libre Publishing

Libre Publishing is a Japanese boys love manga publishing company. It was founded on May 8, 2006, and is the successor to Biblos (1988–2006), which folded due to the failure of its parent company.

The bankruptcy of Biblos's parent company, the publisher "Hekitensha" provoked a chain reaction and one month later in April 2006, "Biblos" also declared bankruptcy. All publications were put on indefinite hiatus until "Animate" acquired Biblos in the same year and renamed it "Libre Publishing". Some magazines were kept identical like BExBOY or BexBoy Gold, others took much more time before re-appearing like Junk!. Zero re-appeared in May 2008 under the name Kurofune Zero and the anthology B-Boy LUV became B-Boy Phoenix.^[1]

Magazines

• BExBOY, monthly, started March 1993^[1]
• Be-Boy Gold, bimonthly with more explicit contents and one-shot stories^[1]
• Junk! Boy, biyearly
• Kurofune Zero, biyearly. Focused on the fantasy and science fiction genres, stories' contents were milder with boys love innuendo.^[1]

There are also bimonthly anthologies:

• B-Boys Zip
• Be Boys LUV

And novel magazines, with female yaoi authors also providing illustrations for these:^[1]

• Shôsetsu BExBOY, monthly
• Shôsetsu BEaST, quarterly with more explicit content^[1]

Closure of Biblos and English licensing

After the closure of Biblos in April 2006, Libre gained the licenses for former Biblos titles. Central Park Media continued to publish its former Biblos titles, and in 2007, Libre described CPM's continued publication of Libre titles as "illegal", saying that CPM needed to renegotiate licenses with Libre.^[2][3] CPM stated in December 2007 that Libre had "refused to discuss" the issue with CPM, and that CPM regarded its licenses with Biblos as still being legally binding with Libre.^[4] After CPM filed for bankruptcy in April 2009, Libre released another statement stating that CPM and Libre had not been in a business relationship for some time prior to this, and that Libre expected new titles to be released by their new US publishers.^[5] In 2010, Animate USA announced that they would release some of Libre's books on the Amazon.com Kindle format,^[6] and in September of that year, Libre sent cease and desist notices to several scanlation groups.^[7]

In October 2011, the American manga publisher Viz Media launched the BL imprint SuBLime in collaboration with Libre and its parent company Animate to publish English-language BL for the print and worldwide digital market.^[8][9] Although the first slate of books announced under SuBLime are Libre titles, the imprint will potentially offer titles from other Japanese publishers in the future.^[9]

References

External links

• Official website (Japanese)
• Libre Publishing at Anime News Network's encyclopedia
• Comipress
• Be Boy (Magazine Official Website) (Japanese)