Before you yell at me, I REALIZE that we are a manga site, while the article is about anime. But remember, what happens on that side also influences this side. We like the same stuff, right? (No arguments about which is better!)

The original article came from ANN:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2008-03-11
The person interviewed is Tofusensei from the group Live-Evil. As a former fansubbing AND scanlator, I totally understand his sentiments. I would consider myself "old-school" in that sense, even though I've only been on the scene for a few years (read the article for what I mean).

Now the question is, will this spread to manga scanlators too? Notice all the one-man teams that speed scanlate the most popular series? (Some are just individuals that have a tiny knowledge of Japanese and editing and just throw together a sad looking thing they call a "scanlation") How about the large speed groups that do tons of series, but in LQ? Will the book industry decline like DVD sales? It's all to be seen...

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

That was certainly very enlightening... just to see the opinions of someone on that side of the community. xD I'd also have to agree that a lot of those points can be just as easily mirrored onto the scanlation community. But all in all. It was interesting. >_>

Hmm, which one-man teams are there that speed scanlate popular series? I could only think of 10sigh but by now there are plenty of others who do so just as quickly.

It's hard to say... The fact is that buying videos in general is a lot more difficult than buying books, or even borrowing them. For one, it's much cheaper, and for another, written material is just a lot more easily available, through bookstores and libraries. It's particularly hard for me to get anime, since it usually costs fifteen bucks for four episodes, but manga is *extremely* easy to buy, in comparison--most of the time, I don't have to go to a specialty store to find a series that I like! (I'm a minor, and my parents don't like me to buy stuff online, so I've always felt uncomfortable doing so).

I feel like the response of the book industry to fan concerns has really helped boost manga--and you can tell that a lot more people are getting into manga, and increasingly more libraries and bookstores are starting to buy them or have them in stock. As much as scanlation has increased, it hasn't boomed like anime...

But then one could say that most of the manga scene consist of people who don't care about the "community," or about actively pursuing manga outside of the net, and that once upon a time scanlation was really about bringing manga to the people, whereas now it's about scanning popular and often licensed series, just like Tofusensei describes. You can see this especially in shounen series like Naruto and Bleach, which has had over sixty scanlators in the latter case, and over seventy, in the former. Plus, the time gap in manga tends to be several years (Naruto is about ten volumes behind, for example, and at the beginning of the summer it was probably more like fifteen).

But you could also cite the increase in forum-based scanlation groups, and especially the insistence on forum posts to get downloads at forums, as a sign of the opposing trend. ~__~ Ah, it is confusing.. xD But I feel like manga still won't decline just yet, based on the growth now, and the differences in accessibility between anime and manga.

thisi is sooooooo important I hope we can make a booth to talk about it at AE

AE? What do you mean?...

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

this was very very Intriguing. It feels and sounds Nostalgic to what is really going on in fandom world.

OH. SIDE NOTE! I thought this tied into the NEW WAVE OF FANDOM!
ANN posted about a very popular Video stream site-
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-03-11/vid eo-site-with-unauthorized-anime-gets-us$4m-venture

this took me a while to read. only noticed there are 4 pages after I was done with first. not gonna stop now. >.<

what I want to say is that this interview is mostly related to usa. I don't own a single anime dvd. because where I live (slovenia, europe), you can buy none. there is really not that many potential customers to be worth it for companies. and I don't buy R1 DVD's because they are region 1! make them region 0 and I will even order them online. >.< so basically, fansubbing is my only source of anime. and I am pissed as hell if anime got licensed and the supposedly only group that did it stopped subbing it because of that.. and there are alot of people like that. all over the world. it is almost identical with manga. just no R1.

speed scanlations should not exist. I have never before seen so many speed scans with v2. in the end, few hours doesn't matter that much. also I hate seeing quality scanlation groups dropping a project because another group picked it up and they are doing a speedy scan. overall quality is going down.. I actually like that B-U took down most of the DL links. it takes a bit more time, but I have to take a closer look. miRC, scanlator homepages, .. it makes me appreciate scanlations more. but the question is will book sale decline. I would think not. scanlated manga is kind of like a library. I get to read and know new manga's, which I normally never would have. and there is a potential customer. I always prefer a book on my shelf to my computer. a book I've read before is more likely to get read again even tho I have millions of books on hard drive.. so my answer is that scanlations only increase the sale. they are good for you. ^^

this got waaay too long.

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<!--url_type_2--><a href='http://deathfish.deviantart.com/' target='_blank'><u>mi art</u></a><!--url_type_2_end--><BR><BR>A note on how I rate and review which I do. I rate it purely on my personal enjoyment, overall value and lasting effect. I also change my opinion with time, because I forget what I hated and mainly remember what was awesome. Or the other way around. There is no consistency besides consistent inconsistency. <!--emo[🙂]--><img src='emoticons/beigesmile.gif' alt='smile'><!--emo_end-->

Speed scans and subs shouldn't exist.I completely agree. I don't like video steam sites and manga distributer sites who don't state clearly that it is not their work either.Putting aside the horrid quality of re-uploaded pages and episodes, like the article says, it makes it so that people don't know the source of what they're watching and reading. And that just gets on my nerves sometimes, especially when I see ignorant people posting things that make the video uploaders seem like the people who did all the work. Thanks aren't being given out as much as they should be.

Wow. I don't know much about fansubbing but now I've read this I guess it really isn't that much different from scanlating. The whole dynamics are the the same. You might as well change "anime" to "manga" in that interview and it would've made equal sense. You could replace "crunchyroll" with "manga hosting sites", and the answer will be the same.

"the fact that it's removed the community from where it should be is disheartening.

There's a hardcore group of people that's always around but you do miss the numbers, the people thanking you for your work. You see 10,000 people have downloaded your show and you only hear from maybe 10 of them. That's no fun."

very, very true. We input so many hours on doing scanlations and all we want in return is a simple "thank you". We're not even getting that now.

I also agree that speedscans and speedgroups are really only out there to seek notoriety. What's the point of translating manga that 10 other groups are translating?

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Nice interview!
And I guess it's already spreading to the scanlation scene. :-(
How I hate those crappy LQ large speed groups!!! HQ ftw!

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www.kefi.org
www.manga-sketchbook.org

One big difference is the amount of time it takes to create a desent quality speedsub/scanlation. If you are fluent in japanese, it takes an hour to translate a 30-minute episode, and one more hour (done by another group member) to time/edit it - so you don't really need to be that dedicated, and the only thing your sub is going to be lacking compared to "quality subs" are those fancy karaoke effects and some cultural references. For an ordinary 13-episode series its just 13 hours, half of which you're going to spend watching them anyways...
Scanlations on the other hand require a lot more of your time. Just a "quick" textpasting onto the bubbles in Skip Beat will eat at least 6 hours per chapter, and the result looks far from acceptable...
And most good mangas are 100+ chapters long, and there's a megaton of them.
If you throw a thousand speedsubbers at the task you'd quickly sub all the anime that was ever released.
If you use ten thousand speedcanners - you'd just graze the upper layer of all the manga out there.

Ah SkipBeat. There was a nubmer of particularly horrible vols from a certain group that we HAD to read simply no other group done it. Horrible editing, typesetting, eyehurting scan. OTOH sometimes surprising quality translation. Thank god that period is over and we had dedicated group now.

That said, I didnt know enough about anime side to comment. Dont really care for it to tell the truth. Manga is better.

And yes, the point of localization is also well put. I am in Vietnam. We know all about the rarity of manga and anime in local language. And what were made are not too good in quality of translation.

Also, the number of manga is simply staggering compared to anime. There's quite a few of quality manga but no one has touched them yet.

I especially liked this paragraph:
The people running those sites have absolutely no connection to the fansubbers whatsoever. They're basically downloading and then monetizing that and selling it to people. It's wrong, it's disgusting, and I hate seeing my videos on those sites. We lose even more of that community aspect thanks to that stuff – they don't come to us anymore, not to our IRC channel, they're commenting on the forums of those sites. I think almost every fansubber is against those sites completely.

I really miss all of the people that used to come by IRC and the site forums and talk. My forums were so lively back in the day... we're getting old faces back now, but new ones are really scarce, and they rarely talk about the manga.

I'm also kinda curious to know how many manga groups operate solely on P2P scans. Just so I can grief them. Clearly the problem is widespread, as evidenced by the amount of crappy manga that's translated and the amount of good manga that isn't available on P2P that hasn't even been touched. I have a huge list of stuff that's absolutely wonderful that isn't on P2P but deserves to be made available to the fans.

And stop translating licensed projects, damnit! They should really start prosecuting Naruto groups.

I don't think licensed manga scanlations are a threat - printed version has a lot of additional value compared to online scans. You can't read them in bus or on a train, you can't lend them to friends, it usually looks much worse and people don't like reading from the screen... Manga is just like ordinary books - they are profitable despite being available through libraries and online; even books in public domain are profitable.
I think even scans of the licensed version bring more good than bad through additional exposure.