This is a discussion on r/manga that I saw that I thought was worth talking about more.

https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/82pfsg/dischave_w e_reached_a_point_where_scanlation/

What do you guys think? The original poster said, "I'm open to learning more about what you guys think about scanlation and the manga publishing industry, and I don't want to bash on scanlation either.

A lot of big publishers (Kodansha, Viz, etc) and small publishers (Manga.club and Manga Planet) seem to be working hard to make manga legally available. At the same time though, aggregate sites and scanlation groups are forging on (and even making patreons?), making manga far more easily accessible, albeit illegally. At the end of the day, doesn't it seem like scanlation is going to win (winning meaning, publishers give up trying to bring more titles into English). Are scanlations hurting the long-term development of manga industry, both in Japan and outside of it?

Or perhaps a better question would be, what would it take for publishers/legal manga to overtake scanlation? (This is, of course, with the understanding that scanlations are a stop-gap measure since supply doesn't meet demand.)

Edit: Also wanted to add this forum thread because it was really what made me start thinking about it: https://forums.tapas.io/t/what-do-you-guys-think-of-manga-scanlators-such-as-mangastream/12814/20"

It's sorta an interesting discussion.

The first step in this discussion is to stop lumping scanlation groups and aggregator sites together. For profit aggregators are the ones that might be hurting the manga industry, just as they are victimizing scanlators.

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Nope. Scanlations, once done and put on the Internet, will inevitably be taken up by aggregators with the purpose of profiting from them. Greed is the spirit of the current age.

You will also be inevitably ravaged by viruses and bacteria at one point or another, so anyone else they attack will be clearly a joint responsibility between you and them. Got it, thanks.

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I don't think so. The manga industry and related industries are overwhelmingly focused on the domestic market and these domestic readers don't often read scanlations, for a variety of reasons. The scanlation scene emerged because producers weren't interested in foreign markets, which has largely stayed true. The small amount that it hasn't has been due to scanlation and a bit of riding-on-the-coattails of anime.

Most casual scanlation readers wouldn't or can't buy manga even if they didn't have a scanlation available. They just wouldn't know about series or it wouldn't be available. Some series that weren't big enough in Japan to market overseas became popular enough overseas due to scanlation, but the biggest name series probably have seen a bit of a hit.

I imagine that most of the lost profits are due far more to aggregators than scanlation itself, but even that is probably not extreme. That is, of course, assuming that hurting the manga industry means costing them profit.

Maybe they could do something like Steam Workshop? Scanlators can upload their work on something like Crunchyroll or Viz and get a 10-20% cut.

They’re many ways to do this, but management at these companies tends to be very orthodox and insular, so it makes things much harder.

My personal feeling is that we live in a bubble here. General interest towards manga and anime outside of Japan is next to non existent. The more ample potential clients don't even know what they are, and aside of the occasional anime on TV, there's no exposure. It's mostly an untapped market, that due to vastly different cultures will likely stay that way. Scanalations are probably a drop in an ocean of indifference.

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I think this question is missing the point. We are approaching a post-scanlation era. They won't die off completely, but there's already less of them than a few years ago, and the number of releases will shrink at least one order of magnitude in the next five to ten years even without licencers interfering. There are multiple reasons for this:

- The current generation in most hobbies(not just weeb ones) is not interested in giving, only in consuming. The scanlators who are growing up and don't have free time(or go legit like J-Novel Club) aren't replaced at a sufficient rate.

- From what I've seen the amount of new people getting into manga and anime in Western European and North American countries is decreasing due to political correctness and such, and because many releases are retranslations from English or French, it also affects other languages.

- Among those who do step in to scanlate are SJWs, trollscanners, and people who barely(if at all) know the language but are in it for the money, all of whom push away readers with their ruined "works" to either licensed translations or learning moonrunes and reading raws.

- Speaking of people in it for the money(of any skill level), there's a lot of groups on Paypal, patreon, etc. and sooner or later these sites will purge scanlators and cause many series to be dropped(although in some cases it would be a good thing, not gonna point fingers but most of you can think of at least one butchered translation).

- Both licensed series and legit raws are easier to get than ever, and as someone learning Japanese, I hope the second part will stay that way or get even better.

I hope that Japanese publishers will take this opportunity to enforce translation quality of official releases, especially as someone who used to buy censored and dejapanized bullcrap Polish licensers are putting out. I'm fairly confident that "zawsze in love" was deliberate, and Ruri's rant about translators wasn't just some random brick in her character building.

Besides, a somewhat recent EU study shown that piracy only hurts profits of top cinema movies, and even then we're talking about worst case scenario of 3%, so no.