If I were in USA, I would agree about licensed projects stuff....but I am not!!

I really think that if US manga industry start to put those manga online like music...it can help people from other parts of the world too.

The group I'm in actually buys every manga we scanlate. Sure, there are scans available online, but it just isn't right not buying it, not to mention a lot of the P2P scans aren't as good. And licensed projects...it's just not right. But the problem with a community like ours is that there are no set rules---everything will just be based on people's good faith. People steal other group's projects. Some groups scanlate licensed stuff. (though I do sympathize with people from countries who do not sell manga and people who are too young to have a credit card and buy online...it's a double edged sword. They get affected with all these but they have no choice but to read online.)

I also hate the manga I translate being on other manga hosting sites. I agree that the scanlation world is definitely losing its sense of community---more and more. It doesn't feel the same anymore. You're lucky if 5% of the people even go to your site for the manga.

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Probably the most interesting thing on there is the talk about the growing rift between the community and the scanlators.

On one point, it's much easier to get your hands on manga because things are so readily distrusted in a number of places. On the other, people don't even need to know where they are getting the manga from. A number of people who get mangas don't even understand the different procedures and time needed to spend on a manga.

Another is the speed issue. I've noticed a decline in LQ speedscanlating in Naruto, which I think is good. X will speed translate and get all the reviews, until Y takes his translation and makes a horrible LQ scan. The fastest one out "wins" and gets all the "thanks" as compared to the HQ scanlators. Interesting read

I buy perhaps 5% of the manga that I read online and most of that is for the purpose of trashing it and scanning it in for higher quality raws. I do, however purchase a lot of manga that I don't read online first.

Tell me, if I, someone who spends $100 a month (not counting shipping, since I purchase from Japan) on my manga habit, doesn't buy manga they read online, how many people in America buy it? Let's give the benefit of the doubt and say that people buy 20% of what they read. These people must be filthy rich (at least for highschool kids), because just about everyone reads dozens of mangas, and let’s say that they purchase 6 of those on a monthly basis. That's like 55-70 bucks a month depending on the publisher. I'll add in an extra 40 for catch up purposes (like you found something that isn't scanned in and you wanna read it or something) to put you right at my 100 a month. Do you really think that people here spend that much? If I wasn't buying to scan, I wouldn't spend nearly that much. Hell, I doubt more than 5% of the people on this site spend more than 30 minutes in a bookstore every month, and all they do is check to see what the covers of their favorite manga look like in English.

People are never going to buy the mediocre series if they've read them online. Sure they'll buy your Bleach copy or whatever it is the fanboys are reading right now, but these companies spend maybe 1% of their budget on Bleach and 99% on everything else that no one buys because they've read it online. Any argument for licensed scanning is an argument for stealing in every sense of the word. They’re so bad that those of us that break the law putting out unlicensed manga look down on them for being so sleazy. Nothing but manga whores working for the highest bidder.

Normal people don't buy "100$ worth of manga" regularly - they do it on a spur of the moment, to read during a flight, as a present, etc. - just like any other book. How much you read only describes the amount of time you spend in the library, being a bookworm doesn't make you more or less profitable to the publishers.
If the manga is so bad that you wouldn't want to read it a second time then it either shouldn't be licensed at all or should be sold in dirt-cheap bookstalls as a one-time travelling read, or presented in manga magazines only.

Yes. That was my point. If I spend that much and still refuse to buy manga that I’ve read online, then no one buys shit they’ve read online. Most of the people here have probably never owned a hardcopy of anything they claim to like. So any argument for scanning in licensed manga is an argument for blatant theft as well as accessory to theft.

And how in the world do you read a manga as a one-time traveling read? They barely sell it in airports... and if you want to read enough to last you a trip, it'll take at least 3 or so volumes (3 hour plane ride and a slow reader?), and then you've bought... Idunno, 'weird manga 1-3' and you’ve realized that serials aren’t exactly like other books. Do you buy more? Stop reading it in the middle of the story? Or go online and steal the rest?

This isn't an argument over whether things that aren't good should be licensed. Personally I think that crappy manga shouldn't be translated by anyone, amateur or professional. It's a waste of time. The point is that people that read it online don't buy it, and the companies rely on people buying their mid-range manga just as much as they rely on people buying Naruto. They’re filler series to cushion the bottom line. They expect them to do a little better than breaking even, but they fill out the catalogue and who knows, maybe people will like it.

"no one buys shit they’ve read online" - you're completely wrong.
In Japan practically all the manga that is sold in tankubons is printed first in extremly cheap(like 5$ for 500 pages) but LQ magazines, so the japanese are exposed to practically the same thing as you are through scanlations and that "blatant theft". (BTW, those are completely misleading terms - "theft" and "stealing" are bad since somebody loses something which is not the case with artifically invented "copyright infrigment" there everyone gains and everyone benefits; and just because scanlations use a different word doesn't change the fact that they are still violating the same law).
How much you spend on entertainment is determined exclusively by your income, what exactly you buy is determined by what you read/watch or hear about - if you read a lot of manga you're going to buy it, and if there's no manga online - you're going to watch the TV and buy the DVD's or go to the cinema, etc.
So, quite the contrary to your words - outside Japan only the people that read manga online are buying it, and any argument for scanning in licensed manga is an argument in support of public libraries and free TV, and not in support of robbers that take all your money and cut your throat afterward (that is closer to what RIAA is doing).
Torrents, P2P networks and pirates don't change the total profit of entertainment industry and do no damages to it - they only serve to increase the competition, making people more aware of what is good and what is bad and stimulating those that produce the former while punishing those that try to sell latter through false advertisements.
As for travelling read - you don't gulp it down like you do online, you carefully enjoy the art and presentation. Of course reading speed also depends on the amount of text in it- you'd easily spend an hour to read a volume of Death Note, but Naruto is a different thing... And the fact that you don't have to buy all the volumes, that you can always read the latter parts online is an additional reason to buy it, so even knowledge that those "stolen scans" exist would be enough to actually increase the publisher's profit. If I were a publisher I would even go so far as to create an advertising program like "buy one volume and read the five online for free".
If it is a mid-range manga - make the cost proportional to the quality. Print it in a wideband anthology, so that it compensates in variety and amount for the poor contents.

Yes, thank you for that incredible explanation. I had no idea that there were these ‘magazines’ you speak of in Japan. And they’re just like scanslations, you say? Interesting…

And it… increases their profits? Having stuff online for free? Perhaps having the first few chapters online for free would increase profits by getting people hooked and forcing them to purchase. But hooking someone when they buy 1 and 2 and then losing potential profits of 3-whatever to the internet doesn’t make you any money. If every volume were a budget item, 1 and 2 would be profitable and 3 through whatever would lose money. If there’s more than 6 or 7 total volumes, 1 and 2 would have no chance of outweighing the production costs lost from making 3 through 7. The manga would be a failure and the company would be hit for a loss.

And the last time I checked, theft was the act of taking something that does not belong to you. And as we do not work in the magical land of public domain, we are all stealing (well... I'm not stealing, but I do give stuff away that doesn't belong to me, which is the ‘accessory to theft’ part of my previous statement, and I'm the infringer of the original copyright as well). And I do agree that theft and stealing is bad. Point to you.

As for why purchasing a 'free' 5 dollar magazine for every chapter of manga is somehow the same as purchasing a free zero dollar download for a million chapters of manga, I'm totally dumbfounded that you would even consider presenting that as a valid argument for breaking all of those imaginary laws. I buy lots of those free magazines and let me tell you, they get pretty damn expensive. I don't, however, purchase all of the volumes in them. Just the ones I really like. Which is, like... one... in each magazine. The more I look at your analogy, the more it fits in with my original '20% of the manga you download you buy' argument… although it actually sounds closer to 5-10% the way you put it. Let’s say, hypothetically, that everyone here were to purchase everything they’ve read and enjoyed. The bookstores would be empty. We’d have manga on the best seller list beating out Stephen King (on a bad week). But it’ll never happen, because people rarely (note that I didn’t use an absolute this time) buy manga that they read online.

You're basically making an argument in favor of downloading something for free that otherwise costs money. I know you'll say this is ridiculous, but it's like saying that going to a warez site and downloading Photoshop for free is somehow legal and moral (like, maybe because “you weren't going to buy it anyway, so they're not losing any money… you just get it for free because you outsmarted the system”). The black and white of it is that you're trying to convince a thief that he's not a thief to make yourself feel better about being a thief. I've accepted it, you should too.

As for wideban, I actually noticed the other day that they did that for Shounan Jun'ai Gumi (although they called it GTO: The Early Years, which offended me deeply). No one does that because printing more pages in a bound publication is more costly per book. Thus it costs the consumer more per book, and people are pretty stupid, so they'll buy the cheaper manga next to it. It's called the 'Idiot Dynamic' and you learn it in marketing (not really).

One thing the article failed to mention in detail was how horrible the VHS days were for people buying anime, how much more expensive it was to purchase licensed copies and how many officially licensed distributors' translations were often of disgustingly poor quality.

Back then, subtitled anime cost up to ten bucks more per cassette compared to the english dubbed counterparts. Censorship/nightmarishly bad dubbing was common and the number of episodes was often as few as two per cassette. A lot of licensing companies even carried over that model to the DVDs, never bothering with added features and making one version english dub only and another subtitled only. This did little to build customer loyalty and it shows.

Manga does not suffer from this so much. It still suffers a bit from the release time gap but it has many advantages over anime. For one thing, it has always been far more affordable for consumers and publishers. No one expects companies to give them a Japanese and an English/Spanish/German/Swahili version of the same title. Censorship is less common. Above all though, the books are simply more convenient. Right now, scanlations are only read pretty much in front of a desktop or laptop, making it inconvenient to read on the go.

A decline in manga isn't going to occur until palm computing becomes more common/practical. The only way to make palm computing practical for manga is if/when collapsible screens are developed to allow for convenient reading. Current screen sizes are simply too small to be worth the hassle and simply enlarging it removes the all important convenience.

At this point, scanlations bring attention to series and even genres that would normally never make it out of Japan. Next to no one would be licensing/publishing yaoi if not for scanlators creating the market.

As for speed scanlations, I see it as a mixed blessing for the manga industry. The garbage translations and copies pretty much whets people's appetite for good translations and copies more than normal. That said, it does discourage decent translations from fans which again is a mixed blessing. It discourages competition but gives licensed companies greater opportunity to sell quality titles to hungry consumers. If every scanlation was turned to trash though, I shudder to think what licensed companies would be able to get away with. No one wants garbage translations like those in Azumanga Daioh to become commonplace after all.

Actually, I agree totally with Tofusensei, about the fact that if you don't support the industry there won't be any industries there for you after a time. And I try to buy the official material as much and as far as my money allows me to. But, on the other hand I just can't handle most of the "official" releases of many anime/manga that I like, I have been always a hardcore fan of not replacing, nor transforming the original contents to adapt it to your requirements, even tough i understand that it makes it more suitable for a wider audience, it kills the original work of the people who worked back on the original version, sometimes if not that notorious, some changes are minimal, but others can exceed the words i can think of, One Piece censored episodes, script, scenes, make me sick, even tough I consider myself a lover of this series; on the other hand is Tenjou Tenge, even tough i'm not a fan of the series, I really consider that censoring a product that is meant to have nudes, and "offensive" language, is not like gang members or street fighters would use a correct language or be always gentle, I have seen even grannies or children showing the "infamous" censored finger.
Then also comes the cultural transition that every element suffers, sometimes the fact that some facts are changed is unavoidable, but as I mentioned before, it stills is reviling the art, the creation itself of another person, i.e: It would be like the people on United States, decided to turn The Gioconda into a blonde, because it fits better their cultural environment, and even tough it may sound ridiculous, is what sometimes happens with the translations, edition, etc.
And on the other hand, I consider many times that the quality of many fansub groups is still far away from licensed products.
I remain still on the fact, that the transformations done to any creation should be minimal, and licensed products just don't fit in with it.
P.S. Excuse my english, it's just that it's not my native language.

I actually buy up to the 14.3% of the manga i read "online"(this does not count mangas already finished, nor mangas that i gave a shot and dissappointed me, nobody's gonna buy something that they don't like, when give a shot, it's the equivalent to buy the classic periodic magz, that comes out in japan), 64.3% of what i read online, doesn't even come out on my language yet, and 14.3% of that total doesn't arrive to my country, the resting 7% is on my buying list, i don't expend big amounts of cash, but at the same time I buy what my spare money lets me too, and I don't have any way to pay online.
And some stuff that i finished "reading", i got the most complete collection at my hand if i think it's worth

I don't think that the manga industry's going to be terribly affected. I honestly doubt that any company that publishes manga expects it to jump off the shelves by the thousands like it would if everyone who read something online bought it. I might be making some generally incorrect assumptions here, but you guys can always just tear my argument apart if it would make you feel better.

Anime and TV industries don't earn their money from people buying their product, at least not the people watching the shows buying the product. Their actual product is advertising space. So to them, the watchers themselves are important because the more viewers there are, the more valuable those thirty seconds of advertising will be to any potential buyers. That's where subs can hurt, because people don't always want to watch a dub of something that they've already watched a sub of. Of course, there are people who just like dubs, but not that many, I think. I honestly hope that the anime industry isn't trying to get most of their money from DVD sales, because I doubt those would be high even without subbers. Hell, I would even carry it so far as to say that without subbers, most fans would never have even heard of most shows that go straight to DVDs (the exceptions being obvious; big names like Miyazaki will always be known, but I don't think even he would be quite as big if there weren't an online community to create hype. Big, yes, but not quite as big). So I like Tofusensei's suggestion to the industry: make the speed-subs themselves. I would say that they might as well skip the internet and just release it on TV--that's where the profit is.

(Of course, my entire argument goes down the drain if DVD sales generate greater profits than advertising space sales for anime. I wouldn't know, myself, but for bigger series like Naruto, I doubt they could.)

Manga's different, though. I haven't read all the comments, but manga is like books. No one expects every person who has ever read, say, Twilight (for lack of a better example; Harry Potter fans are crazy and are therefore the exception to the following argument), to own a copy of the book. They expect libraries to buy one or two copies and for those copies to be shared among a very large population. I don't think that what scanners are doing is much different. There are one or two people buying a book and they're sharing it with a whole lot of other people, some of whom may also decide to buy a copy, most of whom won't. I can go to my local library and get a copy of Naruto to read, free of cost. No one has ever accused libraries of stealing from the publishing industry (or at least not in my memory), and I don't think scanlations will do any more harm than libraries have.

Obvious counterargument: distribution online takes only one buyer whereas distribution through libraries takes many libraries purchasing a book. I don't really know what to say in response, but I still think that overall, manga's not going to harm the industry that badly.

> No one has ever accused libraries of stealing from the publishing industry (or at least not in my memory), and I don't think scanlations will do any more harm than libraries have.

Actually someone on this forum has asked the question if public libraries are like scanlators in that gray-legal line. I don't recall the exact thread of course but it was an 'scanslated manga: is it legal?' question (in theory the answer is no ,but yet anybody that's taken part or enjoyed a scanslation has probably continued enjoying it even keeping maybe some of his or her own ethics while doing so).

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My avatar was Yves Saint Laurent's The Black Evening Dress (with big bow) first shown in 1983, photographed from his 2002 retrospective and final show. [color=#CC0066]Check out some of his collections for free (pre-2008) HERE[/color] courtesy of FirstView.

> A decline in manga isn't going to occur until palm computing becomes more common/practical. The only way to make palm computing practical for manga is if/when collapsible screens are developed to allow for convenient reading. Current screen sizes are simply too small to be worth the hassle and simply enlarging it removes the all important convenience.

Well even when I heard about how Amazon.com has this device that costs $400 to read ebooks and that the service to read a few hundred available books is the set cost of around $10 or less per a month, if the Japanese are interested enough, I think a device for manga could be brought pretty fast. Japanese buy the new devices and when the slightly new ones are out, they jump for them and there tends not to be much of a second-hand market while people in North America hold out for the better or closer to the final product version and then purchase that. There's the Mac Book Air which is really thin and the obviously pointed out that it's thin enough to fit in a letter envelope with zero strain, so if a device was that thin, and maybe half that size, it would be considered I think. It might be lumped together with some (text)books to sort of protect it. (If a school kid was able to afford it, they might be always dragging something else around. But I think a good chunk of people that are working carry a brief case, a purse that a carry-all type, or a bag that's the size of a backpack.) If the device was as small as a manga volume that alone should be appealing enough as instead of having to constantly maybe buy and resell (or even just discard) the physical manga book, one could just download the new volume(s) just like the ebooks mentioned before. And maybe the device would have all the extras that an mp3 has or a Blackberry.

But maybe the reason why the device hasn't been made yet is there is no demand or if people are working on it, they haven't built interest. To me, having things like a stereo hooked up to a CD player and like 40" LCD TV are okay, but I'm not going to run out and pay thousands of dollars if I only feel "okay" about it.

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My avatar was Yves Saint Laurent's The Black Evening Dress (with big bow) first shown in 1983, photographed from his 2002 retrospective and final show. [color=#CC0066]Check out some of his collections for free (pre-2008) HERE[/color] courtesy of FirstView.

I was actually thinking a more general purpose device like the blackberry or the iphone would advance functionally/technologically enough to be used for reading books/web pages/manga eventually. Hell, you can already surf web pages and watch video with the iPhone. The only things really stopping it is that the size is a bit too small and the cost is too high.

As for laptops, even ultra light laptops are too unwieldy when folded open to read on the go and tablet PCs haven't really caught on. Combine that with a cost of around 500+ bucks for even the cheapest and least functional models and it just isn't practical at this point.

I'd love to see a functional bare bones 6"x8" 2lbs convertible tablet PC for $300 or less though. It would be the dream of any portable media buff and the nightmare to media companies everywhere. It may seem impossible now but in ten years, who knows?