I am not denying that and I am also not denying that manga culture exposure to the public through publication companies is rather limited. Becuse of the internet manga exposure increased drastically but thats due to scanlation groups. What are publishing companies doing sitting back and relaxing instead of keeping up with technology. Why does it take publishing companies months to translate chapters while it takes amatuer groups few hours to half a day each chapter.

Well, do realize that companies have to actually pay for translators to translate series. That, and they have to actually license the series as well. Since it costs money, they can't just do whatever series they wished to. Scanlators on the other hand can just take all of that for granted, for free, and whenever they wish.

________________
Founder of Kirei Cake. We're always looking for new members regardless of experience, so if you're interested, seek us out @ http://KireiCake.com!

I realize that and also translators are a dime a dozen whenever money is involved. The fault lies in the original publishing companies and not the companies that licenses in other countries. The companies that license in other countries are basically made scapegoats because the original publishing companies did not do it proactively like giving material before hand etc.

Licensing is cheap. Publishing is expensive. Unless we're talking about digitally publishing. Thats cheap too.

That said, the idea that the industry has to compete with "free" is a meaningless straw man argument. The manga industry isn't competing with "free", they're competing with a market whom they've stifled attacked via cease-and-desist orders for decades and finding that they're not getting the royal treatment when they decide a little bit play nice. (Why is there a ~1 year time gap between Japanese and U.S. volume releases when scanlation groups can do the same job (and sometimes better) in a few days/weeks?)

That is quite easy to explain. The scanlators don't have to deal with making an agreeement with the Japanese manga companies about the rights for licensing and for the period. Scanlators just scanlate whatever they like and drop it whenever they want. You can't do that when you license a manga you paid for. Not to mention you don't know if the manga is going to be a hit or not when you license it if you do it when it's released in Japan for the first time.

About scanlators doing a good job. I would say that's a 50/50, you may not know it because of your missing Japanese skills (This is an assumption) but many times when scanlators screws the translation you won't know it. Also when there's mistakes in the editing part or proofreading part, you accept it since you paid nada for it where if it was something you bought you'd expect them to make it near perfect. Making perfect takes time...

So yes I agree licensing is cheap and publishing is expensive. The problems aren't there when you go digital...still you need to pay the people you hire, right? These days translators are being paid in scanlation groups too. (many more than before) Go figure

Well see, Japanese publishers work around the clock to push out chapters each month or each week, and if they had to wait for their licensees to put out their copies, they'd be messing up their own schedules. Manga publishing in Japan isn't as streamline as airing anime since there's a lot more manga than there is anime, so a Crunchyroll-like approach to publishing manga internationally isn't exactly an easy feat to perform.

Sure, unless a manga series is popular it won't exactly be released by scanlation groups immediately (within a few days, if the groups are dedicated), however, the same goes for any translators and editors that the licensee company needs to hire, since they too wouldn't be able to get it all done in a day or two.

And unlike scanlation where you (theoretically speaking) have the entire world of manga readers to possibly pick out translators and/or editors from, licensee publishers don't exactly have that benefit. They have to individually screen and recruit people, which takes time and effort (and of course, money).

Elaborating on what T1 mentioned about how more and more translators from scanlation groups are getting paid for scripts, I think it's fair to say that they're rather just lucky, since the ones that pay them are usually smaller companies that deal with more specific demographics and genres.

________________
Founder of Kirei Cake. We're always looking for new members regardless of experience, so if you're interested, seek us out @ http://KireiCake.com!

Well, apparently crunchyrolling manga has failed. Time to try some other approaches to get income from this "market". I can suggest crowd funding that's been a popular topic lately. It might work, considering that scanlators do get donations, and that some fan translators do get paid (not that I'd personally lift a finger for those peanuts ). Clearly, many fans are willing to put their money where their mouths are.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel that this will be doomed to fail without the corresponding C&D'ing of scanlators. If the manga is popular, while you're trying to collect the cash to start a project, some scanlator out for what they think is fame and a few bucks they think is money will already be churning out chapters.

________________
Active translations list
Completed translations list
Dropped translations

I don't want to entrupt this. But we're talking about JManga in this thread. As mentioned in first posts too, I don't think the problem was scanlators this time around. JManga was working on some of the series that have been already licensed and translated by other companies such as VIZ and Tokyo Pop. Tokyo Pop has been inactive for a long time, but still I think JManga had copyright issues with some of those companies. For example using their translations and such. And also I think somehow JManga was starting to be the same threat to those companies as scanlators are, seeing how they were publishing the same sereis online with less cost and such...
Anyway their fast disappearance and removing the track behind them completely is not normal.

What do you mean by "crowd funding"?

Indeed, C&D's are necessary to keep scanlation groups under control. Most groups honour C&D's, which for the most part, serves its intended role quite well. Since C&D's don't cost money, as a form of a warning, it usually does its job in stopping most groups.

The only area it falters in is the scope of their potential lawsuits, which is limited to the money they wish to put into one (it can easily cost a lot for so little return, which makes them undesirable if they would dent the company's profits), as well as the jurisdiction of them (if a scanlation group's website and/or server is located in some country that doesn't really care, they're not going to court any day soon).

As well, apart from the groups that just don't care, even if C&D's successfully bring down the groups working on the series they wish to keep, other groups (both new or old) will likely pick up the series, if they want it continued.



Yes, I mentioned that the sudden closure of JManga just does not seem possible that it could've been due to a loss of profit from scanlation. It's likely a lawsuit or court order from other issues, such as the one you mentioned.

________________
Founder of Kirei Cake. We're always looking for new members regardless of experience, so if you're interested, seek us out @ http://KireiCake.com!

I don't know much about this JManga service. Did they scanlate new series or just host stuff that has been done to death by scanlators?

btw, it seems you have to pay for each chapter. A subscription model would work better imo.

________________
its cold down here fam ~

I'm not saying that licensed manga publishers need to be on the cutting edge of whatever is released in Japan (I'm sure we've all started reading stories only for them to be axed after a few chapters/volumes). But when you're an officially licensed publisher, its pretty irritating for your customers to hear "X popular manga, a 20+ volume, anime, movies, video games and toys successful series? You have to wait over a year after the Japanese release for the same volume. And we're going to do that for EVERY volume." (One Piece, Berserk, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Detective Conan, etc...)

Why would fans wait if there is 'good enough' fan scanlations that come out within a month after that Japanese release?

JManga licensed and published a mix of popular and unpopular series, to try and cultivate to all sorts of demographics and genre preferences. I personally thought some were a dumb waste of time, but it's their choice.

And yeah, a Netflix-like model would've worked better. But then again, it doesn't seem like they're closing down for loss reasons, but likely for other reasons. Probably copyright issues.



Licensee companies only have so much money to spend on translators and editors, and we're not looking at a company with like, 1,000 people. It's only like 100 people at most, and that's stretching it.

Unlike scanlation groups where people can sometimes get so addicted that they'll end up churning out chapters daily, licensee companies don't have that royalty of daily releases. The employees that work there just do it like a normal job, and don't rush at all since there isn't a need to. (If you get your job done earlier, you get paid less, you know?)

That, and licensee companies usually start the series from the start again, so for long series, they'll take a long time to catch up. Some do just adopt other company's publications, but not all.

________________
Founder of Kirei Cake. We're always looking for new members regardless of experience, so if you're interested, seek us out @ http://KireiCake.com!

The official explanation per Jmanga's twitter is a lack of revenue:

The odd thing about Jmanga was that quality on some titles was basically on par with scanlations. I know in the Chitose Get You! manga I ran across 4komas where they forgot to translate the title, and I'm pretty sure I remember one where they did translate it, but forgot to box out the Japanese text, so it had the English overlaying the Japanese and was pretty much unreadable in either language. The Poyopoyo volumes I read were better quality from that standpoint (no missed 4koma titles) though, so it may have varied from title to title. Still, you tend to expect better quality from a professional site, even if it's digital publishing only.

I still bought from them, and was a subscriber, but stuff like that really made me wonder wtf they were thinking.

I was poking around their site today and noticed they stopped updating their blog back in December. Looks like they may have known since then this day was coming.

I think what killed them was mainly the reader. That flash reader was atrocious. Even if it just had to be flash it could have been better. Ever tried skipping around in a volume? You can drop down a list of pages, but you have to scroll one page at a time left to right in it to get to a specific spot. It's quicker than doing the full pages, but not by much. Then you had their reader app, the Android one was unusable. Literally so for many people, it simply would not work for me on two different tablets and my phone. If they'd actually written a reader for Android & iOS that worked it would have helped. So basically the execution was lacking, and that very well may be due to licensing restrictions placed on them from the publishers. Doesn't really matter in the end, it still turned a lot of people off enough to make them not become paying customers.

I am pleased that the way the closure announcement reads, you can still use your points you had at the point of closure. They're refunding based on your balance as of March 13th, but you can still use your points through March 26th. I take that to mean I can buy the remaining volumes of Poyopoyo I had points for and still get refunded. (I'm willing to take the chance because I want to read it all.) That seems pretty generous of them. Also, since the refunds take place March 21st-25th, you can always wait and get your refund E-mail before you spend what you had left.

I'm really not looking forward to the massive screen capturing sessions I need to do to save all my purchased volumes. I didn't have as many as some people, but I still have around 20 volumes to do.

Then licensee companies should pay based on commission instead of salary? You're making it sound like they're failing due to management incompetence and blaming it on "you can't compete with free!"

And the U.S. manga publication of One Piece is a mere 3 volumes behind (not bad since we're talking about a 60+ volume series). But theres still an 10 month time gap between the U.S. and Japanese releases (vol 66 JP release: May 2, 2012, vol 66 US release: March 5, 2013). Your "it takes time to catch up"-argument is falling flat on its face. (Oh and volumes 67, 68 and 69 are already out in Japan. So they're 10 months AND 3 volumes behind.)