my feeling is that as long as there's a demand, there will be a supply. the form of how scanlations will be supplied might change, such as sites like batoto becoming more popular. however, I doubt that scanlations will go away anytime soon. even if/when the publishers of manga start releasing english versions faster or online, people will be so used to unofficial scanlations and being able to read for free that I don't think anything will change much

/thread pretty much.

As long as people will be willing to take the time to scanlate, however poorly that may be, there will be scanlations.

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-GGpX

I run Illuminati-Manga. You're welcome.

I've noticed the quality's definitely changed since I started reading scanlations like 5 or 6 years ago. I don't even really read them anymore because I can just import the books from Japan, unless it's a really, really hard series to understand, but still.

I can see it heading into a different direction, for sure. US and Japanese companies are definitely trying to keep up to pace with the way the manga fanbase is going. I think in the next 5-10 yrs or so, most Japanese companies will be more directly offering their manga to the world in multilingual format and offering high quality releases, like Kodansha Comics is doing. I could see it going mostly digital here in the US, though I don't like reading manga on a computer, since I think it looks best on paper, but that's jmo.

It will be interesting, nonetheless.

It depends on how publishers act. I feel the same "that it will be around as long as the demand is"
Plus, as the music industry and piracy has proved. its incredibly hard to get rid of something once its on the internet.BUT i do feel that, publisher pressure will diminish the community. which is sad. the majority of leechers/fans are retarded and selfish for continuing to use such online readers knowing what they do. its like theyre showing the middle finger to the mangakas and saying "i dont care if you get ripped off as long as i get my manga"
The whole thing is ridiculous.

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"Man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived."- Dalai lama

If the publishers go after the profiteers and not fans, it won't diminish the community, it will only make it better. The community is ailing now, and someone's gotta set it right.

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Yeah. But really, like cmertb said, the publishers aren't likely going to go after some small time groups, they're concerned about aggregators and people who are profiting off this stuff.

scanlation will never end, although i do believe in like 10 years scanlators will only be translating series that arent really popular. Why? because i said so! lmao jk.

real reason: everybody is moving online, watch movies online, download games directly from sources like steam and gamefly, anime is online now, books are slowly getting phased out in favor of ereaders, and manga is slooooowly moving online. i believe once most major publishers move their distribution online they'll eventually get to translating their popular series' like naruto, bleach and one piece and releasing it in english internationally like anime simulcasts. its only a matter of time until this happens imo but im just not sure this will be true for all series'. unlike anime, there are hundreds of series getting published out there regularly so if publishers release english scans for popular series' then scanlators will be stuck with not so popular series hehe.

and some might argue that even that happens, scanlators will continue releasing stuff like naruto since anime fansub groups still release stuff that are being simulcast. My answer to that would be that theres really only one way to release manga online for an official publication, in HQ. Unlike video, publishers wont have the option to release crap in 480p for free users and 720p for subscribers.

P.S. i also think Batoto would get shut down before Mangafox ever did. Why? Because at least with MF its pretty obvious that scanlators hate the site and only 1 person is making major cash out of the site but with Batoto, their site slogan is basically "we make money for scanlators". it turns the argument of scanlators MIGHT make money from donations, but only enough for site fees and raws into scanlators WILL make money, and not just a few groups, but ALL groups that host their scans on Batoto. If i was a publisher my reaction would "hmm Batoto? 20 groups making money or MF where 1 person is making money? BRING DOWN THE HAMMER ON THE 20 GROUPS!!" lol

I, as a scanlator, don't think scanlation will end any time soon.

However, I think two things are obviously going to happen, seeing the way things are now:

1. Scanlation quality will be going down.

It seems that, as of recently, a lot of new groups have popped up. With these new groups, they pick up series. However since they're fairly new, all they have to go on is tutorials from around the internet. Depending on where they get their info from, they could end up with amazing scans, or crappy scans. It seems a lot of newer groups end up with crappy scans. This is mostly because since they are new, and need to experiment more before getting it right. However, we can also blame tutorials that show people to use filters. Sure, they work for magazine scans, but on most tutorials I have read for those, they don't specifically point out that they're only for magazine scans. So then what happens is, with these new groups who are using cleaning methods intended for magazines on tank raws, we get cruddy quality on something that only really needed to be leveled...

Also, with all the new groups, comes new translators. These translators are very rarely experienced, or have English as their first language. So what happens is, we have a bunch of newbie translators who are barely understanding what the manga says in the first place, putting it into english. Also, if the person who is translating isn't native to English, the translation suffers more.

2. Larger groups eliminating smaller groups.

With large groups like Red Hawk Scanlations, Gantz Waiting Room and others, smaller groups will have a harder time staying alive. Especially if said group wants to work on a popular/weekly ongoing series. For example, recently this happened to me with the manga my group was working on, Violence Jack. I was told that another group was going to pick it up, so I decided to go to their site to try and see if they would like to joint. Sadly they did not, and I was put in a position to either compete with the other group, who have a large number of members and are known to release volumes quickly, compare to my group where it's just me doing the majority of the editing and my translator only able to translate a chapter a week or to just drop the project and let the other group handle it. I decided to let the other group handle it, since they had more man power and I wouldn't really be able to compete with them over the series. There have also been other examples going on pretty much everywhere, the most recent one I can recall being when Red Hawk jointed with Jojo Project to release SBR and a lot of the Jojo fans being sour about it.

Anyways, the point I'm getting at is, if smaller/newer groups who are trying to stay afloat with popular series, they will most likely be challenged and even overwhelmed, by other larger groups if they try to compete with them. The only solution to this I can think of is that maybe larger groups should cut back on adding series. Then again, that would be like telling the rich to stop getting richer.

Oh boy, I won't be happy if this happens. My advice to you on your situation: even if the other group is going faster, that doesn't necessarily mean they're doing it better. If you really enjoy the series, keep at it. Time is kinder to those who do a good job rather than a rushed job. Violence Jack is a classic, so people will still be reading it years from now.

Anyway, I feel there's a couple things I need to get off my chest in regards to big groups. The first is a lack of quality control. It doesn't matter how many QCers or proofreaders a group has. If there isn't one picky tight-ass holding everything to an extremely strict standard, the quality of work will go down the drain. This has already become a problem with awkwardly phrased translations and excessive filtering becoming the standard for many groups.

The other thing about big groups is that these days it's too easy turn a profit from ad revenue and donations. Involving money in scanlation isn't always nefarious, of course. Naturally there are costs for the groups who make their own raws (though most groups actually don't do this) and server maintenance and whatnot. But when you're doing a very popular series, a group is able to very easily go into the green. From ads alone, a group might be able to make $20 in a single day from an online reader with a new release. Now imagine a group doing three very popular series. Or ten. Or twenty.

These two points are related to each other. Big groups pick series that they know will be popular, then they rush a scanlation out so they can attract readers and garner profit from ad revenue and donations as quickly as possible. This shouldn't be how "fan translations" are done but unfortunately it's increasingly going this way. I've been doing scanlation work since 2005 and things have noticeably been going downhill the last couple years ever since online readers became a viable business model. Very few people nowadays seem to care about producing a good translation or doing justice to the series they're scanlating.

(Please note that probably not all big groups are guilty of the second point, but there are some notable cases out there, and if things keep up it's only going to keep getting worse.)

There's only like five of us and even then theres only one who you could consider "always active".

For christ sake, your group is at least twice as large as ours.

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1. Scanlation quality will not be going down. There have always been noob groups who do crappy work with public tls. There will always be such noob groups. The average quality of scanlations has only gone up over the years. It's enough to look at some old manga scanlations to see the difference (e.g. look at GTO and prepare to gasp in horror).

2. Large groups have always been picking up projects without paying too much attention to the protestations of small groups. Even if these smaller groups get eliminated, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of noobs with insufficient experience and understanding of this biz trying to create new groups (just look at any recruitment forum). Some of them might actually succeed. In fact, I think your point 2 contradicts your point 1, Yazawa.

And incidentally, when it comes to really popular stuff (like WSJ), small groups try to steal from big groups all the time. Hell, I had a monthly chapter stolen because it was delayed by one whole week (that's how they justified it).

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Are you kidding, as of right now, we only have roughly 5 active people. That is kind of small compared to the big guys...

In response to Cmertb:

1. The thing with GTO is something that was more experimental, and since then, no one else has used that method to work on manga because of how horrible it looks(Although, I have seen joke scanlations reuse it.) However, with new groups with lack of knowledge, there is actually more lower quality stuff, not because they're doing something like the GTO scans did. It's because they are using the wrong methods on the wrong types of scans. Many new groups are actually using denoise on tankoubon raws that significantly ruin the quality. So what I'm saying is, it's not that their editing methods which are flawed, it is a bit of ignorance of when they're actually supposed to use them.

2. Yes, I am fully aware that new groups will always get knocked out when a larger group decides to take a project from them, however instead of just dying off, they are sometimes forced to join the larger group and work on the manga that way. If things continue like that, it will eventually be something like 4 large groups all working on many different genres of manga. Since people notice that there's only these 4 groups doing mangas they actually want to read, rather than make a new group, newbies will be more willing to join the larger groups and learn from there.

I strongly believe my second point does not contradict my first point. Just because a group is large, does not necessarily mean it has high quality scanlations. You must think of what is success to me, and what you think is success to yourself. To me, a successful scan group is one that works on the manga they want to, while being able to keep the editing at middle to high quality, and keeping the translation high quality. That is what I think is a successful group.

As for smaller groups stealing popular manga from larger groups, sure that happens, as an attempt to keep their group alive. However, what guarantees they'll be able to pull it off against next month now that the larger group knows to be careful?

Anyways, I'm not trying to say any of this is going to be fact, it's just my thoughts on it, and I could be wrong.

Last edited by Yazawa the Banchou at 4:44 pm, Sep 20 2011