We are living in XXI century now and if asking for money for scanlation would be a standard, the whole scanlation thing would quickly sink. We are literally in the gray area considering laws of some countries (you can share everything as long as you are not making any profit) and going for money would quickly turn that to black almost everywhere.

It's not only about morals but also about scanlation continuation in the whole.

And morally speaking
-it's a shitty thing to do, profiting off someones work
-money makes people greedy
-mangadex deservse every penny they get, they are working their asses to build and now they are maintaining a decent website with lots of features without throwing ads or any guarantee the whole thing won't burn someday. Also they are respecting everyones wishes, how can someone not like them?

Quote from mangabro69

-mangadex deservse every penny they get, they are working their asses to build and now they are maintaining a decent website with lots of features without throwing ads or any guarantee the whole thing won't burn someday. Also they are respecting everyones wishes, how can someone not like them?

Account was made over a hour ago with one of the most stereotypical "not shill" usernames ever made, first and only post was made minutes later, and the ending of said post being a blantant defence of MangaDex when they have already come out stating that they are not opposed to going legit and will not disclose their income, nor what it goes towards except when talking about server costs.

Is this bait or are you being paid by the hour?
EDIT: Also, why are you talking about MangaDex when the last post mentioning it in this thread was way back in March?

[img]http://www.dragonflycave.com/wpay/mew.gif[/img]

"It's not only about morals:" Morals...? MORALS!!? Hahaha you're funny dude...

but also about scanlation continuation in the whole.

"scanlation continuation" as in "I need my aggregators to keep pumping more manga, screw the people that makes it"

And morally speaking
-[it's a shitty thing to do, profiting off someones work] (Buy you're profiting from the author by reading and not paying)

-money makes people greedy (And that's why we all work, no? for motivation. But you don't owe anything to anybody. You are forced to take a stance of defending the so called "author's profit" as an excuse to have everything for free and feel good about it. Look at every scanlator, all of them have a stupid paypal link into their account)

[-mangadex deservse every penny they get, they are working their asses to build ....]

Build what? another aggregator with manga they don't make? come on, dude. There's no motivation is making manga anymore. Aggregators need to be taken down and burned for good. The fandom is too young and toxic at this point in life.

For the question of ethics, just put yourself in the author's place. If you make a work of digital art (i.e. it's easy to copy), and someone takes it, posts it up on their site, saying "look a the cool thing this guy did", does it make you feel bad? Maybe, maybe not. On the one hand, they did it without your permission. On the other, they did it out of admiration.

Now, if you find out they charge money for it, even if it's only in the form of voluntary donations: Does it make you feel worse than the first case? (It's a rhetorical question. If you answer that it doesn't make you feel worse, you are a damn liar and unworthy of civilized discussion 🙂 ) It's worse because now you have to question whether they're taking your stuff without permission out of admiration for your work.

So really, that's why the argument "it's piracy anyway, so it's all the same" doesn't hold much water. There are various degrees of being shitty to someone, and taking money puts you well on the shitty side of the scale.

There are other (even more important) reasons not to take money, but that's a separate discussion.

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Completed translations list
Dropped translations

I only like odd, quirky, and distinctively Japanese manga, by and large. Almost none of those will ever get published to an American audience. Therefore I'm grateful for the scanlators who translate them, and I will "Patreonize" them willingly and without guilt.

[For the question of ethics, just put yourself in the author's place.]

Yes, I do, they don't want to see it delivered to the audience "for free" or "by unauthorized profit". But the "question of ethics" doesn't apply to me here because it doesn't bother me that someone in Japan doesn't get paid. Same thing with discussing how bad cheating is if we are in a game cheating page, or how bad is to pirate games in a rom page.
mangaupdates was never intended to promote "legal" digital releases isn't it?

The question you should ask me is "If I donate to you, what would you do with the donations?" Because we all like to get money for nothing. But translating a manga is not a effortless job, nor is a common job than anybody with a few hours of photoshop training can do. So I'll tell you "To pay the translator" and even to buy the book.

Your translator skills and effort fuels a motivation you might have to do this for free. More friends? a rep in the community? I dunno why would you want to read japanese and translate it to english. Usually people that can read japanese have no motivation to come to these kind of sites. UNLESS...

There's money involved.

I pay 50.00 per volume to my translator. In USA and Japan, that money is not the effort or trouble for the amount of work. But in Indonesia or Singapore that's HALF a monthly minimum salary. So they work for me.
I can photoshop, anybody can photoshop, edit an english script, QC etc. But is the translator the one that delivers the unique ingredient that makes a scanlation what it is.

but "manga for nothing" and "money for nothing" are aggregators fuel that until today they milk the place without ever giving back to the groups that did it. So, the fans got demanding and here we are....

Questioning if it's much better to just give everything away for free.

Do you imagine if manga fans were weed users? hahaha, They will be demanding that weed should be free because god created the plant and it grows under rain so why they should pay for it 🙂

I know a lot of groups that does this. There was this one group that I was apart of as a low scrub staff, a Typesetter. I didn't even know about their patreon releases, basically it was like early releases chapters but like it was stupid since it gets posted in public either way and it's not their own work to even post it. Unless the original author gave them permission to licensed it then yeah I can get around that but the group was unofficial and didn't ask permission from author to do so. I learned about it over the months of promotion to quality checker and to co-owner. After what happened to Trash Scans, I wanted it shut down. The owner of the group I was apart of says no because he wants money. I told him to stop being a damn lazy prick and forcing people to do their assign work when this is all volunteer. Until one day, he told me he was using other people's donation to pay another translator... That pissed me off so much 😠 I rage and eventually left because his behaviors was unsanitary, j mean the patreon thing shut down but after I left, rumors arise of him trying to bring it back because no one was donating.

I own two groups and none of my donations I've used to scam people. I bought Raws with my donations that I need for the necessary projects also it helps the author when we buy the Raws from them. But when donations don't come in, I don't force people to donate for a damn release. Like, even if I do, there's no point... I don't even have that type of life or anyone's life in the team to even do this. Maybe if your group is those quantity over quality groups sure. But na, take our time to release and make people wait. Donations or not, taking our time is worth.