Raw Providers and Reading Sites Issues

[Aethos]

If anything this crackdown won't hurt the people who are buying the official releases while still pirating. From what I have seen these are the people who largely support the crackdown.

But to the casual fan who may only read a series once and then never pick it up again. To the casual fan who may not even be reading dozens of series at a time. Maybe even just enjoying two or three, and to the casual fans who might have bought the official release were it not discontinued half way through it's run only to never be picked up again, or having a series suffering from release dates, which will take so long that it'll be ten years or more before the official release is where people are reading now. That is who this crackdown is hurting most, and it isn't going to get these people to buy the official manga. These are the people who probably wouldn't spend a dine on manga even if OM and other sites didn't exist. The only difference is that through the free manga reading process these casual fans were exposed to series they'd probably never pick up, and who knows? Maybe there was a chance they could have become consumers. In the end the coalition just shot themselves in the foot.

[Xagzan]

Guess that makes me an odd one out. I buy official releases while pirating, and I think the crackdown is a waste of time and a stupid business move.

[Aethos]

Well there are exceptions to every rule. Also apparently from what I have seen 2ch is pretty much giving OM and the western fans the proverbial middle finger.

[spikexp]

Originally Posted by Aethos

Also apparently from what I have seen 2ch is pretty much giving OM and the western fans the proverbial middle finger.

Yeah, I've read that on Sankaku. They are stupid, yet at less they made me laugh a good time

Personally, I have a electronic pirated version of every paper book I own (manga, novel, poem book, even some school book), same thing with the anime (well, the anime is more cause I hate their damn yellow subtitle .)

For my manga I almost never use onemanga (But I still love it), I always go look chapter and team on mangaupdate.
And some other site that regroup lot of manga chapter and complete volume from scantrad team (10 site like that, 3 french, 7 english). For the rest I simply use google (company should sue google, they make finding pirated thing so easy ).

[Aethos]

Meh keeping copies of manga were too much of a hassle to me. Reading on onemanga made it easy. Besides I really don't need manga chapters taking up my computer space. Especially when I'm only going to read through a series once. Cause that's all I would ever really do, but I suppose that's because I don't understand the appeal of going back and re-reading the stuff you've already seen.

But what made OM great though was not about pirating manga. It's the fact that when you forgot a feat or a quote or something. You had those online readers as reference to remind you of what you wanted to know.

[Seitsuki]

Originally Posted by Solace

Maybe I should considering the stupid comments people are neg repping me with.

I see what you mean, got my first neg rep from some hypocrite paragon of virtue and justice who obviously has never pirated anything in their life. Oh well, welcome to the internet :/

I think the only major change is that publishers are finally waking up to the magnitude the internet can potentially affect their sales, whether for good for bad. Whereas once the majority of their profits would have come from physical sales, and they were probably willing to accept the losses from people reading online in return for the increased exposure, the increasing significance of the internet in terms of revenue is finally forcing them to act. Imo this is only one step of many as the industry prepares to finally itself step into this brave new world. Maybe one of them may even find the itunes of manga, who knows.

But for now, the situation is very unclear. Will they rest for now, or will more hammers be brought to bear. Whatever happens, it's game on yeah?

[Arabesque]

If publishers are willing to try and take advantage of the situation by advancing and improving their online services, then they can avoid the negative backlash coming from the causal users of these sites. If they decided to just call it quites after just this then nothing will be accomplished and everything just goes back to square one.

So the key here is the alternative.

my £0.2

[DragoZERO]

Originally Posted by Random32

you don't have to read all of it, just download all of them to read later

btw, mangafox still isn't working for me. prolly something at my end.

MangaFox should have been one of the first to go because they are owned and run by a for-profit company.

[frubam]

Originally Posted by Arabesque

If publishers are willing to try and take advantage of the situation by advancing and improving their online services, then they can avoid the negative backlash coming from the causal users of these sites. If they decided to just call it quites after just this then nothing will be accomplished and everything just goes back to square one.

So the key here is the alternative.

my £0.2

and why should they care about the 'negative backlash' of people who contribute no monetary funds to their work?

[Xagzan]

Originally Posted by frubam

and why should they care about the 'negative backlash' of people who contribute no monetary funds to their work?

They wouldn't unless people were pissed enough to boycott, which I doubt will happen. But they should care about the corresponding even-further loss of sales to the (potential) casual manga reader, now that they have increasingly fewer ways online to get acquainted with manga for real, and thus actually go out and support any series they really liked by buying them.

Without an alternative that is.

[Aethos]

You know even to give the people who wanna be goody two shoes about this whole thing the benefit of the doubt. Even if we don't deserve to read manga for free that doesn't mean our scanlations should be taken away to the point where people have to resort to file sharing just to get them. If anything the industry should have cooperated with sites like onemanga. I mean heck if they cooperated. Took over, kept the site ad free, and made sure peoples computers couldn't be infected by the ninja viruses you could get on mangatoshokan and mangafox. I'd totally pay ten bucks a month to continue reading on onemanga and such sites.

[DragoZERO]

You can't pay for something free. If I have to pay money to read a translated manga, I want to know that the money is going to those who did the work of making it. What should have been done is remove licensed series and that's all. There is a Japanese site that posts raws which is still online. The Japanese publishers should worry more about sites and alike similar to it. Luckily they aren't or their attempts have been futile since some groups get their raws from places like that.

[Aethos]

Well wouldn't the money be going to just those people if the industry partnered with the reading sites and charged a fee? Pretty much it's no different than netflixs then and hey it's still going to the publishers. No different than buying the actual volumes in the store. Not to mention it'd be a lot more cost efficient and a better form of business as it's arguable that book stores are on the way out along with the music and movie rental industries because of how paper products like newspapers, magazines, etc. are struggling in paper form due to the internet.

[milan kyuubi]

By getting rid of possibly THE biggest manga site, or at least, the most popular, the publishers would look at it as a way to eventually take down other sites as well. They think that this will increase their overall revenue. However, in our eyes, the likelihood of maintaining that revenue, or even increasing it, is slightly unnerving. Let's say that a certain fanbase has 1000 fans, and approximately 500 of the fanbase read the manga online, due to various personal reasons. If utilizing the "pay-as-you-go" or the online subscription system on the foremost manga sites, around 250 of the online readers will stop reading because of their lack of funds. The other 250 will pay, but only for the titles that they really adore. After a while however, out of the 250 that do pay, 125 will end their subscription because their manga is finished, or lose interest.

So now, 250+125=375 (37.5%) fans will be lost, just from the conversion of free manga scans into paid manga subscriptions.

As a result, about 625 people will actually pay to read manga. However, the 500 people that read licensed manga also have to be taken into account. About 250 people will not buy the volumes, since they either view it as a waste of money, or just read it in the bookstores, or it can just be the fact that the licensed form takes a much longer time to release new chapters. As time goes on, and since the mangaka undoubtedly has to take breaks, the space between updates will increase, and that will in turn spur more of the readers to abandon the series. Now, around 375 of the volume readers will have left.
So, 625-375=250 (25%) of all fans will remain, and actually pay money to read the manga.

Then let's say, using our formula, the manga company started out with $1,000,000 as revenue. By getting rid of scans, and monopolizing the volumes while releasing them at a snail's pace, $750,000 will be lost, leaving only a result of $250,000. This shows that instead of increasing their revenue, they're actually losing money; support for the mangaka will dwindle, and more frustration towards the licensing company will grow. In addition, some of the publicity surrounding the manga will die down, as word primarily travels through Internet nowadays, and not by mouth. Also, some people buy volumes after getting interested in the manga online. Without the popularity garnered by manga hosting sites, less people are going to be interested in, and possibly even KNOW of, manga.

If this trend continues, within 2 years, maybe even in 1 year, all the glory surrounding manga will wither and dry up. This could be for a little while, or it could be forever. It is clear though, that by shutting down online manga sites, publishers are, in actuality, debilitating the very thing they want to augment.


Reader A buys japanese manga

reader A shows reader B who did not buy manga.

Reader B translates manga.

Reader B Shows translation to other readers.

Whats illegal about that?

Is it because it can be seen free by anyone online?

This isn't anything that doesn't happen everywhere. I am sure if you got a friend got a manga you wanna read, your not gonna buy your own, your gonna read your friend's.

Its not like this is a large novel or a movie. It is a 20 page a week comic. Its not like your gonna read that comic every day, or very long.

Can someone explain if I translate something and shows others my ability to translate, how is that illegal?
like any good worker on the internet, they will find another venue to work from. they will be able to get their work in the public as well, that wont be stopped.

And even than, you gotta realize for those who see this. How many people go to anime shops, Barnes and nobles, borders and so on to just sit there and read manga unhindered? Its not like people are buying a them like crazy anyway. If they want people to buy their stuff, instead of attacking the scanlators, they should get on the stores that allow people to read their content without purchase, because than sales arent made and they lose money that way.

New manga writers/drawers will never get popular in America without sites like this advertising their work. Casual readers won't bother to look up Japanese sites or learn Japanese, so all they're doing is losing fan-base. The people who don't pay for their manga already aren't just going to START, this won't last very long once they see sales drop and new manga becomes impossible to sell in the states.

[Ryuujin]

Series that aren't licensed at all will be the biggest casualties, since "go buy them" isn't even an option with them (sure, you could import the Japanese versions, but that really wouldn't fucking help, for obvious reasons)...

[Krono]

Originally Posted by milan kyuubi

Reader A buys japanese manga

reader A shows reader B who did not buy manga.

Reader B translates manga.

Reader B Shows translation to other readers.

Whats illegal about that?

Absolutely nothing.

Is it because it can be seen free by anyone online?

Sort of. Specifically the part where reader A violates copyright by scanning the manga and posting it online for everyone to read. Nothing wrong with showing a single physical copy to his friend, and nothing wrong with showing his translation to everyone. But the moment he starts creating duplicates of the original work for people's use, is when he hit's the point where he's violating laws.

The companies were happy to ignore it when it was just relatively handfuls of people downloading scanations off of IRC and scanlators websites. Big online readers with a billion page views a month is an entirely different can of worms. One they can't ignore, despite your lovely fantasy about how much business and money they'll be losing by knocking online readers back hard enough that availability of scanlations goes from "type series name into google, it'll be on the first page of results" to "type series name, and a couple of other search terms into google, it'll be on the first few pages of results."

[Equidistant]

The real question in all this is how much is shutting down these sites going to improve the U.S. companies sales. If they don't see a medium to large, consistent increase in sales there's no reason at all to do this. Should all the online readers be shut down and they don't see a noticeable difference, then scanlations really wouldn't be as much to blame as their making them out to be.

The biggest problem with the US manga market is how long it takes to license something, and how long between volumes. How big do you think manga would be today if Japan used to same system as America? No magazine scans, nothing weekly, monthly, or other. Just periodic volume releases, about 8 chapters every 3-6 months. Manga isn't meant to read like that, because manga does reflect Japan's actual industry, week by week(or month by month) you get new chapters, it's very consistent, there's no waiting months after a cliffhanger just to take 15 minutes to read through to the next cliffhanger. Yet even with these weekly magazines, volume releases of these series' still sell. Their marketed as HQ collectible versions, and people are willing to buy them. I realize the delay in bringing manga is not the publishers fault, but I don't want to be sold a series I only get to read little bits at a time, every so often. I think US publishers should embrace scanlations as their magazine scans and market their volume releases as collectibles. Use the power of the coalition to force OM, and MF not to shut down, but to remove anything that's available to buy right now in the US. Force them to replace where those chapters would be with links to the publishers sites and information on where to buy the official releases. Let scanlations market your product for you, and all the while continue working towards a competitive legal alternative.

[Krono]

Originally Posted by CantQuiteGuess

The real question in all this is how much is shutting down these sites going to improve the U.S. companies sales. If they don't see a medium to large, consistent increase in sales there's no reason at all to do this. Should all the online readers be shut down and they don't see a noticeable difference, then scanlations really wouldn't be as much to blame as their making them out to be.

Define "medium to large." The way I see it, even a small consistent increase in sales would be reason enough.

The biggest problem with the US manga market is how long it takes to license something, and how long between volumes. How big do you think manga would be today if Japan used to same system as America? No magazine scans, nothing weekly, monthly, or other. Just periodic volume releases, about 8 chapters every 3-6 months. Manga isn't meant to read like that, because manga does reflect Japan's actual industry, week by week(or month by month) you get new chapters, it's very consistent, there's no waiting months after a cliffhanger just to take 15 minutes to read through to the next cliffhanger. Yet even with these weekly magazines, volume releases of these series' still sell. Their marketed as HQ collectible versions, and people are willing to buy them. I realize the delay in bringing manga is not the publishers fault, but I don't want to be sold a series I only get to read little bits at a time, every so often. I think US publishers should embrace scanlations as their magazine scans and market their volume releases as collectibles. Use the power of the coalition to force OM, and MF not to shut down, but to remove anything that's available to buy right now in the US. Force them to replace where those chapters would be with links to the publishers sites and information on where to buy the official releases. Let scanlations market your product for you, and all the while continue working towards a competitive legal alternative.

Nice idea, but they'd be better off destroying OM and MF, and all the other big ones, and doing that themselves.

[Equidistant]

@Krono - The manga market in the US is apparently not doing very well. It has even gotten to the point where they have to take aggressive action against scanlations. So if shutting down these sites only gains them a small increase in sales, scanlations weren't the big problem they thought they were and nothing much has changed.

As to my other point, I mentioned that they should seek to develop competitive legal alternatives to scanlation, but that could take a long time. Now I've read through the forums of OM, MF, etc, and I've seen it's dominated by, well to be honest, whiny teenagers pissed about not being able to read their manga(for free or otherwise). I also noticed that these people are woefully ill-informed about the manga industry. Their reading licensed titles that they don't even realize are licensed. I figured while the US publishers are developing their own legal alternatives, it wouldn't hurt to plaster these sites with their names and all the series' that they've licensed. Get themselves out to a new audience who may be whiny teenagers now, but who'll someday grow to be working adults who have more money to spend. Imagine people going to a page to read a manga and seeing notices everywhere that it's licensed and directed towards links to buy. Who knows how many people would care, but it's still better then just hoping they'll flock to official releases all by themselves. Spend a bit of effort marketing your products to this unruly lot while developing your own platform for digital distribution.

On the other hand, if the US publishers do see a somewhat significant increase in sales, then shutting down these sites was the right move to make.

[Irenicus]

Originally Posted by CantQuiteGuess

@Krono - The manga market in the US is apparently not doing very well. It has even gotten to the point where they have to take aggressive action against scanlations. So if shutting down these sites only gains them a small increase in sales, scanlations weren't the big problem they thought they were and nothing much has changed.

It's been said a page or two earlier that this is a Japanese coalition-led effort, not the brainchild of US publishers.

There's also a few links to news stories of some legal alternatives being planned. Whether they will be sufficient or not is another matter of course, but the plans exist.

I know it's a long, scary thread, TL;DR and all that, but these information are only a few pages back.