Why are licensed translations so slow?

[Question]

See title. If you compare the licensed translated versions to the scanlations done before it got translated, the scanlations were released vastly faster. So whats the deal? Sometimes it takes half a year to get a volume out when you see a team of guys doing it in their spare time in 1-2 months....sometimes even weeks.

I mean, look at bleach, there are what, half a dozen groups doing the scanlation even though its licensed, and you can see just how far ahead the fan groups are......shouldnt it be the other way round? You have a professionally trained and paid team doing it for a company, and on the other side a bunch of guys juggling this with their real life work and life, and sending stuff to the rest of their team on the other side of the world and compiling it into a release.......yet they are faster?

P.S. Somethings been bugging me, i keep hearing about how fan groups drop scanlations for licensed manga, so why is the bleach manga still being translated by about half a dozen groups even though its licensed?

[rooboy]

Leaving off the question of why groups are doing scanlations for licensed manga, the reason it's slower is not because it takes them longer. The reason it's slower is because the bookstores (and more importantly, the people who buy them at the bookstores) don't want them to release volumes too closely together. The reason for this is because the retailer wants each volume of the release to get a chance to exist on the shelf for a while before a new volume comes out. Partially this is because the bookstore customer is not vastly similar to the people who are going to read scanlations. Anyway, so the answer to your question is: they're released slower because it helps sales of the book to have time for each release to be on the shelf and attract customers. At least, that's what Tokyopop's guy said. ICV2 link (it's the second question). There was another article from a Viz or Del Rey person stating essentially the same thing, but it's always easier for me to find the Tokyopop one.

Originally Posted by Mike Kiley

You've been experimenting recently with frequency and so have other publishers. In particular, you've been running Fruits Basket monthly at times. What result have you seen from that experimentation and under what circumstances will you put out titles under that more aggressive frequency in the future? Do you base it on sales potential, the season, the length of the series, some other factors?

It probably has the most to do with the season. Late spring and the summertime season are really huge in this business because of kids getting out of school. As to when and if we would do it in the future, obviously it's been wildly successful in a lot of ways this year. You try not to generalize too much from a phenomenon like Fruits Basket because it's so unusual and it writes its own rules.



I think we'll always have some seasonality to the business and we'll be willing to do that. In general our philosophy has been to release very gradually. I don't know if anybody's really noticed it yet. We want to release slightly fewer books at a slightly more leisurely pace. That appears to be what retail wants, that appears to be a little bit more consumer friendly, to not jam so many things out in any given month, in any one series so quickly. That's the general arc that our release strategy takes, but there will continue to be periodic seasonal exceptions particularly with hot-selling titles. So we could very well do a certain amount of that in the future.

[TronDD]

Well most of the time, the scanlators get a year or more head start before a title is licensed. I don't know if Bleach is an accurate comparison in that regard. Companies also have to go through printing and distribution processes. Scanning and then distributing digitally is far quicker than going through the printing process and shipping books.

Why is Bleach still getting scanlated? Because those groups don't care about property rights. It may be that they don't have to care because they are in a country where it has not been licensed. But licensed in the USA or not, they are all still violating the copywrite of the Japanese copywrite holders. That's the legal grey area anime fan subs and manga scanlations live in. Everyone draws the line where they want it to be. And unless someone forces them to move that line, they stick with it.

[IMSabbel]

You also have to consider that their liscenses have to last some time.

Release 30 volumes of naruto in 6 months, and the fandom will die down quickly.
Spread it out over 5 years, and more inprinting, more kids growing into the target group age, ect.

Plus you have to consider the pocket-money factor: If consumer X, 11 year old, has only 10$ per month for manga, then faster releases will cause him to only buy one series, while else he would have bought two or three (for example)

[Mareel]

Retailers want to get you into their store on as many different occassions as possible. This is because of impulse buying. Each time a consumer comes into the store, there is another chance they might buy something else they would not have if they did not come in to buy / look for what they originally intended. So if they release a manga monthly, and different series on different weeks, that means there are that many more occassions people would have a reason to go into their store.