And so it ends...

[dragonbeak]

Wow, I wasn't actually expecting for onemanga and other scanlation sites to be taken down so quickly, hrm... I'm not really too mad about it, because it was illegal to begin with, but now I'm more like "well, that makes it even harder for me to be in the loop with anime now

Comments

[kaerstyne]

Well, I don't see the problem with the hosting sites making some money, because they must have ridiculously high bandwidth costs. But I have no idea about how much actual profit they make or anything; I'd agree that making much beyond what's necessary for bandwidth is a bad thing.

But I doubt this'll help sales at all. I'm firmly of the opinion that the reason the official publishing companies have issues with sales is because they suck. You read too many bastardized series with translation errors and censoring and no respect for Japanese name conventions and you realize you've been paying money for this shit, and you just stop buying them entirely. /stopped buying licensed manga years ago and is very unlikely to start up again.

...er. Yeah. /stops ranting now.

[dragonbeak]

No, no, no, I totally understand having to pay bandwidth costs! In fact, that's why I thought they had the advertisements in the first place ^.^; But supposedly, they actually do make enough to break even with their costs and then some. Like, ridiculous amounts of money considering that they're promoting piracy *shrug* I have no idea what the numbers are but they were suppose to be impressive.

And totally agree with the sales thing. The advantages that scanlations had over the publishers was that they were faster and had better quality translations, ridiculously enough :/ Especially since scanlators tend to actually like the series they're bringing over, you can tell they put more heart into it. *realizes how cheesy that sounds, but it's true!*

So, I feel like unless the companies come up with some sort of venue for comics that can replace the quickness and quality of the online scanlations, they're not going to be bringing up their sales.

[dybji]

The advantages that scanlations had over the publishers was that they were faster and had better quality translations, ridiculously enough :/ Especially since scanlators tend to actually like the series they're bringing over, you can tell they put more heart into it.

TRUE TRUE TRUE.

It doesn't make their omnidispensal method okay. Scanlations were famous for being all Robin Hoodly in their morality back in the day, and now they're just everywhere, regardless of whether there's a licensed version, and that puts them into old-school bandit territory. :/

In other words, fine, a gilded-née-golden age of free media comes to an end. Now the publishing companies had better step up.

[dragonbeak]

Actually, thinking about it, perhaps if the publishing companies step up, that would also lessen the demand of scanlations in the first place.

[laenavesse]

Onemanga is down, but Mangafox and other places (I can never remember this other online scanlation reading site, and it had a very basic setup...dammit. NO WAIT I GOT IT) Unixmanga are still up. Stoptazmo is another place, but that's more for linking to the downloads and not an actual manga reader.

...But yeah, everything that was said up, agreed!

What I'm kinna bamboozled about is how everyone is saying that now Onemanga is down, they won't be able to find their scanlations anymore. ...As far as I know, not all of the scanlation groups are down. All Onemanga did was put them up online so people could just read them instead of download them, and they weren't the only ones who provided them. Mangafox only took down their Viz titles, but I just looked and they still have Bleach on there on their Updates list

[dragonbeak]

It's a good point, supposedly the publishers were just going after the hosting sites and not the scanlating groups. I just know that I myself, am not going to go hunting for these scanlations out of laziness xD;; And... apparently other people are like me I guess, but they whine about it o_o;

Most of the series I read were out of habit, not so much from a drive to know what happens next. So it's like, whatever. I do kind of get the feeling though, that this movement might scare a lot of scanlators into stopping. Which would be unfortunate, but I think it'll also be a while until they completely disappear.

[laenavesse]

Also good point! The fact that publishers/companies are cracking down on scanlations and fandubs could scare groups into stopping, or be more respectful about it. From what I've seen from over the years, groups have become more prompt when it came to dropping licensed titles. However, they would continue with the unlicensed one because...well they're not licensed. And more than likely will never be licensed.

But I guess the "new" tradition or rule that started a few years ago was that once a project was licensed, groups would drop it.

Of course that isn't to say all groups followed that rule XD And I doubt all groups will, either. Just some are better than others

[yukiro_osaki]

So I wasn't the only one that used Onemanga but sadly I only started using it in May...yeah I'm a late one. The only thing I was happy about in all this was I found 2 new series on there and had time to find out who the scanaltors were. Including one of the series that is OLD, like it started in 1993 and ended in 2000 and its NOT publish so for me its more like...I can't find original copies unless I go to JAPAN again! *faceplant* But yeah for series like...oh prince of tennis? I can't see owning it...I can't, unless its in Japanese...big price difference. I just hope the publishing companies wake up and do some create shit or well there will be ways around it. Like I don't know...start working with your Japanese counter parts earlier on? Instead of waiting for a series to hit it big and after a year or two START doing something about it? Or maybe Publish faster? Hire some poor as college students to scope this crap out for ya? :P