I am gravely disappoint.

[elementalhero]

I'm sure most of you guys have heard by now, but a whole bunch of manga distributors have teamed up to start cracking down on scanlation sites. They've already hit Mangahelpers, and Onemanga is soon to follow.

I think this is a really bad decision on their parts. Without online manga sites, a good three-quarters of my current manga collection (which has grown to easily over one hundred volumes) would never have been purchased. Manga is expensive, and that makes it hard to justify buying on faith. But being able to read series beforehand and decide that this is worth spending money on definitely has gotten me into the vast majority of the series I currently am purchasing.

I understand the concern over people just reading scanlation sites and not buying volumes at all, believe me. But what they should be doing is what Viz and other animanga distributors have already begun doing with anime - put it online yourselves. Viz now offers many anime series, both dubbed and subbed, for free streaming on their site. Why can't they do the same with a manga viewer? Think about it - going page-by-page refreshes ensures that they can make a hell of a lot of money in on-screen advertisements. And they can make this online manga available for download to a Kindle or iPad or hard drive for a lower price than buying the volume itself. And there will always be people willing to buy the print volumes. I love manga volumes. They're very visually AND tactile-ly engaging.


Don't shoot yourselves in the foot, manga distributors. Work with new media, not against them.

EDIT: shit mangafox took down all its Pokespe oh my god no I need this to survive work this summer oh my god fuck no

Comments

[okroginator.livejournal.com]

Oh my god thank you for that link /glomps

But yeah, honestly, I think they're in for a rude awakening when they realize how much of their fanbase they're about to alienate big time. And in a niche market like manga, alienating your fanbase is the dumbest thing that you can possibly do.

[laurelsblue.livejournal.com]

No problem. I saw a (locked) post over on pokemon mentioning that it had been taken off Mangafox apparently due to it being licensed by Viz and that link came from the comments.

I suppose it's a threat that's been hanging over the scanlations community for a while now. The fact that someone was stupid enough to tweet Kubo their congratulations on the new Bleach chapter before it was even released in Japan and the fact that apparently the vast majority of traffic for early raws is from Japan didn't help.

[okroginator.livejournal.com]

...Okay seriously. It's one thing to read them online because they're not available in your country, but the fact that the majority of early raw traffic is from Japan and now we're getting the hammer brought down kind of ticks me off.