Found via MangaBlog… UK reviewer Tiamat’s Disciple takes issue with a couple of comments by Yen Press at a certain panel regarding the scanlation scene’s ill effects on official products (full transcript not provided), and a lively discussion ensues.
First off, something that irks me whenever the topic turns to scanlations is that the MPAA/RIAA strawman gets propped up without fail. I doubt Yen Press has ever claimed that every scanlation downloaded is a lost sale, and I’ve never seen any other manga publisher do so. VIZ isn’t suing single mothers, Tokyopop isn’t shutting down net access at universities, and Yen Press isn’t blanketing the internet with C&D letters. This rhetoric is stale, tired, and we need to move past it.
That said, the role that scanlations played in popularizing manga in the first place is very legit, and Tiamat is right that publishers cannot dismiss that. And another truth that many in the industry may not want to admit or care to understand, especially those that got into the business only after it became big (i.e. major inroads into bookstores), is that the scanlation scene is where many of the technical people… editors, translators, clean up artists, etc… first learned their trade. Just as most Japanese copyright owners have an interest in giving tacit approval to the doujinshi talent pool, manga publishers must not look at scanlators as some kind of mortal enemy, or they will simply end up fighting themselves.
But there is yet one more truth, something a scanlator cannot truly appreciate until he or she actually makes the jump into the professional arena: the burden of responsibility. It’s a sense of duty not just to readers, but to the retailers, to the Japanese licensors, and ultimately to the artists who slave and toil and without whom the very source of our enjoyment wouldn’t even exist. It is this very lack of responsibility (and consequences) that allows scanlators to cavalierly dismiss pointed criticisms. What of scanlations that remain online after the manga has been licensed? Not our problem, say the scanlators… for all their professed passion, once a project goes online, scanlators care not what dark alleys of the internet their children wander off to. This is selective disregard for the negative consequences of their actions; a self-induced momentary blindness for the sake of personal ego. It’s cheap and reeks of selfish rationalizing, and this is the mentality that mustn’t be allowed to permeate the fandom any further than it has.
Another year is going by with anime conventions reporting greater turnouts, all the while general anime and manga sales are sliding. As for ourselves, it seems the more people actually learn of Icarus Publishing’s existence, the further our advance orders drop… probably because our books are getting scanned and shared much sooner. Yet manga publishers still have largely left the scan and ripping scenes alone… why? Because we aren’t like MPAA and RIAA. We don’t want to pick a fight with the fandom, which is not black and white but a gradient; we don’t go after particular groups or websites because we can’t draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say everyone on this side is good and playing by the rules, and everyone on the other side is evil. We must have a conversation, reach out, appeal to reason and morality… and that was what Yen Press was doing. Not everyone may agree on all points, but at the very least approach this with some fairness and honesty.
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If you’d like to spend the next 4 hours ogling pictures of cool toys that will eventually lead you down the slow winding road to bankruptcy, visit Danny Choo for links to Wonder Festival coverage. Of note is this photo gallery of the adult section taken by Akiba Blog, which goes a long way towards explaining why the male-to-female ratio in the crowd photos is roughly 100 to 1.
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If Manga Entertainments reissues Ghost in the Shell with The Tonight Show dub, then I guess I’ll have to buy it again… for the fourth time.
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The SDCC/CCI and AX coverage is prevalent enough that I’m not interested in linking to all of it, but with news of the Twilight adaptation at Yen, and now of Del Rey scoring the rights to a graphic novel of Last Airbender movie,is stuck in my head. In particular, I can’t help but wonder how different things would be now if Tokyopop had stuck with their OEL efforts and avoided some of their costlier mistakes in that program. Del Rey snagging The Last Airbender might be especially bitter, since Tokyopop first published the ani-manga of the animated show. And that, too, is going to Del Rey.
Original material produced in-house is the growing trend this year, regardless of whether the sales levels can match licensed manga, because the major Japanese companies all have their own designs on the market. Tokyopop recognized this early, yet it seems other companies have taken over the OEL spotlight. Timing is everything, I suppose.
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If I may split hairs for a bit – it’s not stale and tired; it’s culturally relevant.
The infamous acts of the RIAA et al. are opposed at a fundamental level by many internet users. The resulting blanket backlash against all intellectual property claims has to be understood as a matter of cultural identity – much as the French farmer who torched a McDonald’s was against the entire culture of global capitalism because it ruined his personal capitalist aspirations, the “Keep Everything On the Internet Free” culture is born of a desire to have avoid personally paying costs.
So please – if you wish, call it insufficiently nuanced. Call it entitlement. But it’s misleading to say it’s not relevant. I can think of few things more relevant to the ongoing argument.
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It’s true, scans have held a very important role in the localization of anime and manga in the west, still do. I remember when Death Note was just a few episodes uploaded and the creators were clarifying a few of the name translations, then boom, it exploded. We wouldn’t have ‘Light’ Yagami or ‘Shinigami’ without scans, it’s a real success story.
On the other hand, you have a magazine die a dog’s death when you have plenty of people loving the hell out of Shojo Beat, but not actually getting out to buy it. It may not be fair to say that every scan is a lost sale, but you can certainly say every lost sale is a failure to support the things you enjoy.
Also think on what happens when everybody gets their wish and Shojo Beat goes on-line. In that case, then every hit on an SB scan is a loss of revenue for the publisher, subscription model or no.
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Simon, I have to agree with you, in part, on this one. Scanslators do have an ego about them and the ones who say they do it for love of the craft could simply do it for the sake of doing it and not release it, much like a number of eroge fan translators. And I don’t mean trying to prove that people own the game before giving them the patch, I mean not releasing a patch. Or in the case of manga scanslators, not releasing the chapters or volumes.
But let us move past that for a second. My philosophy as a business development consultant has always been the same. Find the root of the problem and fucking fix it. Nine times out of ten the root of problems occurs far higher in the food chain than people want to admit. Management and big thinkers not understanding their markets or how to get the most out of their people. So let’s take that logic and apply it to the problem at hand without bringing legality into it which is such a popular way of doing things it even warrants mentioning in your post. Legality has dick all to do with fixing this problem and I’d like to bitch about copyright law but that’d take all day, and this is already going to take most of the day.
Anyway, let’s start at the baseline product. You have distribution rights to a Japanese comic book. You have to translate it, print it, and distribute it. Bare minimum, you’re printing books and sending them to shops. Let’s ignore for a moment that almost, if not, 100% of manga shops in the US are ONLY doing the bare minimum. Bang up job, ladies. Expenditures are printing costs, translators, editors, clean up people, one time expenses (or rarely recurring such as to be negligible) for software and probably some office space if you’re into that sort of thing. Oh and of course, a mid six figure salary for your C-level show runners so that you can be “sure” you have the best of the best. Right. Bang up job again, ladies.
We’ve got your basic costs covered, ignoring some thing. We’ve got a product. And since it’s an established product, we’ve got a price point. Assuming, anyway, that you print up 5000 copies of a book for about $14k. I hear tell that’s probably kind of expensive, but there you go. Anyway, sell 1400 copies of the book at $10, and your printing costs are back. Good times.
So, the next thing we need is someone to sell it to. What do we know about these people? Nerdy, sort of stupid, most of them have no real idea what they’re buying they just know they likes it. Seems pretty easy. Ok, here’s the problem most traditional businesses seem to ignore. The manga demo is like… let’s say 12-25 with 25 being sort of the upper limit on common spending. So a young demo, to put it in a word. So what percentage of this audience is tech savvy? Let’s put it, extremely conservatively, at 75-80%. I’m going to guess it’s likely closer to 85-90% at a minimum. But let’s forget that for a moment.
Now you’ve got all this information because you run, or at least make big, manly decisions at a manga production company… you know that to turn a real profit on your books, you need to sell probably… Simon, help me out here. I’m going to assume anywhere from 40-60% of your book’s run to turn a profit, considering overheads. You know that in-store purchases are down. You know that web usage is inordinate and super important. You’ve seen Hulu be a tech company that skyrockets to ubersuccess in its first year, turning ridiculous profits from companies ad-money alone.
Or if Hulu is too obtuse for you to wrap your idiot CEO head around, look at OneManga. Or if you want to keep your idiot ears shut, look at CrunchyRoll. What’s that, you say? Leveraging a hitherto untapped market with gigantic profit potential? And the first ones to do it right get lots of money? Quick, CEO! What do you do? Think about it… do you… keep pushing books to retail like a fucking idiot and then wondering where all the money went? Yes, yes you do. Because they hired you when they should have hired someone intelligent and aware of the will of the people you’re supposed to be selling to.
Internet overhead, WHEN YOU DO SHIT PROPERLY, has a startup cost which should be respected and will likely set you back a little. That’s fine. You don’t want to skimp and get a shit product. AnimeOnline did that once, and now FUNimation is primed to do the same stupid shit again. But that’s fine. You pay for something you KNOW is going to be badass. That means you find experts in the field. They probably do not work for you already. And they are NOT Patrick Macias. You have them look at your product, look at the teeming throngs waiting to help you monetize, and you have them design a solution for you. After you get it made and get it made well, which most companies can’t manage, your overheads for this web venture become minimal. Infrastructure is cheap compared to printing and reprinting books. Bandwidth. HA! Then you only need one or two good programmers to keep that project relevant and bug free. Pay them well, though. Or else they’ll leave.
The thing is… the manga companies won’t do this. They’re just like the anime industry idiots. They’re greedy, greedy idiots and they think that if they just keep their IP to themselves and come up with their own one-party solution they can make it work. But that ain’t the way it goes, baby. You have to reach out and have everyone’s manga. You gotta put it in the hands of users for free with an amazing interface that makes it a joy to read on a computer. And you have to monetize that. I know how, but I’m not telling. Hell, I could write a bunch more paragraphs on monetizing. But that’s free advice and fuck you. You guys don’t deserve it. Not for free, anyway.
Right, apologies to Simon for using his blog for this stuff. But that’s fine. He’ll still respect me in the morning. Haha. Also, I will kindly ask him to ignore any numbers I used for reference because they weren’t harvested from anywhere accept my own research into things I was talking about.
Oh! And if digital distro isn’t in your current manga licensing agreements, put it in them. Idiots. It’s not 1982.
And buy Icarus Publishing manga. I say that on my blog enough… and I mean it. Simon runs an operation worth supporting.
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Pingback from Updates, wrapups, and scanlations « MangaBlog on July 28, 2009 at 4:21 am
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“It is this very lack of responsibility (and consequences) that allows scanlators to cavalierly dismiss pointed criticisms. What of scanlations that remain online after the manga has been licensed? Not our problem, say the scanlators… for all their professed passion, once a project goes online, scanlators care not what dark alleys of the internet their children wander off to. This is selective disregard for the negative consequences of their actions; a self-induced momentary blindness for the sake of personal ego. It’s cheap and reeks of selfish rationalizing, and this is the mentality that mustn’t be allowed to permeate the fandom any further than it has.”
This is not always true.
Many scanlation groups stop scanlating and distributing their projects and ask that their users to do the same.
However, due to the nature of the internet, recall is not possible; so how is this disregard?
Those orphaned projects can also have several good uses, as extended previews of both the title and the artist work (as reference for other titles).
I myself have done this, having started reading Emma, GTO in particular, and works by Mitsuru Adachi (severely unrepresented in print, but with a very extensive scanlation scene) and Kaiji Kawaguchi in general, through scanlations, and bought the print books afterwards.
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On the scanlation front, I noted on the TD thread– fans who download scanlations and then buy the books aren’t the problem; even Dark Horse’s Carl Horn once note that it’s not downloading that’s the problem, it’s downloading and not buying. What seems to be blatantly ignored on that thread is the fact that people who download AND buy are the minority. Most people just won’t go out and spend $10-15 on something they’ve already read.
There are plenty of exceptions, especially in certain markets (yaoi fans are notoriously happy to buy just about anything, it sometimes seems). But they’re exceptions, not the rule, at least in my experience. (And yes, it’s much worse in anime than in manga.)
As for OEL…I think Tpop’s biggest problem with their original titles is the insistence on it being “manga,” when some of their comics were great, but not manga-like at all. I Luv Halloween, for example: awesome-looking comic. But because Tpop kept its marketing focus so narrow, it probably missed out on a lot of potential readers.
They also haven’t always able to attract a consistently high level of talent…I won’t name names, but some of their books, especially amongst the earlier titles, just didn’t look very good. Companies like Yen Press and Del Rey Manga have their parent companies’ pockets and relationships to wield in the fight to get some of the best talent out there. They and Dark Horse have long histories of working with creators directly, not just licensing through a publisher, and they make good use of that experience.
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Hey Simon,
Michelle from DMP here. Quite a lively discussion we have going here, and allow me to put in my two cents from the publishers perspective. I’ve read the arguments made by fans who obviously love their scanlations and of course the opposing end, the publishers who find scanlations possibly affect sales of titles. So of course, in terms of scanlations, we as publishers find ourselves in a bit of a bind. On one hand, we have fans who love titles so much that they want to understand and share them with others, painstakingly translating them, lettering them, even editing them, like their own personal publishing company. Many of these small scanlators will pull, or discontinue scans once the title has been licensed, or if we ask. On the other hand, we have the scanlators who basically take an already licensed title, cover with branding and everything, scan it page by page (even novels) and put it up for people to download for free. There is an extremely large scanlation group (which I’m sure we all know who they are), that has numerous amounts of our licensed titles, production done by us, up for free on their site. They then hide their site servers overseas, or in another state, or hide contact information in php forms that probably don’t go anywhere-since it’s impossible to find living contact info. In fact, we as well have been approached to advertise on one of these sites-and when we asked them to pull our licensed works, they suddenly disappeared. It isn’t as easy as many claim to contact these groups, to get a court order for livejournal, and such. Livejournal is particularly tough at times, because of locked profiles. We count on fans to let us know about those. These kinds of things are very time consuming, especially for small independent companies like ours. We rely on our fans, and our fans are the ones who contact us, send us links to rampant scanlations, and ask us to follow up to try to have these people blocked, to have them removed, to have them stop sharing files. If our fans are telling us-”hey, this isn’t right”, then there is obviously something wrong. However, we are not like the RIAA, we’re not attempting to throw people in jail, to fine someone a milllion dollars. We’re trying to stay in the business of publishing books, to validate the people who purchase their books legally, and of course, we have yet to determine if there is a direct parallel of scanlations affecting actual sales of titles. Obviously, some books benefit from building a pre-existing fan base online through a scanlation, but others may not. The very long comment about not utilizing the fan base on the internet to its full potential was a little off. The main thing being, publishers are attempting to combat scanlations with more previews, with legal digital distribution of titles, with e-Readers, with digital product. Again, remember, digital distribution rights still have to be cleared with licensors in Japan, just like print rights. These things take time, and it’s not free. Licensing for digital distribution is very tricky, and it’s still fairly new-especially as companies continue to make new platforms for reading, whether it be via streaming online, downloadable DRM protected content, or others. And of course, as you and I know, mature content is still new territory in the digital realm. How to protect content so that some 12 year old child doesn’t accidentally download it? Obviously, what we hope, is that our fans continue to report blatant copyright violators to us, so that we can curb unfair sharing of licensed works without purchase, and that many of these people will look into exploring the legal avenues of e-reading that are available online, as with our eManga reader, our Kindle titles, and so on. We hope it isn’t too much to ask that if you love what we do, and love our titles, that you support our work, and not give in to illegal distribution of it.
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You know, I don’t if this on-line stuff will work. I tried Viz’s IKKI. I could never find a zoom feature so all the pretty artwork was diluted and some text was hard to read. And don’t get me started on DRM! I can’t “legally” back up my DVDs or BluRays to my PSP for trips. BluRay has digital copy but PSP is only available on some Sony discs. I can’t even upgrade the hard drive in PS3 because I NOW know I would lose all my BOUGHT video from the video store if I even need to reformat the current drive.
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I’ve been volunteering at Sakura-con for many years as Japanese guest relation staff and talk to the creators (animators, writers, manga-ka, etc.)
Fans offhandedly bring up to the guests that they “downloaded” this anime or read this manga “online”, without much shame or regret. It’s embarrassing for me to see, as I know many creators are for the most part not rich, or at least are extremely hardworking people, extremely kind and generous. Creators often don’t know to what extent their work is pirated and are especially surprised by the availability of recently released work. They’re never angry about it, but they’re never pleased with it.
I’m of the opinion that the world would be better off without scanlators and fansubbers. If those groups think their work is good enough, there’s plenty of legitimate ways to run a business, online or off. Nerds, at least those working with computers or scientists, should be able to afford to come up with their own (non-profit?!) Hulu or whatever.
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Not trying to point any fingers, but every time this ol argument gets brought up, there’s always a great showing of support and exchange of ideas and brain-storming of solutions among fans while the publishing end tends to (justifiably) bemoan losses from an often inscrutable position of authority and don’t seem to offer too much in the way of solution strategies. Yes, I realize if there were more viable solutions floating around, they would be implemented, but I think a little more transparency with some numbers and competitive strategies and anecdotal experience with the issue would diffuse some of the polarizing effect of an issue like this. We’re not talking about what’s your favorite color this is consumers vs. producers and that’s not a fight the publishers will win.
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Well I buy the japanese originals if I like a few of the scanlated chapters. I was wondering what about the titles scanlated by ero mangaka groups on titles thatll never see the light of day in america a la uziga waita & other ero guro artists if they get any attention in america its mostly from scanlation a la daily life (you know the title).
I dont read the ero manga scans that are available domesticly but I do order the japanese tankubons if I can find retailers with stock available if not oop.
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My House is Burning. Can you offer me Marketing Solutions, or New Business Models?
I’d really like to stop the house from burning, but folks are telling me the arsonists love my house so much, that since they can’t own it the only way to express their love is to Burn It In The Pretty, Cleansing Flame. I try to tell them that my property doesn’t need to be burned, and I can sell them fine production lithographs of the property they love so much if they can just give me time to hire a photographer, and find someone to produce the art prints, but no,
They say they love it so much, it must burn. And it’s my fault for having such a fine house to begin with.
They’re content with the amateur photos of my house on fire; and granted, some of these amateurs are quite skilled — a 11×14 print of my house on fire looks quite nice in some cases.
Some also come back at me with what-seem-to-be valid arguments: “will you deny the homeless of a little heat in winter? Will you deny the kids the tasty toasted marshmallows?” The marshmallows they enjoy while standing in what used to be my backyard, or s’mores made over the glowing coals of what used to be my living room.
“The Fire Was Already There When We Found It, we’re just innocently roasting a few marshmallows, why kill all our fun? It’s not like we started the fire… well, OK, maybe the first two or three guys who showed up threw on some additional wood and the smallest bit of Gasoline, but the fire was already there. Can’t blame us.” They ask, how can I be so callous, trying to kill a little innocent fun?
I’m really trying to sell my house, but it’s on fire and most buyers either join the marshmallow roasters or walk away: knowing that they can either find a picture of the house online, or will be able to show up tomorrow with a truck to cart away some rather fine charcoal. For cheap, if it isn’t free.
My House is Burning. Can you offer me Marketing Solutions, or New Business Models? I really wish there were some sort of organization or solution that would either stop arsonists before they torch the place, or who would help me put out the fire.
Say, can you hand me a graham cracker, some chocolate, and a marshmallow? As long as my House is on Fire and all.
– what? Well, I guess you did have to spend $6.50 at the grocery store, but, um… well… haven’t you made that money back? And it is… was… my house…
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Well, even if you did want to pick a fight with fandom like the RIAA, I doubt you’d have the money for it*. It costs quite a bit to take someone to court and anime and manga fans are unlikely to have large amounts of cash lying around (thus preventing recovery of the cost of any legal action). And let’s be honest, the manga (and anime) industry isn’t exactly rolling in spare cash these days (ever?). So, as a fan, I think it’s less goodwill on the part of the industry and more lack of resources. I don’t doubt there is some goodwill though. Oh and just to be clear, I don’t have any objections to companies protecting their interests via the legal system (the damages the RIAA sought may have been excessive but I digress). If anything, I pity that the industry’s hands are tied, to a certain extent.
Personally, one of the main reasons I purchase is because I want a say in what gets made and licensed. So because I loved Kannagi and wanted to see more of it, I bought the R2s and imported the manga. Because I want more shows like it to get licensed, I’m buying the R1s. If want to see more of what I like, it’s in my self interest to give those creating it an incentive to create more. Otherwise, I just get what those who do want–and I don’t like that. Not to mention niche entertainment can only survive if there are enough people sharing the burden of the costs of creation. And when sales are in the low thousands, every one counts. But I’m odd.
Course, the majority of people that do download and never buy aren’t going to change their habits because of an argument. I doubt if most of them are even aware it harms anyone.
*I confess I may be underestimating the sales potential of eromanga.
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I also buy quite a bit: I buy manga because I hate, really *hate* reading comics on a screen — the tech. solution to this is coming, they tell me, but to date paper is still the best way to read comics — and I also buy DVDs even if I already have (and prefer the presentation of) some other version of the video.
aside: the presentation of subtitles on DVD absolutely Sucks, it was an afterthought, which is a major pain in the ass for those of us who prefer foreign cinema (of whatever type)
Companies could produce better dubs, someone could make a DVD viewer for the computer (or even your TV) that presents subtitles in something other than a yellow 20-year-old machine font, or I could learn Japanese — these are all valid options. But it is still amazing to me that amateurs manage results that *look* so good (even if the trans. is crap) when the license holders and corporations are releasing the bare-minimum usual crap without any consideration that they are, in fact, in competition with pirates.
A little care in presentation would go a long way to winning over the casual user, and would buy undying loyalty from dedicated fans.
My S’mores argument wasn’t intended as a defence of the RIAA and other corporate-legal-assholes, it was more of direct jab at Randall. There’s stupidity on both sides (or three — or even seven sides) of this argument, and no solutions yet.
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Personally, I think there are a lot of things scanlators could do differently if they are really interested in supporting the original Japanese works and building a market for professional translations. When there were few commercially translated titles available and it was difficult to find even the most basic information about untranslated manga and their authors, the mere act of translation might have been “free publicity” and might have been effective at building a market. These days, that’s just nonsense.
Now, you can pretty well figure that any currently-running blockbuster series is going to get translated, all the moreso if it runs in Shounen Jump. There are also dozens of ways to get the official Japanese releases of these titles anywhere in the US, UK, etc. They’re not even prohibitively expensive most of the time–when you add the markup for imported goods to the original Japanese price, you end up with more or less what the translated volume would cost. Scanlators who work on these kinds of titles are just deluding themselves if they think they’re helping the commercial industry. If current blockbusters aren’t licensed yet, they soon will be.
Of course, there are plenty of series that aren’t going to get translated because they’re too violent, too pornographic, too intellectual, or simply too old. However, most scanlators of such series think that the act of scanlation itself is sufficient to “build the market” or whatever justification they’re giving for scanlating. I think they could promote and support the commercial industry, but it will take a little extra effort beyond merely scanning and translating.
For example, if a non-Japanese speaking fan likes a scanlation and wants to get the original, they may have some trouble figuring out how to go about buying it. Scanlators could easily include the ISBNs of works they scanlate, information about whether they’re still in print and in what format, and links to Amazon Japan or recommendations of import companies to order from. They could improve articles on wikipedia and various manga information sites so that their readers know what other similar works remain untranslated.
Even when it comes to the professional translation industry, scanlators could do more to be supportive. Why is so much of the work of scanlation devoted to making the scans look perfect? If they’re intended to bring a work to an audience that couldn’t otherwise get it or to build an audience, they only need to be high enough quality to not be unpleasant to read. If readers want a perfect-looking, smudge-free copy, they can buy a commercial release.
On a similar note, why translate absolutely everything? If scanlators like an author and want to build an audience for them, why not scanlate one of their famous series rather than all or only the main storyline and not the various side stories? Why not do their more mature or hard-to-market works to “build an audience”, leaving the more obviously commercially viable works for professional translation? (That way, even if the scanlations remain available indefinitely, they don’t necessarily destroy the market for pro translations of that author.)
If some other group has already covered an author pretty well, why not choose a different author to work on? God knows there are enough of them! (Also, why on earth do so many scanlators release competing scanlations of the very same series unless they’re only in it for the ego trip?)
And then there’s the issue of how scanlators view professional translations. Yes, some titles have been butchered. Yes, pro translations tend to be more figurative while amateur ones tend to be more literal. However, this is no excuse for fostering a sense that all scanlations are superior to all professional translations in all cases. Anyone who has spent more than five seconds translating knows perfectly well that a huge amount of choice and personal judgment goes into the work even if you favor an excessively literal style, yet few scanlators bother to try to educate their audience about the translation process. (And small wonder: if they did, they might have to point out that professional translations are often better.)
Scanlators could also stand to mention what official translations they do like instead of only those they don’t. You want to build an audience for garo or josei or stuff from the 70s? Great! Tell your audience which translated titles (or even which comics originally in English) have a similar style. Tell us which authors actually have gotten translated instead of only those that haven’t. If there are out of print volumes in English, tell us what they were and who we can pester for another print run. These days, there’s almost no style of manga that’s never, ever been translated. Most are horribly underrepresented, and many aren’t very similar to anything originally in English, but there are always at least a couple of titles scanlators could be recommending.
I think there are plenty of ways that scanlators can show a sense of personal responsibility without giving up scanlating entirely. Most wouldn’t even require all that much effort. Scanlation could be about educating your readers and building an audience–it could be, but it usually isn’t.
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