Well, it has finally happened. Publishers Weekly is reporting this morning that the Japanese Digital Comics Association in conjunction with other major Japanese and US manga publishers, including Viz, Yen Press, Vertical, and Tokyopop, will be jointly seeking legal remedies against online manga piracy. 30 websites are said to be in their crosshairs, although the group hopes the sites will take it upon themselves to remove offending material (which would pretty much be all of it, right?) to avoid a legal fight. The group will also “aggressively report violations” to federal law enforcement. The DoJ is currently involved in a case against alleged comic pirate Gregory Hart. (I think they’re going to need a lot more interns this year…)
This will surely generate a lot of discussion on the net. Will check them out later tonight.
I’ve said this before: if scanlation fandom gets destroyed, blame the aggregators.
Edit: Discussions and commentary worth following:
- Japanator
- Boiled Egg
- Colleen Doran told you so!
- Viz’s PR, at ANN. The PR reveals a member list which includes all kinds of manga publishers… including yaoi and ero publishers such as Akaneshinsha, Libre, and Fujimi.
- Robot 6
- Kuriousity
- MangaBlog
- The Beat
Edit 2:
Robot 6 has a few more links of interest.
Oh, and please, please don’t email me for a reaction. I’m content with relaxing, drawing, and watching this thing run its course.
Edit 3: Anime on DVD’s editorial.
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Fun… ANN interviews Gilles Poitras (author, librarian, and maintainer of the indispensable Koyagi.com) about new editions of Anime Companion, geisha versus modern day hostesses, and proper etiquette in the porno section of a Japanese manga shop.
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Oh, Marvel is going to release some comic simultaneously in print and digital. This is apparently big news. Robot 6 has a nice collection of quotes and links from people who understand this far better than me.
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You know, I wouldn’t quite characterize the similarities between The Lion King and Kimba as mere cross-pollination, but I’m biased…
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Well, it took until a number of English manga companies went kaput and several other prominent publishers laying people off and slowing down production for them to band together and make a serious effort to crack down on such sites.
I don’t know why the hell they waited so long for, where they just stupid or afraid of making bad impressions on people who aren’t buying their product in the first place? If only 10% of people who read scans decide they like the material enough to buy it now because scans may be harder to find, that’s 10% more than they were getting.
I’m so tired of the bullshit people on the internet say regarding manga scans providing publicity for series. I feel pretty confident that you either fall into the camp of buying the stuff or you don’t. A large number of people only read manga scans because they’re free. If they had to pay for it, they just move onto to something else. Those 30 volumes of One Piece speed up should have sold like hotcakes if online popularity meant something, but they didn’t. OP showed up on the list for the initial release week for volumes and then fell off pretty much every time. I mean I just looked at the list for a week and the top 4 are Black Butler, Black Bird, Pandora Hearts and Black Butler again. Where the hell are the online top ranking manga series that get all this free publicity? That list also reaffirms the idea that females support stuff more than males, especially when it comes to manga.
The whole topic just makes me rage a bit as someone who has bought manga for years and is getting more and more jaded about its place in the English market. I’m also about 98% manga 2% anime, when it seems like the majority of English buyers primarily focus on anime and dabble in manga. I think the new Eva movie was the first anime I watch in at least a couple of years.
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Forgot that the list I mentioned being one of the new york times one.
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Since I love typing replies to myself, though I’d talk a bit about problems I have as a consumer. 3 big points
1. Price-One big reason why manga is popular in Japan is that it’s cheap as hell when compared to other Japanese entertainment media. Baseline prices just keep going up and up in the English market and I can’t phantom how anyone who buys manga regularly does so at a brick and mortar store without being a millionaire. If not for rightstuf studio sales I think I would have given up the ghost a while back. It’s just too expensive for such a short burst of entertainment, especially when the books are always part of a much longer series.
2. Quality-Not talking about stuff like color pages where more often than not they were never reproduced in color for the Japanese tank. If I’m already paying premium prices for a book that will take me no more than 1 hour at most to read, make me feel like I paid for something. Tokyopop’s Future Diary 1 and all releases during that couple of month span for them are of newspaper quality paper that you allows you to easily see through the page and feels like shit. Just completely fucking unacceptable and a slap in the face to the consumer.
Also, find a way to include all the bonus materials and artwork found in the JP tank. I don’t care if it has to greyscaled or whatever, just find a way. If there’s a four panel comic on inside flap on the dustcover, find a way to put in your book. Don’t try skim the details to save some money on printing.
Another thing, always align your god-damn text bubbles. So many magna has bubbles where it looks like left someone left “align left” on when typsetting. Just amateurish and terrible work.
3. Translation and Adaption- Since I just recently read a volume of Eyeshield 21 I’ll use it as an example. Whenever there’s a game going on or they’re talking about football, they’ll either use incorrect terminology or just make it read like someone who doesn’t know much about football adapted it a couple of times a book. If you’re not a football fan, you probably don’t notice, but since I am, I wince every time I come across one.
If you can read a series for free on the internet, as the publisher you need to make sure your translation is free of these types of problems and is superior to the scans. You can’t charge a price and give the consumer comparable translation quality or just slightly better than average, you need to be clearly superior in adaptation and translation.
That is all.
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So you would pay more for better paper, translations, and extras?
It’s funny… your cost complaints are the same as those made by comic book fans… ($3.99 for 32 pages of color, read in 10 minutes.) They drool over Shonen Jump costing $6 for 300 pages.
Here’s the economics… as the initial print-run decreases, costs must be budgetted over a smaller number of sales. Thus prices will rise. The publisher can reduce the price by reducing costs like paper, translators, designers…
Icarus charges $20 per volume. It’s a good value, professional, with nice extras.
The manga I buy is worth the cost. There’s more that is good, but which requires the use of a library card. But the same can be said of DVDs, movies, CDs…
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And you think Black Butler would have sold nearly as well if it didn’t already have an extensive fanbase thanks to scans and an anime to go with it? What, did Yen Press launch an ad campaign while I wasn’t looking?
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I think what we need to go back to are the times when people would remove scanned content once it had been licensed. The reason why these scan aggs are such a big problem is not because they are showing series that haven’t been released domestically, but because they host entire collections of series that HAVE been published in english, sometimes even going to far as to rip content directly from the official english translation.
If it were just a case of people reading series they couldn’t get in the US, I don’t think we would be seeing this action. But the sites that are being targeted are providing competition to legitimate publishers, and that’s a problem, because it’s so hard to compete with free.
If they had the scrupels to remove series once they had been licensed, this probably wouldn’t be the problem that it is.
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As a scanlator myself (DON’T SHOOT DON’T SHOOT) I’m going to have to say that the large majority of us comply with C&Ds. None of us have an interest in getting sued, and frankly, we respect the decisions of both the publisher and the mangaka.
As for the scanlators who don’t, it’s pure economics. There is simply no way to kill them until North American publishers can beat them at their own game. Let’s look at industries with high piracy rates, shall we? Music: iTunes is hugely successful in part due to ease of use, lower pricing, ability to purchase individual tracks, and the advent of the iPod. Gaming: Steam is hugely successful for many of the same reasons as iTunes. WoW, a subscription-based game, is also hugely successful. Books (pirated to a much lesser extent) are now moving to the Kindle and iPad. Anime: CrunchyRoll has proven to be successful (albeit not as successful as iTunes and Steam) by using a subscription-based service to offer Japanese anime within a day of the Japanese release. If you can make legitimate manga easier to access than scanlations, you’ve won the harder battle. For the bigger mangas, if you can release at a faster pace than scanlation groups, you’ve won another big chunk. I’d personally ask for high quality work (learn to typeset, publishers) but in reality, nobody actually cares.
tl;dr: Digital distribution: quicker, faster, easier-to-access releases.
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It works both ways. Scanlations can publicize a little-known manga, but once its licensed, they take away from sales. Would sales exist without scanlation? Not in the same volume. But would sales increase if scanlators stopped after licensing? Arguably yes.
With regard to One Piece though, a great deal of the scanlation-reading audience is casual and underage. Would people really pay for up-to-date English One Piece? Maybe, but without access to a credit card, how would those kids pay? If free scanlations exist, and they always will because some guy in Singapore, China, or wherever, would be happy to scanlate, there is simply no feasible way to capture that audience.
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The thing is, if a group is scanning a popular series, it gets licensed, said group it but some other group will just pick it up.
As for One Piece, with being by far the best selling manga in Japan and one with an extensive folloiwng online, how can it it be 3-4 volumes behind the japanese release and still not be a big seller in English? Especially since I read a million times that people wanted a quicker rate of release for it, well it got the most volumes ever released in English during a five month span and still wasn’t a breakout hit. It’s mind boggling.
Personally I think the problem lies in their being a generation of people who become acquainted with manga/anime first through pirating. I exchanged currency for goods for my first experiences with the medium. If you get something for free from the get go and then get told you should pay for it, people respond extremely negatively. If I had been getting gas all my life for free and suddenly had to pay for it, I would be incredulous.
I’m also skeptical at various floating ideas of digitally releasing chapters soon after their japanese release for a number of reasons.
1-The idea that the great majority of people who read manga in Japan are buying the serializations for their fix is largely false. The periodicals have been trending down for a number of years and publishers noticed this and started to modify various apsects of manga to better suit the tank readers rather than the periodical reader.
A lot of japanese people are more than willing to wait longer for the tank release. English readers seem to operate on the idea that translations are needed less than 24 hours of the magazine hitting the stands in Japan.2. If the publishers did release translations of a series soon after the series, will that even help sells? If they charge for the service, you run into the same problem as Japan, people will just wait for the tank release. If you don’t charge and provide content for free, what makes you think that an audience that wouldn’t pay for the stuff before would will be willing to pay for it after they already read it?
3. A personal problem for me, I like reading manga in physcial form. I’ll never do the kindle/ipod thing. Not sure if many others fell the same way.
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Ugh, forgot the word drop in the “it gets licensed, said group drops it but some other group will just pick it up.”
Also sales not sells among other mistakes. I can’t read or write all that well it seems.
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I’m going to sound like a suck-up, posting this here, but I really do think Icarus’s distribution style works.
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Glad you liked the Gilles Poitras interview. I had a lot of fun with it, he’s a really interesting guy.
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“Japanese AV star with a doctorate, Anri Suzuki, 24, is having sex with Chinese students for free in Japan to apologize for her country’s invasion of China.”
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/special/2010/06/182_67319.html
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Boy, if only that news came out in time to make Judith Miller’s recent City Journal article.
And honestly, if Japan came to me and asked for a list of proposed compensation for all the plague, flesh-eating bacteria, etc. it forced on millions of my countrymen and was then covered up on a massive scale, sending Japan’s porn stars in wouldn’t be number one on my list. But it would be high. 1. Develop cure/treatment for those still suffering from horrific ailments -or- 2. Admit wide-spread crimes against humanity and pay compensation to victims -or- 3. Send in your best JAV stars to do the two-bear mambo with me. Hey, not a bad choice there!
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RANDALL IS HERE TO THROW HIS MONEY IN WHERE IT ISN’T WANTED!
Here’s what I’m okay with:
Scanslating or fansubbing series that ARE NOT AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH VIA SOME OFFICIAL CHANNEL.
Scanslating or fansubbing series that have been drastically edited (See Tenjou Tenge, 4Kids shows, etc)Here’s what is bullshit and why I am glad the aggregator sites are getting sued:
Putting out shit that’s available in a perfectly respectable manner in English.
Making money off of ANYTHING that isn’t yours.That second point, oh man, I could go on for ages about how bullshit those aggregator sites are for that second point. But I won’t because I am lazy.
SIMON I LOVE YOU LET’S BE BFF!
Haha.SEND ME SOME OF YOUR DRAWINGS! I WANNA SEE!
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“Here’s what I’m okay with:
Scanslating or fansubbing series that ARE NOT AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH VIA SOME OFFICIAL CHANNEL.”Agreed. Most of the scanlations I read are titles that are not licensed in my country. Some of them never will be. For the titles that are, and that I still read scans for, I actually end up buying them eventually. But I will not wait for this purchase to be the first time I read the chapters within. I will read them online so I can stay up to date with the series and discuss it with other people who also are, all over the world. That’s called the importance of community. Like it or not, this is a big reason for many other scan readers, which anyone could see by spending some time in manga forums discussing this issue.
“Putting out shit that’s available in a perfectly respectable manner in English.”
And what’s respectable? Is translating Cero to Death Blast in the English Bleach respectable? How about removing full color spreads for no good reason? How about the waits, is that respectable? Viz, for example, has published 9 volumes total out of 56 in their Vizbig version of Inuyasha (which I am buying), and their normal size version is finally around volume 50 I believe. Meanwhile, I read the final chapter when it came out…2 years ago. So sorry, you can spout off whatever moral righteousness you want, but with intolerable waiting periods, somewhat pricey volumes here and there, and on many occasion a bastardization of the cultural influence of the original work just to suit a foreign “target audience” (this isn’t even including the fact that verbal and visual censorship of series’ more risque scenes outside of Japan is unacceptable), people will continue to seek scans. Let me guess, you were against the whole “digital music piracy” thing back in 1999 too. How’d that battle turn out for the music industry I wonder? Similarly here, this is an unbelievably stupid move by an industry that lacks a competent business plan then blames their shortcomings on others. And not the just the obviously for-profit sites, and yes those should go, but going after non-profit sites (onemanga is a non-profit, despite what you may believe) and possibly even scanlators themselves, who do it purely for the love of the series. It’s idiotic, insipid, and doomed to fail.
“Making money off of ANYTHING that isn’t yours.”
That’s funny. Isn’t that what publishing companies do?
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http://www.japanator.com/talking-to-the-publishers-about-the-anti-piracy-coalition-15209.phtml
Another fun article if anybody is interested. -
Some scanlation groups seek out permission. I know one light novel gave permission for scanlation and one manga title did as well. *smile* I guess one manga title is just too few for the pirates. If that copyright holder revoked their permission, I am fairly sure that scanlation group would stop too.
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