Forum - View topicNEWS: 4 Japanese Publishers Sue 'Mangamura Successor' Sites in the U.S.
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ErikaD.D
Posts: 660 |
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Can't these 4 publishers make mangas available worldwide(I live in the country where buying mangas are doesn't exist and reading manga legally are difficult). Unfortunately, piracy won't going away anytime soon.
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otastorian
 Posts: 64 Location: otakuhistoryguy.blogspot.com |
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The war against pirated manga isn't one that'll never really end. In Japan it's one thing, but here in the states, manga is much more expensive, and being that most people don't have $100 to drop on 10 volumes, pirates will always have a market. Besides that, there are groups of people that just agree with pirating, like people who trust fan-translations to be more accurate than official ones, or people who want their media archived. But it's not like the companies can throw their hands up and just say fudge it either.
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IceLeaf
Posts: 146 |
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It depends on the company publishing the translation, the translator, and the quality checker. I have several volumes of various series where the official translation hasn't been able to maintain consistency even within a single chapter from things such as misspelling the main character(s) names, to constantly shifting translations for characters abilities and locations. |
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chronos02
Posts: 272 |
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The thing is, you can't really compare the translation done by someone who gets their income in a per-translated-word basis that doesn't really choose what they translate, to someone that translates based on their love for the title, together with other people that also love it, and that don't mind doing proofreading again and again, and have plenty of QCs to see if there're consistency problems.
Let's not forget professionals are simply people who do something for the money, regardless of them liking or disliking what they do or being good or not at their job. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5936 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I could be wrong, since they don't mention by name the Mangamura Successor sites, but I believe they are going for the 'for profit' groups. The ones that stand out for their sheer audacity. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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They can, but just like what's happened with the music industry and the movie (streaming) industry, it is going to take a huge shift in the way the publishers make their money. They will be forced to focus on the digital market instead of the print market whether they like it or not. They will be playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with pirates until the manga industry steps up and comes up with some kind of a legal scanlation system, just like the music industry did during the heyday of Napster. |
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jellybeanbandit
 Posts: 107 |
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This looming digital only market people keep trying to push for is only going to lead to bigger piracy IMO at least it is for me. I pay money to buy a manga volume I can actually own and have on my shelf. Why am I paying for jpg files in some proprietary reader that I don't actually own and either the site or the license can be revoked at any time? It makes me less likely to pay since I can find those jpeg files for free very easily and in a much more accessible format. Being able to own a physical copy is the anchoring point for actually paying for something. Like with music if I want to hear a song I'll just type it into YouTube and listen to it for free and can even use a website to convert it to an mp3. But I buy CDs to collect them. Take that away and what's the point? IMO a product becoming digital inherently devalues it and makes it far easier for people to justify piracy. |
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Яeverse
 Posts: 1146 Location: Indianapolis |
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It doesn't make financial sense to make investments in places where they wouldn't earn any money, certainly it makes more sense for one to A) import from a country where there are mangas in a language one understands B) beg or urge the local library to get mangas. I mean you already said your country has no manga or a small manga market. Nothing also stopped the mangamura successors who seemingly were dumb enough to use the previous sights admin as their site name for some reason, from setting up there servers in these countries that have no manga industry. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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My preferences tend to agree with yours: I prefer physical media too. I don't own a single E-book but I have hundreds of physical books. I prefer to listen to music on record or CD rather than just playing MP3s or streaming music, etc. I have many hundreds of LPs and CDs but I don't even have one song on my phone. No music app either. But it's important to look at the market as a whole, not just our personal preferences. Buying a physical product is an "anchor point" for me too....but it's not for most people. I know that I'm the odd man out. Every time sales data for physical media are posted they drop compared to their digital alternative. You and I may not like it, but that's obviously where the market is headed. The manga publishers can either own it and make some profit off of it, or they can die trying to fight it....just like the music industry did with Napster. We already know, empirically, that if the industry can create a legal service which is just as easy to use as piracy is then people will flock to it. That's exactly how today's music and video streaming services work. |
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Predictabo
Posts: 13 |
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What's incredibly frustrating about this is the lack of legal availability. There are tons of manga that will never be licensed, some that will take years/decades to license and some which only got licensed specifically due to scanlations giving the series an audience asking for release.
I don't think they realize how much this is going to hurt them. I discover almost all new manga I buy primarily through these types of sites because there is no plentiful cheap manga anthology magazines here to help discover things. I'll just stop buying new things if this continues because I won't have a way to discover new titles. |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5936 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I don't think anyone is pushing for digital only. I buy physical BD's, because streaming services don't have libraries of everything. Anime is going to take the biggest hit on that. But when it comes to books and manga, though, I simply have too many. I have boxes of books and manga in the garage. You can't read books and manga while stored in a box. Also, when you get up there in age, carrying around and moving heavy boxes of books and manga gets quite a bit troublesome. Going digital for books and manga really is a survival strategy for me. But I would never tell other people that can't have their paper books. I too have enjoyed reading paperbacks and hardbacks all my life. Nothing nicer than a proper hardback book on the display shelf. |
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RedSwirl
 Posts: 344 |
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Is this the same thing that happened to Manga Rock a few weeks ago (well that one voluntarily shut down, kinda)? I've never heard of these specific sites and the news story seems to suggest what got shut down were some Japanese-language sites that were just hosting raws. That's one thing.
The real issue is the overseas demand which the official industry is absolutely not meeting. The few simulpubs that you can get on services like ComiXology or Crunchyroll or the Shounen Jump app are initial steps in the right direction, but there's still way too much out there that either isn't being simulpubed or will never be licensed. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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It doesn't prove that professional translators are worse at translating, or anything like that. But situations like this do make me wonder why we have a profit-driven society in the first place, if even within that system, the non-industrialized work people do voluntarily on the side often ends up being higher-quality. Pro translators are surely more skilled than the average scanlator, but the company's desire to crank out as many titles as possible at a just-good-enough-to-sell level, on top of extra concerns involved with publishing and printing and censoring and marketing and whatever else, makes for a lot of inefficiency. In the end, all people really want is manga in a language they can read; the need to make money by doing that creates a ton of extra steps. Legal digital manga would help, but getting an industry to change how it operates is a huge struggle in and of itself... CR Manga still has only a few dozen random titles. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I think what it illustrates is that passionate fans are willing to put forth an incredible amount of effort into their work; and there is something more to it as well, though it is difficult to describe. Anytime a person is doing something they truly love doing--be it fixing cars, playing a sport, or even translating manga--that dedication really comes through and an extra high level of talent or quality is shown. Passionate manga Scanlators are little different from the guy who spent the last decade restoring an absolutely perfect Corvette Stingray. They know the subject matter inside and out and they care enough about it to pay meticulous attention to every detail. Just as how the Corvette restorer might make sure he is using the period correct valve stem caps, passionate Scanlator is going to take extra care in selecting the best font to use. They will spend far more time on the project than they are actually being paid for, if they are paid at all. It's difficult for a company to buy that kind of passion at any price.
Personally, I'd agree that a pro translator is likely more skilled than the vast majority of fan translators. As for how busy they are, or how much "crank it out fast" pressure there is? I have no idea, and I'd love to hear from any insiders if they can weigh in. My guess is that there isn't very much pressure to crank out as much as possible. I think you hit the nail on the head with the 2nd part of what you wrote here though. Fan translators have a huge advantage in that there is no bureacracy for them to deal with. There are no approvals, no censorship. They might do some checking within their own group but there's far less overhead work compared to a professional company. There's far less overhead in general: a fan translator does not involve extra money spent on staffing, building rent, insurance, layers of management, payroll and legal expenses, etc.
Agreed. I had suggested a crowdsourced, legal, method of digital publishing scanlated manga in a previous thread. I think that model is great because it harnesses passionate fans for optimal, fast, translation plus it would be legal, with money going back to the original publishers to pay the mangaka, etc. But, I think the "industry changes" are the big problem. In order for that to be successful there needs to be a fundamental change in the way of thinking. I hate to keep beating this horse, but it really is just like the days of illegal MP3 sharing with Napster switching to legal distribution like Itunes. The industry needs to realize that they can make money and fight piracy simultaneously by giving people a legal option which they like. Just like you said: people want manga in the language they can read. If the digital option is legal, affordable, and easy, just like Itunes, then people will use it. The second big hurdle is a doozy: Japanese law, as I understand it, gives a huge amount of power to the 'original creator' of a work. There are at least a few famous manga which may never be re-released or translated simply because the Mangaka has decided not to give their permission, for whatever (often silly) reason. |
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Finny-chan
 Posts: 448 Location: West Virginia, U.S.A |
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I'm all for removing sites who profit off other's work and at the same time stealing from scanslators who do it for free and out of love on their own time.
Viz Media with their digital Shounen Jump manga for free and Crunchyroll manga is a step in the right direction, but there are millions of titles that will never see the light of day and can only be seen on pirated sites so no matter how many they close down there will just be more sites that will pop back up out of fan demand or just change their IP like to .ru or .io for example after closing the old IP down. I will always use pirated sites cause the series I love are not available legally and probably never will be cause of how niche they are. Maybe one day manga will have a huge online library like anime does now. |
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