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INTEREST: Wall Street Journal Reports on Manga Piracy

agila61 wrote:

The demands that can be satisfied are those where the amount that people are willing to spend covers the full economic cost of production, including a return to funds at risk and for use of the resources tied up in the production.

Which, hypothetically speaking, could always be met by charging the same or a proportional amount of the already established price, taking into account that the cost of production itself would vary and that the number of potential buyers could be increased through appropriate marketing, possibly leading to greater profits in the long term.

If you know of a appropriate marketing strategy that can increase the number of potential buyers sufficiently to ensure that titles considered marginal can instead of assured of covering their overheads, you ought to bring your "secret sauce" to the attention of the manga publishers. Unless, of course, it is mere vague hypothetical speculation that such an appropriate marketing strategy exists.

This is good. Finally a crackdown on pirating. If this was to continue, as we all can probably guess, the manga industry will continue to fall from lack of money being bought on the actual manga.
Scanlations are good as long as it is legal. Some of the older series and the most popular should be put out. But if a company bought the rights, then the site should take it off.
I have gone to those sites and some series will say it has been removed because the company ordered them too. That is good, even if i really wanted to read them.
Anyway, after all this saying, its good that this is being more tracked and monitored. Just hope that it does not fall short or people give up

agila61 wrote:

If you know of a appropriate marketing strategy that can increase the number of potential buyers sufficiently to ensure that titles considered marginal can instead of assured of covering their overheads, you ought to bring your "secret sauce" to the attention of the manga publishers. Unless, of course, it is mere vague hypothetical speculation that such an appropriate marketing strategy exists.

Maybe if the companies don't treat their prospective customers as criminals, maybe they could get semi-accurate feels of what the demand is. If it worked for them back then, it could still work now.

Life is all about risks. You need to take some in order to get ahead.

If it wasn't for pirates, Melancholy of SH would have never made it to the states.

Undead Unicorn wrote:

If it wasn't for pirates, Melancholy of SH would have never made it to the states.

That's a bit exaggerated: the Melancholy of SH anime would definitely have been picked up in market conditions of 2003, when piracy was a small fraction of what it is today, and a successful anime would have led to the manga being picked up if it had not been picked up already.

Try for being rude, but lol NO. Bandai themselves admitted that they didn't know the series would have appiled to us Westerns until piraters..well subbed it.

Not to get involved in the conversation, but why the references to the 2003 market when discussing a show that aired in 2006? Just curious.

A lot of these stories that circulate around are just myths, like the myth that a manga publishing house said that their marketing department made recommendations based on scanlation popularity, when the actual statement said nothing of the sort.

The term is a Web-based neologism; a portmanteau word that fuses scan and translation. It's a buzzword you have to be in the know to know, but plugging it into Google produces nearly 11,000 hits. That fact alone is an indication of the breadth of this phenomenon, which is to commercially translated manga what Linux is to Windows -- a collectively generated alternative supported by a thriving and passionate community, produced as a labor of love and distributed for free download via the Internet.

The process is simple (now that personal scanners, Photoshop and the Internet are widely available, anyway): "Raws," or original copies of Japanese manga volumes, are scanned into digital formats; these are distributed via the Internet to legions of bilingual translators, who send rough scripts on to editors, who polish the language and then paste the translated dialogue into the word bubbles of the scans. After a quick quality-control check, the scanlation is ready for release via IRC (a worldwide chat network frequented by hacker types), peer-to-peer technologies such as BitTorrent or direct Web download.

While scanlators operate somewhat outside legal boundaries -- the works they're republishing are copyrighted and proprietary, and there isn't a penny of licensing money exchanging hands -- their existence is tolerated by the commercial publishing houses because, frankly, scanlators play the invaluable role of identifying new titles that are hotly in demand. Would "Fruits Basket" -- a quirky romantic comedy about a young girl who becomes the housekeeper for a family whose members are cursed to transform into animals whenever they're embraced by members of the opposite sex -- have been picked up for U.S. release without its overwhelming popularity on scanlation sites? Possibly -- but the built-in fan base scanlators provided has helped turn the series into one of TokyoPop's best-selling titles.

"Frankly, I find it kind of flattering, not threatening," says TokyoPop's Steve Kleckner. "To be honest, I believe that if the music industry had used downloading and file sharing properly, it would have increased their business, not eaten into it. And, hey, if you get 2,000 fans saying they want a book you've never heard of, well, you gotta go out and get it."

...except now that Tokyopop is DEFINITELY not what it used to be, after making plenty of poor business decisions...

Quote:

And, hey, if you get 2,000 fans saying they want a book you've never heard of, well, you gotta go out and get it."

Sunday Silence wrote:

Quote: And, hey, if you get 2,000 fans saying they want a book you've never heard of, well, you gotta go out and get it."

Heheh, they want "to buy it" or want it "for free."