What do you guys think of manga scanlators such as Mangastream?

@maripazvillar2004

I just checked
Quite a few places are using your series

I have no idea what prompted that
Especially since you can read it on this site

I don't think you can talk about one without the other any more. It's been a long time since the days when very little manga was available commercially in English, when scanlators operated in private forums, Livejournal communities and on IRC channels, and most dutifully deleted their files and requested people stop distributing whenever something got licensed. Aggregators may not be doing the work, but they are the face of scanlations now. Google the name of virtually any manga, popular or obscure, and they'll be the top hit and most of the following results on the first page.

Even if you personally ended up buying books, I'm sure only a tiny fraction of people who read scanlations even think about it. Why would they? Everything they could ever want to read is available for free online, and they can access it without sparing a thought for the many people whose efforts went into creating it. What started out with good intentions is now completely out of control, and is hurting the industry and creators.

While I do agree with some things you're saying here, I also wanted to ask: is the manga industry truly losing as much as you say it is?
I mean if you think about it, a good chunk of these people you mention who are "fixated on free and choose not to support creators" are just that- if scanlation groups were wiped off the face of the internet and suddenly the only way to access manga was through making payments, a huge part of the current audience would simply stop reading manga altogether due to the lack of accessibility. Take YouTube or FaceBook for instance- the reason why they both have such a large and diverse community today is precisely, because they're free!
Honestly, if the manga industry truly wants to maintain the size of its current audience while avoiding piracy issues, I think the only way for them to do that is to 1) do a better job with marketing, 2) find a way to expand its catalog to match that of current illegal sources (cough, maybe recruit members from active and high quality scanlation groups?), and most importantly 3) find a way to provide content to readers for free. If aggregator sites can figure out a way to make a profit, legal sites should be able to find a way to do it too.
Until the manga industry finally gets its shit together, I don't think scanlation groups are hurting it much by keeping the current audience interested at the very least.

1) Anyone who has done it knows that marketing is massively expensive and that there is no guarantee of any results. Advertisers will sell you all kinds of stuff and they don't have to give anything back in terms of assurances. They just have to make the contract impressions, which, unfortunately is very easy to skew. Those those unaware, internet ads are sold as CPM (which is 1,000 images). A very common CPM is $10. Which means you pay $10 for 1,000 impressions. In a perfect world 1,000 people would see the ad. The reality is very few actually do. The Wall Street Journal did a long study of internet traffic and reports that 30% of all traffic is bogus. Computers in Russia and China refresh webpages over and over and over gobbling up impressions in return for a kickback. The websites themselves are not always directly to blame as they just lease out their space to third party vendors like Project Wonderful who then sells the ads. So of that 1000 impressions, 700 are left. Next consumers themselves are to blame. They use AdBlock programs so they don't see any ads, but still get all the content. AdBlockers range from 30% to 50% of all internet traffic depending on the country. The USA ranges around 30%. So now you are actually paying $10 for 400 impressions. And how many people brag about never looking at or clicking on ads? We sat through a board of directors meeting for a publishing organization and many were going on about how stupid advertisers were for buying ads because they never looked at them. We know someone who works at Microsoft selling ads and they said something similar. The average internet ad gets a .1% click through, which means in 1,000 impressions, there is 1 click. How is a manga publisher supposed to break even on a book that has a $5.20/unit gross if it is spending $10 for a single click (and 1 click does not equal 1 sale). Marketing is expensive and risky and consumers don't support it because they don't click on or even look at ads. Books are primarily sold through word of mouth. Otaku USA charges $5,100 for a single full page print only ad. A similar ad in the New York Times Sunday Book review would be $38,500 for print only. Again neither offer assurances that a reader will buy a copy. Especially if they can go on Google search the title and find it digitally free as a scanlation.

2) We assume you are referring to "expanding the catalog" as getting licenses to Japanese work and translating it to English? For those unaware, the Japanese can be exceptionally difficult to work with. Some creators have a very long list of demands. Others want large royalties. Getting a foreign license is hard, time consuming, and expensive. Publishers like Yen Press have a tiny catalogue in comparsion to what is being published in Japan because they are cherry picking the best sellers. In N. America your manga sales are 1/10th of what it is in Japan. So if 100,000 copies of XYZ has sold in Japan, maybe you will sell 10,000 copies in N. America. 10,000 copies isn't worth the effort.

3) Find a way to provide content to readers for free. How? Tapastic generates $1 per 3,500 raw views (due to ad block, no mobile ads, advertisers getting wise and not paying anything for ads that generate no response). As most webcomic creators can attest to, ads are on the way out. Sponsorships? Art grants? Someone has to pay the bill. Readers should have to provide something towards the burden of creation. They should turn off ad block. They should click on ads. Support on Kickstarters or Patreons . . .. something. Right now on Tapastic, creators are the ones who are footing the bill by putting in 1000s of hours of time for little to no return.

There is no system that can support creators being paid while readers read for free. The resources for production (time and money) have to come from somewhere.

Consequently, readers read for free and creators give way their time and skill.

Before I begin, I want to apologize for saying that the manga industry needs to get its shit together. I know there are people out there working hard to improve conditions, and I don't like to generalize.

With that being said, it is possible for manga to be legally provided for free online. Examples I can think of off the top of my head are companies like Comico and MangaBox. I don't follow any series on MangaBox, but Comico has produced rather popular series such as ReLIFE and Momokuri. Both have millions of Japanese followers. There is no english version of these sites/applications available at the moment, but I feel like if the owners of these companies simply reached out to scanlators, they would willingly translate, redraw, and typeset the series they already scanlate for a larger audience, and possibly even for free. Its nothing impossible, as far as I can tell... it's just that the Japanese industry seemingly doesn't care much about catering to foreign audiences as long as they can make a profit within Japan.

(Also, there are even apps released by Shueisha in Japan that let you read the most popular weekly series out there (Gintama, for instance) for free. All you have to do is to collect points by logging in every day and viewing ads to unlock a new chapter.)

As for marketing also, I feel like it could be done for free or virtually for free if the industry simply joined hands with scanlators, who already have the attention of basically the entire foreign fanbase. There are literally thousands of people out there willing to dedicate countless, sleepless hours to their favorite series for free. Why can't the industry figure out a way to make use of these people?

And again, the main point of my previous post, which seems to have been lost: scanlation fans who are "fixated on free" only follow series because they are available for free. They are unlikely to support the creators if the content is not available for free in the first place because unfortunately, many people are entitled or simply poor. Getting rid of scanlation groups instead of making use of them seems like an unwise waste of free exposure to potential international and big-time supporters of the legal industry to me.

The issue with that is by "joining hands" with scanslators, they're basically condoning scanslations and that's gonna be pretty unacceptable on the Japanese side of things. No printing house is going to allow their foreign distributor to team up with an illegal distributor, they want the pirates shut down.

I meant they should recruit people from high quality scanlation teams so that they can make use of the scanlators' abilities legally.

I'm pretty sure publishers already do that. I've heard about professional translators who got jobs at legit publishing companies after getting a start in fan translations.

That's good to hear ('v`)

They can and will do something against it 100% as Naver already took down every single comic from them on a certain site (and they're always promptly deleted if anyone uploads them again).
I guess, if you tell them which site it is, they will take them off there too asap =)

@lurker4649 before everyone had access to the Internet, if you had no money, you just did not have access to some comics. It was not perceived as a slight or a disadvantage. But now, people feel entitled to material for which they cannot pay for and are willing to destroy people's career over that faulty sense of entitlement.

Look at the way you twist yourself in order to justify piracy.

"Oh I'm poor and live in Iceland where they don't ship comics so that justify my piracy..."

Nothing justifies your piracy. The right of cartoonists to be paid for their work trumps any kind of false sense of entitlement that you have over their work. No one owes you anything. There are alternative comics that are accessible, like the web comics found here. Copyrights afford the cartoonist the exclusive rights and privilege to distribute their work the way they see fit. No one can decide how they can make their property accessible except a cartoonist or its publisher.

Paying for your comics after the fact does not make up for your earlier piracy. As was argued above, only a fraction of people ever go on to buy what they pirated earlier.

Many scanalated comics are legally available in English on ComiXology and other digital comics platforms. That means they are available in practically every country without shipping costs as a restriction. Often, they are available for just a few bucks. Still, it has not reduced the level of piracy. Access is just an excuse.

Before scanlations became a "big" thing, actually read manga by checking out volumes from the library or reading Shonen Jump (sometimes the library copy). I did buy some manga but it was usually for stuff I REALLY liked, so my collection was very small (now smaller because I donated most of it).

I then at one point got really into reading scanlations like from MangaFox and OneManga. I was then able to read series that I could not before because 1)they were not in America and 2) English copies were not available in local stores or libraries. And, a lot of the Japanese only series were some that would NEVER be brought over due to them being less popular. Though, I was always aware what I was reading was not legal. I remember when OneManga removed all their series, people went nuts, but I just shrugged because I always felt like it was bound to happen at one point.

I know for a time, the SigIKKI (of Viz) took advantage of the online reading thing and posted chapters online temperately for people to read but then would remove them and told people to buy the manga. Tho my major criticism with this is that they posted a series but never printed it. So when they removed the pages, all traces of the English version of the series was gone.

I guess at one point, I just stop reading manga...I don't remember why, I just stopped all together. So I don't really read anything now. I did at one point read Baruto and that Rock Lee spin off. I do at one point want to read Soul Eater but right now I am not sure how to go about it because I do not have $200 extra dollars to just buy manga.