Forum - View topicNEWS: U.S., Japanese Publishers Unite Against Manga Scan Sites
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bayoab
Posts: 831 |
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prime_pm
 Posts: 2336 Location: Your Mother's Bedroom |
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Too true, sadly. |
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GWOtaku
 Posts: 678 |
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Well, that surely does help immensely, although I think your assertion is quite speculative. If anything, I'd think that it's the lower-tier titles that would benefit from this sort of exposure the most. Of most interest to me though is the fact that consumers at large are buying the books even with a free, legitimate alternative staring them in the face. It's a confirmation of the idea that yes, given a good product, people will bother paying up for it. |
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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A key element to any crowdsourcing is competition for recommendations. Someone uploads a translation overlay on the original unlettered artwork. Someone else uploads a competing translation. Someone else combines the two. Someone else objects to juiced up translations and tones down excessive swearing. And all the time, viewers are rating and talking on the forum thread attached to each upload. And 5/5 and 4/5 ratings fade toward 3/5 over time, so the headstart that the "speed translation" gets because its FIRST!!! also fades, as the "oh, yeah, its here!" votes fade away and the "zOMG, this is so lame!" votes hang around. The place to start are titles that are not going to get licensed anyway, and work out a pure share of gross revenue deal, and non-exclusive license over the "hobbyist translations". Then aggregate the legit publisher online releases in coordination with the publishers that put licensed work online, to best support their own commercialization strategy. As far as commercializing, do it in a flash player (flash is not just video, after all) that has a 30 second ad every x page turns, and have a premium subscription option that turns off the damn ads. The flash player can also have 90 degree rotation for those who prefer it, and zoom with panel order sensitive next panel display in support of smartphone access. Also an Apple app - the bandwidth ought to be low enough if snippets of the streaming ad are cached per page turn to allow it to be used on 3g and not just WiFi. |
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Aerfyn
Posts: 2 |
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As I said piracy will never be stopped. It has not in how many centuries? There will always be some people that will steal stuff because they can and those are not people that are going to be stopped by the removal of sites line onemanga. Using random numbers here lets say they blame 30% of lost sales on piracy. In that 30% maybe 10% are those that are simply too cheap or have a thing for stealing stuff. The problem isn't going after piracy its understanding it and figuring out how to deal with it. If 10% of that 30% are people that will steal regardless then you have to ignore them and forget about it. The focus should be on the 20% and figuring out why they are pirating things. If you identify the reason why those 20% are going to scan sites instead of buying your product and address those reasons you cut piracy by 20%, recouping them into paying customers instead of fighting 10% and getting no where but wasting money combating a problem which has existed longer than print media. Which is really the more profitable route?
Reading this site the work of figuring it out has pretty much been done for the companies. Seems to me there are three main reasons besides being cheap that people are going to scan sites: 1. Slow releases of products and many titles being unavailable. 2. Badly censored / cut products that hurt the quality of the product and make it undesirable. 3. Poor distribution making it hard or extremely expensive for people to buy the product. What is sad is that this sites forum has not only quickly but accurately provided a good explanation of why manga sales are suffering and yet the publishing companies have failed to come up with these simple facts. That is the biggest problem the anime/manga industry faces is a lack of understanding of its clients. Failing to recognize what the customer wants and offering it to them is a reason why companies go out of business. Yes economic times are tough. They will however not get better unless companies start finding ways to improve sales. People still have money, but they have to be enticed to spend it. Companies have to work harder to deliver what the people want if they want people to spend. Yes people are going to be more picky about what they buy, they are going to be less likely to go for impulse buys than they were 5 years ago. But some companies seem to be able to not only stay afloat but increase market and profit. Look at Apple as an example (I don't work for Apple but follow their products) they managed to still increase their market during one of the worst financial periods and by selling what a lot of people consider over priced products. They did this buy selling things people want in a way that appealed to people. The anime/mange industry can thrive but only if the companies are willing to take some chances and actually look at what their customers are telling them. The answers to their problems are spelled out in these forums. They are getting the answers provided to them here by their customers for free. They just need to pick up on them and act. |
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ayashe
 Posts: 122 |
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Then the most popular sites should just change their names and start over releasing under something else before the idiots can get them.
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vashfanatic
 Posts: 3489 Location: Back stateside |
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I love that we yet again have people giving their "expert" opinions on how the industry should fix itself. Sure, I'll bet some of you are business or economics majors, and therefore your opinion counts. But really, are we all qualified to say what's a good idea and what's not?
My advice is addressed to fans: turn to legal means of getting material first, exhaust all options before turning to fan translations of any kinds, avoid becoming a distributor yourself, and take every chance you get to support the industry. If we can keep them prosperous, they won't care as much if we do a little piracy on the side for unlicensed and unavailable material. Heck, they could use our interest as an accurate barometer of what to release if we all do that. |
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spartydragon
 Posts: 61 Location: Portland, OR |
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[quote="agila61"]
I honestly believe that the main reason legal online comics (from Marvel and such) don't do as well is because of those flash viewers.  Part of why the pirate sites work so well is that it's just a simple series of linked images. There's no DRM, but it works on older computers and slower connections without any trouble.
Even my graphic novel teacher had a dislike for them, he couldn't figure out why they didn't just use a standard webcomic navigation system. |
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Ranma87
 Posts: 170 |
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Scanalation sites exist for a reason, and that is because otherwise we cannot get manga in English without a year or more delay otherwise and most people don't want to wait that long. Some we do not get at all...
If publishers don't want people scanalating manga they should give us simultaneous released in the U.S., otherwise they are NOT going to stop it. /thread |
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ZenErik
 Posts: 392 Location: Boston |
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They exist because people like yourself feel entitled to take what isn't yours? Learn Japanese and import, simple as that. |
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Ranma87
Posts: 170 |
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I however would pay for simultaneous English releases. |
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Craeyst Raygal
 Posts: 1383 Location: In the garage, beneath a 1970 MGB GT. |
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However, this is US distributors and the Japanese creators attempting to solve a US market problem. I'm sorry, but the "world market" defense of English scanslations produced in the United States and distributed by US based websites holds no water. I stand by my statement. If you're a US fan complaining that "I can't find manga so I download it" then you're not going up to the counter at your local comic book shop and asking "Hey, you don't seem to stock manga so can I order it?" I've never run into a shop that won't let you place an order (usually at the mere cost of money up front so they're not stuck with unsold merchandise) and so the argument is nonsense. |
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CCSYueh
 Posts: 2707 Location: San Diego, CA |
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You know, there's this interesting thing called reality. In the real world publishers gamble with every license over whether enough people would be interested in paying for a copy of the story to make it worth their effort to pay to translate it, print it, distribute it, etc. This follows the old idea that in the dark ages of the past decade or so prior to the existance of the behemoth known as The Internet writers would shop their brilliant masterpoeces to various publishers to see if their little epics would be deemed worthy of being printed. There was also the Vanity Press option of printing copies oneself & selling them oneself. There's nothing in the world that says any person not fluent in the native tongue of any particular novel/movie/whatever has any right to read that title. In the past if one wished to read something in a language one couldn't read, one paid a translator oneself or learned the language oneself. I lady I met as a teen discovered I was taking German, so she gave me a letter she'd had for ages, asking me to translate. It was beyond my skill, but I gave it to my teacher who provided her with a translation. Prior to that, it had sat in a box for decades unread. The world doesn't owe you a translation. |
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Ranma87
Posts: 170 |
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The world does owe me a translation or i'll freaking take it, don't be an idiot.
Last edited by Ranma87 on Tue Jun 08, 2010 2:54 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Deacon Blues
Posts: 383 Location: Albuquerque, NM |
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I've had my fair share of battles with the administration of OneManga trying to get my groups material removed. Fortunately they finally did remove it after I poked a couple holes in their excuses (once you release a 'fan translated' work, it's no longer your own and it goes into public domain), but I'm glad to see them being taken on. Here's to hoping they are shut down soon. Also, I agree with the "if you want it, take the initiative" approach. The typical fans are all about "gimme, gimme". Seriously, in the time you spent loligagging around waiting for said series to come out, you could have had a huge headstart learning another language to read it in. :/ It's one of the reasons I learned Japanese in the first place... no one was gonna sit around and tell me every little piece of information in something, so I had to fight tooth and nail to figure it out myself. Plus, having another language under your belt works wonders in the real world 
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