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NEWS: DMP CEO: New Venture to Launch 1,000+ Manga Online

Just checked, it's taken 8 days for this to break out into general news (aka.ANN).
Now, who thinks that's fast, or slow, in the manga/anime world?

DMP is working on a new ‘secret’ project for publishing more manga faster and cheaper than it is now.

ANN had to get confirmation to post it as news. Until the cofirmation, it was only an industry rumor.

agila61 wrote:

ANN had to get confirmation to post it as news. Until the cofirmation, it was only an industry rumor.

... but Jen at TYR exchanged e-mails herself with the president of DMP (at least twice) to get confirmations, days before (and by that I mean her first posting after hearing from him was 6/11) ...

For one, I think most scanlators have done their work out of a sense of charity to manga fans and the industry. Although DMP is approaching this as 'embracing of the existing fan culture', I think scanlator's may come to the realization that they've actually become 'cheap-as-free' labor for the publishing companies. In which case, why would a scanlator want to work practically for free when the publisher is going to turn around and take their translations and sell them for a profit?

I just want to point out a little (pretty well documented) psychological effect. Can't remember who did the researches, so I can't drop any names or supply a bibliography.

It seems, that when you pay people (small amounts of) money, it totally shifts the perspective from "I do this hard work, because I love it" to "Why am I doing this hard work for mere peanuts?".
So maybe fan-translators are better left unpaid. I think they would still do it.
Web 2.0 already proved, that people will happily supply free content. The key is freedom, I think. If the creators or right-holders would get too picky about how exactly you can re-make their work, it could really spoil the enjoyment for everyone.
That's the biggest problem I see.

The whole 'charity' aspect is removed from the equation, and if these scanlator's get wind of what professional translators could very well be making for doing the same type of work, they might cry foul for the overall situation (which, in some cases, they may have unwittingly asked for). The plugin parallel I see here is that I don't think there'd be half as many free plugins written for Wordpress if Wordpress itself wasn't a free application, and certainly most contributor's on Wikipedia would cry foul if the Wikimedia Foundation wasn't a non-profit, charitable organization.

The other problem is quality control. How do you check that all of these groups are accurately or properly translating these works?

I'm not the one who said it was not general news until it hit ANN, that was Yblees. I was just pointing out that when ANN got wind of it, they sought confirmation from the CEO, and when they got the confirmation, they put up the news story.

Clearly, if DMP had been eager to get the story out earlier in the week, it would have been up earlier.

No, what you said was that the news that TYR reported was an "industry rumor" until ANN "confirmed" it.

yblees was commenting humorously that it took a "mainstream" anime news site 8 days to "break" a story that was already circulated on a yaoi news site a week earlier.