Forum - View topicManga Answerman - Does Buying English-Language Manga Releases Support the Mangaka?
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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How about burning down bookstores and burying the clerks alive? Who does that help?
Asking for a friend. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3017 |
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The Demonlord Belzenlok, maybe? |
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One-Eye
 Posts: 2261 |
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While I'm appreciative of some of the info provided...
I guess this was some feeble attempt at humor or some admonishment over American hubris? 
Because an eye roll emoticon is not sufficient. |
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Aquamine-Amarine
Posts: 276 |
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Just had to stick your anti-American bias in there somewhere.
You're conveniently leaving out the fact that scanlations sites always tell people to support the official release when/if it is licensed in their country. They tend to drop manga when they realize it's been licensed. It's not worth translating anymore, and time is better spent on some manga that hasn't been licensed yet. Publishing companies have no one to blame but themselves for that, if they could make more manga available legally, even if only digitally, people would gladly buy them that way. There's so many manga I want to buy, but no one wants to license them. I found this part extremely bias. You only talked about one side of the issue and refused to talk about the other side. ANN was begging for donations earlier, that makes you no better than a scanlation site. If you really want to support manga artists, buy Japanese manga digitally on Bookwalker. You can use your English account to sign into the Japanese version of the site, and buy magazine issues, manga, and light novels. It's what I do. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2541 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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So, if we were to even say that, out of that ~$6.50 per volume that gets split up between Viz, the distributors, Shueisha, & Sui Ishida, the original creator only gets 1% of that money (we'll just round that up to $0.07/sale), then going off of the sales numbers that Deb gave us, Ishida still would have made ~$354... And that's just from comic book store sales alone. Considering that Tokyo Ghoul as a whole made ~$3.5 million dollars in sales last year, even if we cut it in half to account for the various sellers' shares, and then theoretically say that Ishida only gets 1% of that money, then he still would have received ~$17,500 from royalties from North American sales of his manga in 2017 alone.
What's my point, though? I would think that Ishida gets more than 1% royalties in the grand scheme of things, but even if he did, he'd be getting some good money. |
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One-Eye
Posts: 2261 |
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I wouldn't go so far. I think it was an awkwardly placed and weak attempt at humor with the expected result that a few people might find it vaguely insulting. It didn't really add anything to her previous sentence. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
Subscriber Posts: 3017 |
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There's something like 50 scanlation sites where I could read last week's My Hero Academia with a click of a button, and even though they might tell people to "support the official release" on their splash page, they don't seem too broken up about all the revenue they're getting from people without ad blockers turned on. I'm sure that there must be some sites that drop the titles after they are licensed, but those aren't the sites that would come up if I googled "latest Attack on Titan chapter". |
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Twage
Posts: 356 Location: North Bergen, NJ |
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Yes. The answer is just yes. They do help support the author. Yes.
And Aquamine-Amarine, scanlators DON'T always tell people to support the official release. Some of them hate manga publishers, or hate the concept of copyright. And aggregator sites that host scanlators certainly don't give a crap about the official release because they're just pirates making money off ads with servers in copyright havens. Official releases good. Scanlations bad. Always. The end.
I can tell you that author royalties for English manga releases are way higher than 1%. |
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3442 Location: Finland |
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Nothing against digital releases, but you want me to use a service which still has no easy way of making backups/removing drm? Pass. There are plenty other English-language digital bookstores which don't have that problem(amazon, kobo, jnovel, basically everyone else...). I'm content to use them instead. |
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pirateaddict
Subscriber Posts: 191 |
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I prefer to read the official releases if possible but I do visit scanlation sites, in fact they can provide a service and act as an advertisement for new manga. I spend alot of money on both anime and manga, using the internet I get to find out what's out there and available to buy but also you gain insight into how much isn't available to buy in our individual countries.
If I love a story that much then I want the official volumes and if it's something that's now out of print I scour ebay or other sites looking for second hand copies. I don't agree with using these sites as a means of getting something for nothing and bypassing spending money which goes to the creator. Obviously if you want something to carry on being made be it anime or manga then it's only right to buy the official merchandise. I realise that some people find it dfficult financially, let's face it that it's not cheap to buy these things especially if it's a long running series but it's no use moaning if some stories get cut short due to poor sales because so many are using online services. It's frustrating when you have to wait so long for each publication which can take months or years before you get to see or read it. |
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pirateaddict
Subscriber Posts: 191 |
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I also buy digital from kobo, I love being able to read my manga using my kobo app on my computer. The artwork always looks so much better on a clear background compared to paper. Unfortunately at the moment I don't have a nook but that's something I intend to buy in the near future. I also use Amazon and Kindle. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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Indeed, this "doesn't REALLY count" nonsense has been the latest line of attack by anti-industry saboteurs and bootleg boosters, who've become increasingly desperate in the face of historically cheap and accessible legal options that've invalidated their previous talking points.
Maybe scanlation groups themselves say that, but who actually goes to scanlator sites and downloads zip/rar/7z files anymore? Much like how bootleg streaming site have supplanted downloaded mkvs for anime, all the action's on scanlation reader/aggregator sites now. And from some cursory checking, I haven't found any "support official releases" language on those sites -- only BS smokescreens like "Copyrights and trademarks for the manga, and other promotional materials are held by their respective owners and their use is allowed under the fair use clause of the Copyright Law," i.e. the same CYA boilerplate that bootleg streaming sites use. Some groups may drop scanlations of licensed manga, but they're frequently picked up by other groups, much like what happened with TV-fansubs in the pre-streaming era. Plus, there's all kinds of excuses available, like "The official release will take YEARS to catch up" or "PC US companies will censor it to cater to snowflakes!" or "The official release will localize/over-translate/not use the same terms people are comfortable with" -- no doubt leafy_sea_dragon can illuminate that last one 
Last edited by Zalis116 on Fri May 04, 2018 3:06 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2541 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Obviously. I just wanted to give some sort of theoretical number to what Deb was saying in her answer, so I figured it'd be easiest to simply use a ridiculously small number like 1% to show that it all adds up in the end. |
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Puniyo
 Posts: 271 |
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The sites rarely do such a thing. It's infact the scanalation groups themselves who will tell you to buy licensed copies and drop their translation projects upon licensing - manga sites will often ignore this and keep their progress into the translation up on their sites, regardless of the scanalation group's wishes. And of course, that's only the honest groups - there's no shortage of sites that will straight up upload official translations of manga. And we both know no one is talking about unlicensed titles when it comes to these sorts of things. You can safely say that the original creator isn't losing money on that.
This is my favourite argument. It's just so untrue nowadays - even the Pokemon and Yugioh manga are completely unchanged. On another note I hate reading manga digitally. Personally, it's just really uncomfortable, plus it's a lot of money for something you can't keep. |
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Chrono1000
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