A Coalition Against Scan Sites?

No doubt everyone’s read the bit of news that ANN broke.

Now, there are two sides to this–those who side with this idea, and those who are against it.  It’s hard to keep neutral in a situation like this, where hardcore fans are now divided into pro- and anti-scans.  We are all aware that the manga industry isn’t doing so well in this economy, especially since buying of such manga has gone down dramatically.  It doesn’t mean people have stopped buying.  Rather, they are more careful of what titles they do buy.

I’ll admit, I do read scanlations from time to time.   But I’ll do it to see if a title is worth my money.  There are many series out on the market right now in the US that it’s hard to tell whether they’ll sink or swim.  Unfortunately, there hasn’t been enough being bought to keep the industry swimming strong.

I won’t say that scanlations of unlicensed titles are the problem, but scanlations of licensed titles are part of the problem.  See, there are sites where the “scanlations” are just the official English translations uploaded to the sites.  That doesn’t sit cool with me, and it’s pretty easy to tell when a title is an official English release.  The other part of the problem is–in my opinion–the fact that the English licensors of the official releases aren’t listening to their fanbase, which may well be in their 20s and 30s in this current period of time.  They’re no longer the high school students who used their allowance for $10 manga volumes.  They are the collegiate and post-collegiate students who are looking for a job and trying to make a living on a reduced paycheck.  Hobbies just have to take a backseat to real life right now.

I know I’ve said all that before, but it needs repeating.

Now, why do scan groups bother to translate unlicensed series?  Simple–to get a literally-unknown mangaka’s name out there in the Western fandom.  Publishers will only bring over what’s popular, and as a result they don’t want to risk titles that may result in more of a loss than a gain.  Every so often they will bring over something from a literally-unknown mangaka as a test to see how it’ll do, which is exactly what DMP is doing with “Desire Sensibility” (NARAZAKI Souta), and BLU with “CALLING” (OOTSUKI Miu).  Now, prior to these licenses, both were being scanlated.  So the only connection I can really make here is that if not for scans, I doubt both of these titles would be seeing English releases.

Most of the time though, people read scanlations in order to keep up with the Japanese releases, which is the case with long-running series like the Big 3 (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece).  Posting official translations on the licensors’ sites around the time of the chapter release to combat the fan-translated versions may be effective, but may not make much difference.  It all depends on the fans whether they want it or not, and unfortunately, America’s youth has gotten to a point where they want things instantaneously.

The most-lauded suggestion I’ve read on forums is that fans import their manga and read it in their RAW state, but again, not many people are willing to learn another language (and culture, for that matter!) just to read some manga.  I beg to differ on this one–not only are you getting the story by self-teaching yourself Japanese/enrolling yourself in Japanese language classes, but you are also opening yourself to another culture, which is enriching in its own way.  But again, not many are willing to do that.

It doesn’t matter how much manga one person buys–it won’t make much of a difference in the industry.  Some hardcore fans have turned to importing their series in order to have the complete collection if it’s dropped here, which is understandable, since they want to read the rest of the story.  But for those who can’t read Japanese, they depend on scans.  Another point to bring up are those who DON’T have manga at all in their country/province, and depend on scans for their manga fill.  Get rid of scans, and you get rid of potential buyers.

In the 10 or so years since I’ve started buying manga, I’ve ended up with few completed series and more volume 1′s than I can count.  Why?  Because series get dropped due to few people buying them.  Older titles go out of print, and people resort to scans in order to see what happens.  But when it comes to an  unlicensed series that I’ve read scanned and liked, I’ll contemplate buying it, which is what I did for the first time last week.

While publishers can’t tell us what to do with our money, they could do a little bit better when it comes to their fans.  And fans could do a little bit better and not upload official English releases to sites like M****F** and O**M****.  We’ll see what happens with this situation as time goes on.  Hopefully there will be a middle ground that can be reached.

(Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness format of this entry.)

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