[Manga] OneManga Shutting Down

There's no way mangastreamer and mangafox will be around very long, they're really proactively going after the scanlation sites. I'm only mainly curious if the publishers are actually going to try to put together some sort of online pay site that would have scanlation-like turnaround times on manga with some sort of subscription fee that I've seen rumored a bunch. If they do that and it's actually timely and carries the shit I want I would do that. Otherwise though I can't see this really doing anything; people who will not pay under any circumstances will still be able to get these on IRC and other sources. And most everyone else either buys their shit and reads scanlations due to release lag, or is super casual and will just move on completely (which I'm guessing is most people). All this has done is basically encourage me to continue to purchase the couple series I care about, and I'll keep up with those and not bother seeking out all of the other tetriary stuff I was reading. This is ironic because all but one of the things I buy I found by browsing these scanlation sites. I guess ultimately at the end of the day I don't see how this will really generate more sales for the publishers, and it actually hurts the few people who did use this as a tool to find new series, unless some sort of subscription site model comes into play which just seems really odd.

Originally Posted by Mighty Tor

Though I have to say the more reaction I read to this news, the happier I was they were closing. The entitlement of leeches and the internet generation is not surprising, but the way people were railing against publishers, mangaka, official distributors, etc, and whining about how they "NEED" their manga and this will kill sales was simply laughable. I have to admit I kind of like seeing their toys taken away even if inconveniences me some.

Of course anyone with the tiniest bit of maturity will nod to the inevitability and move on to other sources, such as mangareader.net or go back to pulling chapters directly from the scanlators themselves. Personally, I prefer owning the books anyways and hope that with something of the flooded market they have, prices will either fall on individual volumes or they'll start selling larger collections/box sets for easier to swallow prices. Happened with anime at least after years of $30 per hour on DVD being a deal, you can finally find complete series for $30 or less relatively routinely.

While there's certainly some people reacting this way, a lot of the shit I was reading as far as I can tell isn't licensed, but scanlation sites are going down completely, so I can't even get that stuff anymore. Also I've been waiting for some stuff to get a box set treatment or drop in price for a long-ass time and it hasn't happened yet (see One Piece, although they have started doing the 3-in-1 thing finally). Ultimately as someone who is actually willing to buy shit, this just makes everything a bigger pain in the ass for me, and will actually cause me to buy less shit. Again, the people who want to pirate will still find ways, so I'm just not really seeing how this works out for them long-term.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Mighty Tor

I like free and easy access to everything as much as the next guy, but there is no way I could ever construe this as bad business on the part of the publishers. Yes, they have a lot on their plate to deal with, changing demographics, novelty factor wearing off a bit, increasing visibility, needing stronger tv show tie-ins to draw interest, the on-line availability genie being out of the bottle for most of their market. Despite all that though, sidelining what is potentially your most damaging competition probably trumps all of that, especially when that competition isn't entirely legal. If that clears the way for their own subscription service, which seems likely, great, or if it simply clears the way for their own on-line chapter freebie teasers to get people to buy books, also great. The industry certainly needs some changes to remain viable, and chief among them is exerting some control over the distribution of the material they paid for and base their existence on.

Yeah sorry, I didn't mean to sound like the US publishers were filthy assholes or anything; they're completely within their rights to do what they've done. I'm just questioning ultimately what the long-term results of this would be. If they had cracked down like this when these big sites first started popping up, it would have been a different story. But big, easily accessible sites have been around for so long now that a lot of people are basically spoiled and won't buy anything.

Also ignoring the vast majority of people that won't buy stuff no matter what, I'd personally attribute the decline in sales mostly to either:

-Delay in release schedule; at this point even most people I know (including myself) that actually buy stuff still read scanlations because you're usually looking at months or longer for those same chapters to be release stateside.

-Honestly, the market has been completely flooded with a ton of crap. Right when manga started to first get really big in the US around 2002 or so TokyoPop, Viz, and other companies were just shitting out practically everything. I know myself and lot of people got burned eventually because there was just so much crap out there, there was no quality control (especially Tokyopop) and I just stopped buying stuff because at a point I'm looking at a shelf and almost everything I saw was either something I'd never heard of, or something I knew was bad.

I think the release schedule hurts it way more than anything, but that's unavoidable to some extent just because of weekly releases in Japan vs. volumes in the US, but even today I still can look at a manga section in Barnes and Noble and not have any clue what half of the shit there is. Honestly the only way I could say that there would be zero excuse to grab scanlations is if the publishers did a subscription website of some sort where they had turnaround times same week like scanlators do. Like Acer said though, there's huge hurdles to that, and the few series I read are spread out across three different publishers IIRC, so it's just not practical for most people even if that happened.

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