The manga companies have never really gone out of their way to do anything about it until now, is the way i am understanding it.
Apparently the majority of major manga companies have now contacted the major sites and told them to stop.
My beef is that it takes so long for translations to hit our shores, what are we supposed to do now? wait a year and a half for the stories etc to catch up?
Yes. Look, for a long time I read as much manga online as the next guy, but I think the perspective of the manga publishers has much more merit than most of you guys seem to think (I'm not trying to pick on you in particular, Enef). The manga market has been in decline for some time, and the publishers were bound to address scanlations at some point. I first got into comics through scanlations, and I really am sorry to see them go, but good on the publishers for taking this united, uniform initiative rather than the haphazard address-one-site-every-once-in-a-while approach that Marvel and DC have been taking to address the same problem. It was going to happen eventually, and it really bugs me when people act like they are entitled the right to read
illegal scanlations. Maybe some of the Naruto scanlators will take this opportunity to instead translate some of the great manga that still isn't available in English, for which I don't see as big of a problem with online distribution.
Wolcik, I'm more sympathetic to your complaint, because I was in the same situation for a while (living in a country where I couldn't get much manga in print) but the vast majority of English speaking manga readers are in countries where they could purchase manga if they chose to do so, and you can't really blame the publishers for not really taking the small minority that you are a part of in account. It might be expensive, but for stuff that you really want to buy there's always the Internet.
On a related point, I think that now would be a great time for publishers like Viz and Tokyopop to cut the prices on their manga volumes by lowering production values. Unlike, say, some of the more literary manga published by places like Vertical, Naruto, One Piece and the like are mass market products, and they should be treated as such in terms of presentation. If American publishers followed the format of the Japanese tankoubons more closely (chiefly with smaller sizes and lower paper quality), I would imagine their books would be a couple dollars cheaper, and annoucning such a change now would go a long way towards appeasing the hardcore fans that will be angriest about this anti-scanlation initiative.
Anyways, sorry to derail this thread. That was much longer than I planned it to be. I recently finished Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville and I highly recommend it.
Help Needed
Theakon
@ 8:41 AM Mar 28th