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I don’t read scanlations much but I do especially for series that aren’t licensed or don’t have a big chance of getting licensed. I mostly read scanlations for BL manga.

Anyway, I know a lot of people are against it but I don’t think it warrants your fuse to get blown over it. I can understand the publishers’ stance but there will always be people who will continue reading.

The reason I don’t read scanlations much isn’t mainly to support the mangaka and/or publisher but because I don’t like spending a long time in front of the computer reading. So you can say that I’m not with or against. I’m just neutral toward the whole thing. I’m confident that I’m supporting the industry by buying physical copies of manga but I’ll also read scanlations.
I live outside the U.S. and so not all means are available for us here but I’m glad that we’ve Kinokuniya to purchase manga. I also buy manga on kindle.

Publishers are asking people to learn Japanese and buy the Japanese tankoubons to support the mangaka instead of reading scanlations but of course they can’t expect everyone to be able to do that, right? I tried learning some Japanese but I still don’t feel comfortable reading manga in the language.

Honestly, all these arguments over scanlations irritate me. They just make me want to scream and say “Stop it!” to both parties.

I get why you feel comfortable considering scanlations an essential part of your personal experience as a fan, especially since you clearly spend your fair share money on official releases.

It’s not so much attitudes like yours that I personally can’t stand (that was me in high school, rejoicing that all the Arina Tanemura series were getting licensed so I could finally buy them). This is an example of the idealistic argument that piracy=exposure you wouldn’t have had otherwise=better sales for a series actually working, right? But for how many people is this true?

What I hate is the kind of people who say, “Why in the world would you buy it when you can read it for free online?” I remember being completely taken aback the first time someone said that to me, in some forum or other. “Why in the world would you buy something you love when you could steal it???” is basically how it sounded (…and was what they were saying, yeah). Just because it’s all out there, doesn’t mean it’s okay to steal.

All of us break rules. Especially when it’s something that’s considered socially acceptable. You don’t really feel bad about it then, and why would you if everyone else agrees that it’s okay? That’s just human nature. So the problem is that it’s apparently become so acceptable to binge-steal books online that some people–the people who argue until the cows come home that they’re completely entitled to something without paying for it–some people no longer see it as an ethical problem at all.

There used to be “rules” to scanlations, before the aggregate sites started popping up (and they were regularly listed on scanlation group websites from what I remember):
1. Only scanlate series that aren’t licensed.
2. The scanlation group pledges to remove all their files if a series is licensed and asks their readers to not share them.
3. Readers pledge to buy the Japanese release if possible, to support the author. (in most cases it probably wasn’t, but these days it’s reeeeally easy and actually pretty cheap if you get ebooks)
4. Readers pledge to buy the manga in their language if/when it comes out in their country, to support the author.

This acknowledged that scanlation wasn’t the ideal, that it would be ethically wrong to continue either producing or reading scanlations once the scanlations were no longer “needed.” Since it wasn’t acceptable in the community to just read scanlations of everything and never buy manga, I hope that people followed those rules more often than not (but I guess there’s no way to know).

I’m not saying that stealing was okay back then either, but that you did feel some guilt for doing it, you know? Like, you were told up front that it was sort of a sketchy thing to do, and that you really should support the author by buying some of their books officially, because it was never meant to be free entertainment. If the authors WANTED it to be free, they’d just have posted their manga as webcomics.

I haven’t read pirated manga in a long time so I can’t say if there are still any groups that keep those rules, but it seems like that’s not the case anymore. Especially on aggregate sites, where you can run into actual scans of English releases, or manga ripped straight from Crunchyroll, or binge read more manga than you could ever reasonably afford to buy, just because you can. Especially when you see people giving excuses not to buy a series they say they’re a fan of and having the gall to complain about it getting licensed instead, when you remember being so grateful when your favorite series got picked up (I don’t want to sound like an old fogey ranting, but that’s how it feels to me. Dammit, I do sound like an old fogey ranting…). Especially when you see doujinshi artists saying that they don’t want their work to be hosted/translated on the internet, but someone does it anyway, even knowing that they’ve been asked not to.

That part of scanlation culture? It’s hard not to hate that.

I think there’s enough people for and against it though. But chances are we’re gonna be talking about this until a superior official service exists, so scanlations will never die…or something. I just decided to say my piece though.

Whenever I hear the “Why in the world would you buy it when you can read it for free online?” It just comes down to two things for me:

1) maybe manga is just not that valuable to them. Harsh, yeah, but not even throwing a bone to an official release? That just sucks.
2) yeah, but, the official services out there are bad. This is true. I mean, it took a long time for a digital alternative to even pop up, and one of them shut down. They may be getting better, but it’s hard to tell at the moment.

There’s definitely a lot of feelings when it comes to supporting official releases. Also a lot to try and understand about the industry too. It’s tough. It does come down to figuring out a way to make it easier for people to support an official release, I think.