I kno its very sad indeed

this is not good at all for the scanlation community

Yeah...OneManga will be closing in a week. It's #908 on the list of most visited internet sites in the world. I've been with it for years and it's where I found new manga that I liked and would then subsequently buy.

Yes, there are people who read manga scanlations and then don't buy the manga that they are reading, but those types of people wouldn't buy the actual books in the first place. So, it's not like publishers are making money from this change of policy.

If anything, they are losing money because of the mangas that won't be bought because people won't be able to read them online, decide they like them, and then buy actual print copies.

I'm sure the major mangas and their sales will be unaffected, for the most part, from this change, but this change in policy will really affect the lesser known artists and the mangas that they produce. It is through scanlation sites that we find these obscure titles and then go and buy them.

Without these sites...no one will buy them anymore because little to no people will know about them.

I agree, this is sad. I heard about it when Onemanga started closing down. I'm betting they're going to see a drop in sales as repercussion from the fans for revenge.

A good business case study for me. XD.

Well, don't be too alarmed at the moment with it. Yes, they might be closing down with it but perhaps, this is a strategy or some sort to think if the market will drop in sales or not in the manga industry. True, sales will most definitely drop but perhaps, people would be influenced to actually buy it if they are really interested. However, what they are doing is actually a slap in the face by not putting up previews of the manga.

If sales dropped tremendously, they might open up onemanga again. That's IF they think that it's part of a sales strategy. Worst comes to worst, you might have to buy them online to read them online.

Maybe if they make more available previews it could help them? I mean, i only saw previews in Shonen Jump, and that's ONE site. As sad as it is that I will not be able to check random manga of my liked genres anymore, as One that would like to publish works of his own I can understand not wanting your stuff handed out for free to the whole world.

We have to find a "happy medium", I say. That's the best we can hope for...

Yeah, this especially knocks down the hopes of some like me; the series I like are definitely -never- coming in official English, for example, Mudazumo Naki Keikaku/Legend of Koizumi. I mean, sure, I could buy the original JP version, but even with 4 years of Japanese I don't get a surprising amount of it. My suspicion is that the death of scanlations is meant to herald in PDF-type official releases, either in JP or in English-- who knows, maybe the Japanese publishers want to stop licensing and translate in-house.

Well, actually, if they would start a good and solid online publishing of manga, preferably with a good DRM set up that best provides something like Barnes and Nobles "lend me" functionn + the ability to use it on a limited but interchangeable number of devices and also allows you to download something you have purchased as often as you want, I would be really thrilled.^^
Previews of course should also be included, but admittedly, that is not so rare a feature even nowadays with printed manga (at least here in Germany).

This would have one big advantage of drastically reducing publishing cost (and thus allowing more niche titles to be released) and maybe even a clever way to bind the scanlating groups into the industry.
Why for example not just make a platform for Japanese publishers (or mangaka) to seek out a translator group, which then gets a share of every translated manga sold?

I mean, if it is possible to get recent anime translated with only a short bit of delay between the Japanese and English release, then why not also manga?

And think of how much more profitable this would be for the mangaka himself, as he can access a lot more of the profite from his own work instead of only receiving a relatively small revenue with most of the money earned through foreign markets wandering into the purses of the licensing companies?

Perhaps this development -and the reality that, even without one manga and it's like, scanlation will remain as long as the foreign market is not satisfied commercially - this might actually be something we all will profit from in the end.