21 replies to this topic

[SorceressKnight]

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Hmm interesting but not so surprising. The thing is, that's not enough to stop scanlations and there are still plenty of other places online to find scanlations.

Big publishers simply need to get on board with legit digital manga. Make Ipad and Iphone apps.

Even if big publishers make iPad and iPhone apps [and IIRC, TokyoPop already had apps for cell phones for a few years now], it won't make as much of a dent, simply because of the real problem with scanlations. The issue [and the reason things like Onemanga getting nuked was more of a blow] wasn't the American publishers going after manga they've released, but the Japanese publishers going after things that haven't been released and will likely never be released in the United States. This is also a problem, because of how many things go into something *not* being sent to America- not just for good reasons [and from what it sounded like when OneManga said it, there's a good chance that Japanese publishers are the ones going after scanlations, not American publishers.] If that's the case, a simple use of something like TokyoPop allowing you to listen to their middling-quality American ones won't work- it needs some Japanese publisher to take the risk and release homemade translations instead of licensing their work [not as infeasible in theory as you'd think: Many popular series in Japan have been released in bilingual volumes to teach Japanese people English, and Kodansha did their own subtitling of the last Haruhi Suzumiya web series last year.]

[TheVileOne]

But that's what I'm getting at here.  Japanese publishers need to figure this out.  Especially the larger ones.  And the anime producers had to do it with shows that don't have distribution or release deals here.  I think they can figure out ways to do it with titles that would never be published or brought over here otherwise.