One Manga, the largest illicit manga scan site and one of the top 1,000 websites on the whole internet, is shutting down. This message, from site administrator “Zabi,” appears on the front page:
“There is an end to everything, to good things as well.”
It pains me to announce that this is the last week of manga reading on One Manga (!!). Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it. We have decided to abide by their wishes, and remove all manga content (regardless of licensing status) from the site. The removal of content will happen gradually (so you can at least finish some of the outstanding reading you have), but we expect all content to be gone by early next week (RIP OM July ‘10).
So what next? We’re not really sure at this point, but we have some ideas we would like to try out. Until then, the One Manga forums will remain active and we encourage all of you to continue using them. OMF has developed into a great community and it would be a shame to see that disappear.
You can also show us some love in this moment of sadness by ‘liking’ our brand new Facebook page. It would be nice to see just how many of you came to enjoy our ‘better than peanut butter and jelly’ invention.
Regardless of whether you stay with us or not, on behalf of the One Manga team, I would like to thank you all for your unwavering support over the years. Through the ups and downs you have stuck with us, and that is what kept us going.
As a certain Porky was fond of saying… That’s all folks!
Time for me to go lay down and let this all sink in.
- Zabi
Their Facebook is here. Meawhile, the Japanese publisher Square Enix announced yesterday that it is setting up its own online manga site, but the manga won’t be free:
Given the increasing popularity of electronic reading formats, Square Enix has decided to take advantage of the online distribution infrastructure originally developed for its games business, along with the company’s existing payment system and online fan communities in order to establish a paid digital distribution channel to better serve the varied needs of its global customers. Square Enix will continue to work with its existing regional publishing licensees to promote both electronic and print versions of titles, while aiming to deter piracy by establishing an official web-based distribution source.
They are doing demos at Comic-Con this weekend, and the site goes live in the fall, serving North America and France. Right now, you can read the first chapters of Fullmetal Alchemist, Black Butler, Soul Eater, and O-Parts Hunter online for free, with a promise of more to follow. My first impulse was to wonder what Viz and Yen Press, the publishers of these two series, thought about it, but a quick e-mail exchange with Yen Press editorial director Kurt Hassler indicates that this is a partnership, with the American publishers supplying the material.
I have mixed feelings about One Manga. On the one hand they were posting chapters of series already being released. That was illegal. But they were also putting up series that will never ever see the light of day in America. Ever. So I think it’s a shame that manga fans will never get to see any of those titles. In some ways I think it’s a bad thing that publishers control what we get to see. Because what they are putting out over here are not necessarily the best titles and they are not necessarily what I’m interested in. And look at a series like Eden, which is rumored to be published by Dark Horse. They haven’t published a volume since September 2009. It’s taken 3 years for Gunslinger Girl to find a pub. Some of the pubs are just straight up jokes. And what about all the CMX titles that are now in limbo? The pubs don’t have any loyalty to their readers, why should readers have any to them.
I also think in some ways pubs brought the whole scan thing on themselves. They market themselves to young readers that have no money. They stock their books in bookstores with recliners, couches, tables. Bookstores have become pseudo libraries. And when are the pubs gonna start pulling their books out of libraries? They are losing money there as well.
I never really got into reading scans. I have plenty of legitimate manga to catch up on, without searching the internet for more. In the 3 years I’ve my own anime/manga site, I’ve never reviewed or even mentioned any scan titles. There are no links to scan sites on my site. So its not like I’m a scan lover. I can just see both sides of the issue.
I’m a little impressed and suprised that One Manga is going out with such a whimper. And it leaves me wondering, if it was this easy, why did the pubs act like such dramatic crybabies for so long? Why did it take them so long to get their collective act together? I think there are going to be a lot of pissed off people in the manga community. Not just from the bums who never buy manga, but from people that do buy manga but also wanted to experience series that would never be published here because pubs decide what we want. You don’t really think pubs pick titles based on whether its good or not do you? Come on. They pick based on how much money they think they can make. And some readers do not want to be their puppets.
And nobody get too excited about this shutdown. It’s not going to bring back the fad golden age of manga. The people reading the scans were not buying manga before. They will not buy it now. They will just find another place on the internet to read scans sooner or later.
“And when are the pubs gonna start pulling their books out of libraries? They are losing money there as well. ”
Actually, no — libraries buy a lot of manga, especially for teen collections. If a title proves popular, libraries will buy multiple copies of each volume, and will buy replacements when the originals fall apart. Manga publishers also produce special library bindings of popular series (e.g. InuYasha) that provide yet another revenue stream. And last but not least, libraries are an important resource in book preservation; many titles that are hard to find or out of print are available through libraries.
“The people reading the scans were not buying manga before. They will not buy it now.”
Then they should not count.
Why do I get the feeling that they’ll over-charge, offer only a limited selection, make it as inconvenient as possible, let it fail, and then blame it on piracy?
I find it funny that the French part is overlooked by commentators.
Currently French market in the #2 manga market in term of volume. Yes, manga sold more in France than in North America.
So having Square-Enix getting a French version is logical and i should note that at least 4 French licensors are in the boat.
All those said i should ponder the importance of the export market. While France is #2 in sells volume it still represents no more than 3% of the worldwide sells. We are small fries compared to the Japan inner market.
I would like to list some possible reasons why Japanese publishers are at least moving now against scanlation and for some proposing legit alternatives.
1. Scanlation means availability of Japanese RAW not just for would be translators or scanlators but for the Japaneses themselves. On mangahelpers 80% of the IPs reading those RAW were from Japan meaning loss of sells in the Japan inner market
2. The confidence check with foreign licensors who are hesitating over some series due to existence of scanlation. Scanlation has to be kept below an endemic level so borderline manga have more chance to get licensed.
3. The Japanese publisher must look strong because they don’t want magaka getting literally digitally awhol. I’m sure that there were and there will be additional discussion/negotiation between mangaka and their publishers on digital distribution of their works and publishers need to show that they are in control.
4. The demands exists thus making some money albeit not much is better than no money at all.
@ KrebMarkt
1,2,3. This are interesting thoughts, but if scanlators really are the problem, and yet they are willing to work with licensors, then why not work with them? I’m sure they wouldn’t mind working with a central distribution source and a model where they do not release raws, and only use the official ones.. as long as they get to keep modest control over their forums/communities and have their names featured prominently enough. Especially with a profit-sharing license, since these are people who usually donate their time and money.
4. This is really the crux of the issue. It is not very business-like for them to keep taking losses if they could be making money. Thus it seems logical that they either aren’t taking heavy losses at all, or that they are wasting their resources on a futile war of attrition. If everyone’s reading raws, then clearly print isn’t as lucrative as it ones was. Time to move on and make money where it can be made.
@metzger
The two key issues are Money & Control.
We still need a viable economical win-win model for both authors & those providing the digital contents.
By those providing the contents, it could either the traditional publishers, the authors themselves or anyone else.
This is why it was critical for Japanese publishers to re-affirm that they are the game masters as the risk to be by-passed by (former) scanlators broking deals directly with authors or authors going digitally awhol is not negligible.
There are a lot of works pre-dating the boom of Internet and traditional publishers want to pose as the only possible interlocutors for those works digital right.
They are scared of authors saying i don’t need you for putting my works online.
We are heading to publishers monthly subscription portal or Kindle/Ipad bound pay for downloads websites. The kind of websites where criticisms is forbidden & marketing soviet like propaganda will abound.
> They are scared of authors saying i don’t need you for putting my works online.
It’s just a bit surprising that they aren’t as willing to see scanlators as content providers. They wouldn’t have to worry about authors leaving if they catered to them.
> We are heading to publishers monthly subscription portal or Kindle/Ipad bound pay for downloads websites.
I doubt a monthly fee will work for casual readers in the West. If newspapers, which have a daily release schedule and a reason to be read regularly, can’t do it then I can’t see manga succeeding either. Especially since translation costs a lot (apparently) and takes forever.. I doubt they will be able to offer content quickly enough to justify paying this way.
A pay-per-download model would work if the downloads aren’t DRMed, and are at the very least of higher quality than scanlators. Neither of these will happen without a fight from the audience. I can see them trying all sorts of dead-ends like custom iPad apps and Flash readers, but if it costs a substantial amount it won’t work unless the DRM is amazingly considerate to how the end-user actually uses digitial copies (when pigs fly).
If the problem becomes beating the quality/price point that scanlators can offer, and they aren’t willing to figure this out with the scanlators on decent terms, then they’re basically doomed to lose. This isn’t a problem that traditional publishing approaches and mentalities can solve.
> The kind of websites where criticisms is forbidden & marketing soviet like propaganda will abound.
They won’t be able to pull that off without 20-30 years of following Apple’s lead.. and they know it. Not accepting criticism and using heavy-handed marketing tricks will only serve to pull the rug out from under them in this era.
I’m honestly far too jaded and cynical to believe that they want digital copies or international markets to work (beyond the surprise that was France). They’d much rather put in token gestures to look as though they’re trying, when in reality they aren’t. The problem is that they don’t realize that such tactics don’t really work as well in the digital age, and they’ve already proven they’re almost completely unwilling (or unable) to understand the digital age.
At this point it’s just a matter of time before authors jump off their sinking ship and are called rats for doing so.
The majority of the manga that I read is because of these websites. Without them I doubt I would ever have known about them and probably given up on manga completely. I also have to agree that shutting down public websites like mangatraders and mangatoshokan would hurt the businesses more than they would help them.
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
First of all a lot of the mangakas who write these series are just starting out, so their reputations can only go as far as the publishers in the country will allow it. And even if their series are able to get authorized to be shipped outside the country, there is no guarantee that they will make it to all parts of the world. It is especially true for the smaller countries who may not have a strong publishing branch that allows manga to be imported. This could be due to very sensitive policies in which the people may find the contents unfavorable to their youth culture, therefore completely denying all access.
And while official websites are going to attempt providing available mangas online for a fee, there is a very high chance that most of the series that are underrated will not get their chance in the spotlight when they are overshadowed by more mainstream series, such as Naruto and Bleach.
“Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game.
Service wins the game.”
-Tony Alessandra
Second the scalation websites are a modern convenience for promotional usage. Getting a a manga licensed and translated in other countries takes years to accomplish-most of the popular manga series now would have taken at least 10+ years before they could be known anywhere outside the country, let alone within the county that distributes them. But through the free promotion like scanlations they are publicized on a global scale; a feat that can hardly be achieved through standard means.
Take for example the ingenious creator of the “Hetalia, Axis Power” series by Himaruya Hidekaz.
He was able to utilize his own series through the internet without charging his fans, and as a result it has taken the world by storm. The manga has already been turned into an official manga serialization, obtained an anime, official merchandising, a full length movie after a few short years of the anime’s appearance, and to top it all off licensing and dubbing in the United States while it is still in the process of creating more episodes.
“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
-Jeff Bezos
And third ties in with the first point in that the websites and companies willing to upload manga for people to read will either charge them at a price that may not be affordable or convenient-particularly to the age group who can not meet the expenses. Take for example weekly mangas versus monthly. While charging for monthly issues will not seem as big a problem for fans, mangas that run by on a weekly basis will prove to be more difficult to financially continue.
If they were to hypothetically charge .99 cents (which is practically a dollar) for each chapter that readers view, the total amount for each month is $4.95. One whole years worth of a manga is $54.45. The fact that the majority of these series are still currently running (some going as far as 200+ chapters), the years that it would take for the completion of that series could be decades from now. And that is not even taking into account the plethora of series that a fan can read at one time.
To say that these scanlation sites are “hurting” the manga industry is a huge underestimation of the promotional value and benefits that they can acquire far more easily and quickly than the standard procedures ever could. And although manga is free on the internet, it does not necessarily mean that fans will not buy it in stores when it is available. In fact they may be more inclined to buy the product because they developed a familiarity to the source that promotes it.
Even I still buy the manga that I read if it is really well written and drawn. But if the websites that promote these series are taken out, I’m not going to make my considerations on buying them as much as I did before.
i love this site. let me just say that. it is one of the few things that changes every day in my virtual world and i definitely do not find as nice manga at the library. to me this online manga is a very valuable source. what will we turn to next, now that there is a monopoly on manga of which somebody DID buy and had someone else translate, etc?
@metzger
It would surprise if i say that too many mangaka are totally oblivious of the success of their series outside Japan. From their point of scanlators are people picking their works and making them available in others languages without their consents.
Why should they trust those persons more than their traditional publishers?
This is why something like Openmanga whatever how promising it is, struggle.
I strongly doubt of the success of any DRM scheme while the monthly subscription may work. In anime the field Crunchyroll broken even in the last few months.
France & North America are the historical key markets but the countries where Japanese publishers want to develop the most are China & Korea. Adapting work being cheaper and some culture proximity allow more works to be adaptable for those markets.
@Hal
Does anyone asked the authors opinion on the scanlation matter.
Scanlation is nothing but an act that deprives the authors controls over their works.
It’s not something to be overly proud about. Let’s call it a guilty pleasure and if you are persistent enough you can continue to enjoy that pleasure albeit not as easily as it’s used to be.
Now you are raising few points i want to develop.
First even Japanese publishers got it that there is a strong visibility issue of their works because that simply to many manga released weekly. A pity i don’t have the number of dual releases (vol 1 & vol 2 of a new series) in Japan in the last few years to have a bigger impact and visibility. This practice is rather common in France for relatively long series (over 10 volumes).
Second the serialization concept is failing as the less visible and less popular series get less benefit from being serialized in the same big book than very popular ones. There are less “accidental/opportunity sells” as would call them.
Third the market is oriented toward a system based on best sellers. In France, 10 manga series = 50% yearly print run. This is bound to disaster if your best sellers are ending around the same time with no replacing sellers available or you best sellers are not selling as much as before.
Conclusion: Publishers must put more forward their catalog while managing those hungry for best sellers releases. This applied to digital manga would mean that less popular won’t be abandoned in favor of best sellers as for publishers it will become a question of survival.
i am a person who enjoys shonen romance manga i also buy manga but manga like the world only god knows or GE good ending will not be published in america easily these are both in my top favorite five mangas me and my friends are extremely angry in what is happening at onemanga like many other fans and think that some mangas should be kept online but only ones that won’t ever get published in the united states
Some very interesting reactions here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. I suppose the shock of losing such a major site has overwhelmed everything else that’s happened today, since you haven’t updated the site yet. I’m guessing you’re still trying to process what’s just happened in a comprehensive essay form by tomorrow.
In the meantime, after having time to think things through, I’ve posted my thoughts about the loss of OneManga, and a possible alternative for scanlators looking for another outlet.
http://sundaycomicsdebt.blogspot.com/2010/07/onemanga-rip.html
Ah, the corporate american model fails, yet again, for another industry.
I can currently read the hiragana alphabet so I can technically read any japanese manga with the hiragana beside the kanji. I’m also studying vocabulary, phrases, and sentence structure in japanese. I’m getting closer and closer to never buying american copies again!
[...] to remove copyright-protected material from the website. (Namely, all of it.) Brigid Alverson has the details at MangaBlog, as well as an announcement from Square Enix about a new digital manga initiative. [...]
The typical view of publishers is that any illegal distribution of their content is bad for business, as if everyone reading their manga online was doing so as an alternative to buying a hard copy.
Many people will simply abandon any series if they find they have to pay for it, and others, such as myself are encouraged to buy hard copies as well as other series merchandise from the fandom devloped through enjoying the series free online.
Bit of a catch 22. Would never have been introduced to many series (indeed manga as a whole in some cases) had it not been made available to us for free.
[...] MangaBlog an ongoing conversation about manga « BREAKING: One Manga shutting down, Square Enix opens up shop [...]
Is it just me or should publishers done something about scanlations a long time ago? If they were going to kill them off since they were bad, they should’ve done it immediately and made legal online manga right away. It’s bad “reactionary business”.
I actually posted my thoughts about this. You can read it at: http://www.mangatherapy.com/post/846045104/end-of-onemanga
Well speaking from a manga-fanatic stand point I must say a lot of series are unavailable in Canada or the US. I mean if someone were to begin a series like KTR or XXHolic then how would they gain access to these series… If you’re not going to make them available here than why won’t people start reading them illegally.
I personally own every volume/anime adaptation box set of the big three and a lot of other complete series. And believe me the amount of money it costs is ridiculous… It is uninviting to go out and buy these box sets for thousands of dollars.
And another issue is the “lateness” in the US Viz media “Shonen Jump”. It is a monthly series that has series 20 maybe 30 chapters behind.. Are Shueisha and company asking readers to revert back to that?
However, Publishers need to make money. Shueisha is still a company and the rest of the publishing companies are alike. It all comes down to money and a compromising deal seems unlikely.
On a more personal note, Onemanga was my “start-point”. I always thought it just the anime and this site got me into the manga craze. if it wasn’t for this site I highly doubt I would own such a large collection of the series.