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Sunday, July 21, 2013

The Beef With Manga Aggregate Sites (A brief "analysis")

Good Morning visitors,

So this post will be very general (VERY GENERAL) info on what I know about the situation and some personal opinion about manga aggregate sites and the continuing feud between scanlators and manga aggregate sites for years now.

I don't know how many people know about this (not that much compared to the whole population of online readers) but for years, scanlators have had a lot of "beef" with manga aggregate sites. Now, first is the idiom of "someone having a beef with someone" i.e. a problem or bad relationship with someone. Second, what is a manga aggregate site? Generally it's a manga hosting site that collects all or as many of the translated work that scanlators do and host it on their site for people to read. (eg mangafox, mangahere, tenmanga, etc) If you just started off in the online manga world then I don't expect you to know much of this but it's some information you don't want to miss out on. If you remained ignorant despite reading for awhile, it's about time to get educated. If you know about this and continue to ignore and not care, then you are just trying to annoy me. (edit: 07/30/2013)-Not proud to know that my brother is one of those indifferent people....

Ok so, I'm not sure when this feud really started but it was about a few years ago when I realized how unpleasant and uncomfortable I was with the whole thing and I sympathized with the scanlators. First of all, just hosting on its own is quite harmless I think except that there are scanlators who depends on visitors to kind of make a profit to support their own sites. I'm not too sure about that but as far as I know, manga hosting itself is innocent except when they start putting ads up on the pages for profits. The things is that with a manga aggregate site and hosting manga, every time you click, you get a new page of ads as well. Think about it, let's say the average number of pages in a chapter is about 20-30, then you include the fact that you may read more than one chapter in a day and the fact that thousands are doing the same thing from the comfort of a accessible internet device worldwide. No doubt that people got the light bulb and thought that it would be an excellent way to make a profit. Some people claim that the ads don't do anything as long as you don't click on it. I don't know how much that is true but bottom line is that these sites are pocketing the money off of the hard work of scanlators who buy raws, scan, translate, proofread, clean/crop/level/redraw them, typeset, and edit/QC them. (Some do occasional color pages too!) These people aren't making profits off of any of the scans they work on yet someone else is doing that and pocketing the money for themselves....Anyone see how messed up that is?

Now the moral grounds...yes scanlators and what they do with raws is illegal. They do stop if contacted by the publisher or if something is license (I hope). But they simply do this (at least I assume most of them do so) because they want to share their love for mangas AND the fact that not everyone has the privilege to access them in a language internationally understood. Most of the mangas that are professionally (ie through a publisher) translated into english have kind of been not so great in my opinion (especially tokyo pop mangas) There have been a few that have upped the game recently like Yen Press but there aren't many. One of the best sadly died a few years back too....CMX (may you rest in peace).  Anyways, there is an argument that scanlating reduces international sales but 1) scanlators aren't making profits off of what they do and 2)it is true that it reduces profits but again, things aren't being translated/published in english and not everyone has that access to buying translated text. 

The bottom line generally (and I stress this is an over simplification!!!) for manga aggregate sites is that it's unfair that they're making profits off of the illegal work that scanlators do voluntarily on their own time for free. One way how not to contribute? Get a damn Adblocker. I know firefox and chrome has it as extensions. I'm not sure about other browsers but I'm sure you can just google it and find one you can download for your browser. This application blocks ads from all sites including the video ads for youtube. You can also disable the application for sites that need the profits from ads like Batoto which I believe uses the profits from site to pay for the site which is supposed to be a scanlator friendly site for all languages. (good site to use if you want a good will aggregate site).

Personally for me, I use an Adblocker because I do not want to take part in the profits of sites like those. Secondly, I use batoto and scanlator sites/readers to read as much as possible but I don't know what sites are affiliated with profiting hence the adblocker. It's kind of hypocritical for me to denounce people who visit sites that are profiting as I've described in a very generic way because I'm a pretty avid poster on one of the most notorious manga aggregate sites ever, Mangafox. Maybe the difference is that people just remain ignorant and that really gets to me because they either think the sites themselves do the work or they don't care at all about HQ scans, expecting scanlators to come up with a new chapter within days of the previous release! Now back to my own hypocrisy of visiting MF...I go mainly for the discussion community which I think is the best there is, honest to god. It's a great place to visit for discussion and I've been with it for years now. When I first started out on mangafox though, it wasn't as terrible as it is now in terms of respecting the wishes of scanlators. I was here when anime-eden existed and I know for a fact that the staff used to take down mangas upon request but that stopped happening of course when voluntary forum staff were finally denied access to regulating the mangas that were uploaded to the hosting sites (this has NOEZ written all over it, the owner of MF and very notorious-HQ located in China). I feel kind of bad since it was once a quite respectable site to a certain degree when the voluntary staff still had that access....But anyways, if you aren't ready to make the shift just yet, just get the Adblocker. It'll save you a lot of loading time from the ads as well so you might as well get one. But I encourage going to scanlators who have readers of their own or go to batoto. Might as well thank them after you read them no?

I want to say more but this is getting to be too long and I'm getting tired (typing this at midnight before I go to bed). I want to say more and wish I structured this post a lot better and more eloquently but I've got a lot going on.
For more info (and you should want to look into this more) go to:

Sura's Place
(read a part of the journey of one scanlator, no longer wanting to deal with this feud anymore)


Gosh, as I copy and pasted the links and skimmed through some of them (many are familiar), I'm getting the same nauseous feeling I did the first time I found out about this.... 

Bye,
tohukyo
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3 comments:

  1. KaniJuly 22, 2013 at 2:44 AM

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    1. tohukyoJuly 25, 2013 at 11:15 PM

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    2. KaniAugust 12, 2013 at 1:08 AM

      Ahh I see you are indeed experienced then! :) I've only been reading for a year myself :P

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