[army_kitten]

Originally Posted by Laurenlena

This is a sad day. It is pure foolishness on the part of the publishers. They have alienated a massive part of their international fan base. Fan scanlations have accounted for the massive rise in American interest in yaoi and actively trying to stop them is just a shot in the foot. Such greed will only create disdain among the most dedicated fans. All they're doing is ensuring that far fewer people will be exposed to their work. A very poor business decision.

i think this is more about the distribution of raw scans than it is about the scanlations. if you can read japanese, you can buy their magazines and tankoubon. this is more difficult/more expensive if you live outside of japan (like most of us do), but still entirely possible. instead, people are downloading and reading for free. this is causing a lot of publishers to lose a LOT of potential money. while i know little about what's going on in the manga publishing industry, i do know that within the american publishing industry magazines and newspapers are suffering huge circulation losses because most people go to the internet for their news or whatever.

scanlations of unlicensed manga, however, have indeed spread the yaoi love to speakers of different languages. the risk, of course, is that people will keep/read the scans rather than buy the manga if they do get licensed in their language, and of course this happens—especially because manga that has been translated is generally between 4 and 5 times the cost of the original.

but, as you pointed out, there wouldn't BE such a huge fanbase for yaoi in a lot of places if it weren't for scanlations. on their own, i don't see the scanlations posing a threat to the japanese publishers, especially because the original is always better than the translation. but remember that if the scanlation exists, the raw scans they were made from exist, and can and will be distributed.

i don't think there is an easy solution to any of this. ehhhhh...