Quote:
Originally Posted by army_kitten 
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...  |
Well, the cost of the licensed titles is indeed insanely high and moreover the quality is often quite dubious. I don´t think that the scanlations really impose a threat to the licensed titles. I know quite a few people who read the scanlation AND bought the title when it was available in english. If it weren´t for all the people who are willing to spend hours and days of their lives working on the scanlations, I doubt that there would be such a huge fanbase and consequently so many licensed titles...it works like a circle, I guess. Anyway, even if it´s difficult, I always try to get my hands on the orgininal title: 1) original is always better, 2) hard to get outside japan but more available than english version, 3) you don´t have to wait from years to read itXD
Anyway, i hope that the scanlations groups won´t drop their Drap releases any time soon
