MangaHelpers Has Pulled Gunslinger Girl

Yes the French editions are really nice with box sets and glossy slip covers with extra artwork on them. I have a couple of French editions but really so that I can use them to brush up my French which isn't fluent enough to manage without the English copy for reference.

And your publisher produced them in high quality and quickly without dropping the series after a series of irritating delays. I wonder how many French scanlations there are?

This is going to be one hell of a post.

Wow, I'd really love to have those box sets for the manga. Very nice. I would very gladly buy those. Seeing some of the good cover art next to the really vomit-inducingly-bad cover art of some of the later volumes really brings out the terrible quality of the latter though. Welcome aboard Nic2001! I'd recommend making a thread in the greetings section so we can have you introduced properly to the rest of us. Go ahead and post those pics there as well.

mistersaxon wrote:I think the point about the long wait pissing off users is not really a criticism of scanlation though is it? Why the hell does it take them so long to produce the translation versions? And clearly if they were faster out of the gate it would earn them sales, but it seems they would rather that we customers just waited around like sheep till they were ready to "fleece" us. Sadly the days when that sort of treatment of customers was something you could get away with are now gone (and nobody liked waiting ages for sequels even in the old print-only days).

So if publishers produced translations faster and more in synch with the .jp versions there would not only be no scanlation but likely more sales anyway yet the lost sales are the fault of scanlators? Uh no. Nature abhors a vacuum so if the publishers try and create one or just leave one hanging around then scanlators will rush in to fill it. If the publishers are lucky then people will care enough about their properties to still buy the paper books later although I still say that if people are happy to only read online there was little chance they would shell out for a series of books anyway.

This is litigation to cover up a lackadaisical attitude to book publishing and the slackness of a moribund system replete with footling legal traps and complications. If the publishers had any sense they would see that selling an online version of their work was a way round all this and doing so would likely speed up the production of translated works since, by necessity, the translation and image production would all have been done already, especially if it was planned that way from the get-go. Hell, they could sell translations directly over the web from Japan and forget distribution arrangements entirely if they could manage to resist charging the cost of 5 books just to ship one.

This is a point against the license holding companies. I did mention this earlier though with something to the effect of calling ADV manga a bunch of incompetent fucking morons. I also did mention that it is a lot harder to defend the companies when they pull off bullshit like this, as much as I would like to defend them. If they hold the license, then they have a moral obligation to actually do something with it besides letting it expire or dangling it over the heads of the exasperated fans.

I really don't like the idea of e-books though. Partly because it isin't a tangile product, a personal thing of mine, and partly because, like I mentioned earlier, as e-readers and the like become more commonplace, it will begin killing off bookstores. It would be a very efficient system though, I must admit.

mistersaxon wrote:

Godot wrote:You might buy the manga and I know many people that would, but I also know some people who read plenty of manga online whom I don't believe ever purchased one.

Likely they would just not have read the manga at all if no scanlation was available - or they'd have borrowed yours! Casual readers are not a lost sale IME.

Alright, you do have a point there. I don't really see that friend of mine actually ever buying manga either way. It does trouble me, however, that the only people we can really on buying manga are the serious fans. I'm pretty sure that manga sales comprise the bulk of their revenue. Besides the magazine publication, they aren't getting money from anywhere else.

mistersaxon wrote:

Godot wrote:Yes, we should check out what we're reading before we buy it. But none of that addresses the fact that people who turn out to like the series who would normally buy it never will because they can get the series online for free. [...] The main problem here is that it's a free alternative to actually having to shell out money for something.

Really? I have to think that most people who like comics (which manga is) like to read them. Reading on screen is a sucky, delay-filled, scroll-wheel-hell experience and also not really portable. [...] In the absence of scanlations you might get them to buy the books but I don't think they are the majority of scanlation readers. YMMV of course - you may be perfectly happy with the on-screen experience but generally if there's an alternative in dead-tree format I'll take it. Maybe I'm very untypical in liking manga and wanting to collect it.

Yes, fortunately it does provide a largely inferior, markedly different expereience from the actual "dead-tree format".
It really is just the ones that don't mind either way that are the problem. Again, we can rely upon the serious fans buying the manga, which is good, but I wonder just how sufficient that number is.

You do have some very great points though, mistersaxon. Great debating with you.

Kiskaloo wrote:

Godot wrote: I also worry that e-books are hurting brick and mortar bookstores, cutting out the middle man as they do. I could see bookstores being completely put out of business as e-readers become more
commonplace, which I take issue with.

They've been hurting for some time, however. The smaller stores were run out of business by the large chains (B&N, Borders, etc.) and now the low-cost volume movers (Costco, WalMart) are pushing the larger chains to extinction.

They have indeed, but e-readers might be just the last straw in this mountain of competition that's finally going to push them over the edge. It really does bother me that stores like WalMart are the ones that are murdering the business. I'm just waiting for them to start offering discounted elective plastic surgery.

The forum keeps breaking my text up into different lines randomly for some reason. Can only fix by sending the post and then editing it apparently.

Later when i get home (at the office right now) i can post a picture of the Alt covers... some of them are really nice

Godot, the real problem with e-books, even on an iPhone4 with >300dpi screen, is that it's too easy to screencap them and have something that is identical with the original. Only universal HDMI monitors and a ban on Ctl-c / Alt-PrtScn etc will ever stop that. It's tons easier to do than capturing a good quality online video and THAT is the reason that online manga isn't yet a reality. Maybe the iPad WILL be the saviour of us then since it's almost big enough and it definitely won't copy and paste unless the app vendor allows it.
But it's still easy to differentiate between online versions and paper versions by adding omake / bonus strips, extra artwork, etc. The problem is if you try and charge for it twice. I think if you buy the paper book you should get a one-off code that lets you have the online for an extra 50c say, or even free. If you buy the online first you get the cost of it off the book so that online sales drive paper sales. After all, selling the online doesn't actually cost anything at all apart from banking transaction costs if you are doing all the art and translation for the paper book as the main aim. But having the online version allows you to get to market far quicker than you can print, proof and ship paper books, even if you do all the printing in one country and ship international. In turn that speed prevents scanlation sites from harming any of your sales.

I think it's not so much laziness on the part of the license holders, but greed. As in they snapped up so many titles, the costs in money, time and talent to keep them all in regular production probably swamped them. So they're going to focus their efforts on shoveling out the most popular stuff (Inuyasha, Bleach, Naruto, etc.) because that is a guaranteed stream of money to keep the lights on.

The other, slower selling titles naturally fall by the wayside, starved for talent and money. I was actually surprised ADV released V4-V6 considering the financial straights they were in, but then here we have Funimation releasing GSG as one of their first Blu-ray titles, so who knows...

I wonder how popular GSG is in Japan? They forced Funi to sit on the BR discs for six months to prevent reverse importing (since the US discs are about a fifth the price of the Japanese ones) and best I can tell, Goodsmile never released the Triela PVC figure they showed.

I wonder how popular GSG is in Japan? They forced Funi to sit on the BR discs for six months to prevent reverse importing (since the US discs are about a fifth the price of the Japanese ones) and best I can tell, Goodsmile never released the Triela PVC figure they showed.

I don't have any anime sales figures, but as for manga, here's something copied over from the thread for Vol. 12:

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Well, here's the sales figures for the first week of Vol. 12's release - it entered in 18th place with a little over 60,000 copies sold. By the second week it had dropped to 30th place with another 20,000+ books sold. It's not eating up a rainforest's worth of wood-pulp like the Big Three, of course, but it saw at least some representation in the charts and given the many hundreds of manga in Japan I'd say that those figures are entirely respectable. I'm not sure what royalty rates are like for manga, but even if Yu makes as little as fifty cents on each copy (which would be less than 10% of the cover price of a manga that retails for around about six dollars), with two volumes a year plus magazine salary he must be earning at least $100,000 per annum. Even if he has to pay assistants and buy supplies from that, he's left with a fair tranche of $30-$50,000. GSG is still a successful concern!

Nic2001 wrote:So far I think that this is the best translated version that I can read of GSG, the name are intact (well they did change the name of Hillshire to Hilscher, but that’s how the French say it so it’s not too bad) and most of the jokes are intact.

Hilscher is probably more accurate. I've stuck with Hillshire in my translations mainly out of desire for backwards consistency.

Godot wrote:The forum keeps breaking my text up into different lines randomly for some reason. Can only fix by sending the post and then editing it apparently.

It's weird that way sometimes when you copypasta quotes. If you use the non-wysiwyg editor and pay very careful attention, you can usually stop it before you post.

how do u download all the files, i wish i could by past the first 6 or 7 books but as i stated before i cant read Japanese

Looks like MangaHelpers has pulled everything in the wake of the decision by Japan's Digital Comic Association to launch Cease & Desist orders to the 30 largest manga scanlation hosting sites backed by the threat of legal action if they do not comply. While MH has not yet been contacted, they figure they would be so they have proactively closed down the database and will no longer host scanlations.

News Item

I imagine they will shortly be joined by the other major hosting sites.

Can't blame them really; they are losing sales in country due to their own people going through American websites to get scanlations and such.

Still though; if thye intend to do this, then they best intend to license some of the manga's that haven't been licensed yet - but were made available via scanlations.

Actually i think this helpless anyhow. There are thousands major filesharing (not directly manga-related) community provide manga scans on the web, wich remains untouched...

...but finding them is another matter.

If the Anime and Manga publishers are so concerned about their published works being translated into other languages, then they should have published it in those languages! Especially in English Market, where they had put out translated materials for the English speaking public, only putting out 1/2 the work for them creates a vacuum where they will go out on their own and start translating the works themselves. The publishers have no one to blame but themselves on this.

manga fox had better not take them down ill be pissed

Don't be pissed at them; they are only doing what they need to do in order to stay on the net, if they violate a cease and desist order then they are liable to be SUED.