Errors in Judgment

(Judgment is such an awkward word!)

I'm a firm believer in spending money on the things you love. This is probably hypocritical of me, the chick who has posted free downloads on her site before and is currently watching sitcoms on Youtube instead of buying/renting their DVDs. I never buy music, ever, unless I think it's REALLY necessary. But I have an excuse! The musicians hardly get any money from CD sales or song downloads, anyway.

I guess I've just murdered my argument here. But hear me out! I want to support the little guy, directly. I buy niche video games and I buy tons of manga. I hate pirating games; I find it pathetic and irritating. Unless you can't get the game in English/in your home country, then you have no reason to be illegally downloading it. Same with manga. Heck, go to the library and support them!

So, you would think I'd be happy when I found out that One Manga, the most popular online manga scan website, was being shut down. However, I'm not. Read this, the message that pops up when you go onto their homepage:

"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 2010).
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

I'm all for taking off the licensed chapters. That makes sense. But the unlicensed stuff? There is absolutely no reason to remove the manga scans that are not, and perhaps will never be, licensed. Doing that just hurts the fanbases of these companies who are forcing One Manga to shut down. The only things I ever read on One Manga were Bakuman and Kodocha; I read (and will continue to read, on some other site) Bakuman because it's not available in English. It's been licensed now, that's true, but the English volumes aren't going to come out until the fall, and by the time it was licensed by Viz I was already several volumes worth in to quit. I read Kodocha online recently because it's no longer in print and is incredibly hard to find. That's another good thing about these sites, too. I was also planning to read Life online. It's a series that I supported by buying it in English, but it's no longer being published.

Shutting down One Manga hurts people who are interested in delving deeper into the world of manga. Without online scanlation sites, it's hard for people to ever find out about series that aren't the super popular ones. It will be hard for people to become educated manga fans. Of course, there will be other sites on which you can read these series, but they'll be harder to find, and who knows when they will be taken down, too?

It seems the manga companies think that people read these scanlations because they like reading their manga online. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. People read them because they want to read manga for free, or they want to read manga they can't otherwise. The companies are now trying to combat the former while also continuing to let people read stuff online. It's idiotic, because they're trying to get people to pay for things by chapter, with no added benefits over buying the physical volume. Paying a dollar or more per chapter is going to, in the end, be more expensive than just buying the physical volumes. It's not a smart solution. Companies should work WITH the existing scanlation sites to gauge readers' interest and come up with ways to entice people to buy the physical media.

I definitely am against people using sites like One Manga to read things like Full Metal Alchemist or other popular series online; if you like something, and you can buy it readily, then BUY IT. Manga companies don't make that much money, anyway, and it's all to support the original artist. Manga is such a niche that we're seeing once-"huge" companies like Tokyopop on the edge of bankruptcy. But removing EVERYTHING from these websites is not the solution; a true manga fan is interested in the manga that they don't see at Barnes & Noble's, so they go read it online. Now, it's going to take a much larger effort to get to know the world outside of Shonen Jump.