Publishing director of Yen Press, Kurt Hassler attributes the fall in manga sales in America to scanlation sites. The manga publication market was estimated to create $210 million in sales in 2007, but this had declined by 30% to $140 million by 2009 (Reid, 2010). Hassler maintains that there is an ‘inverse relationship between the rise of traffic on these scanlation sites and the decline in U.S. manga sales’ (Hassler in Reid, 2010) and stresses that Yen Press is supporting the alliance of the members of the Japanese Digital Comic Association in their attempts to combat manga piracy (Reid, 2010).
Baldur Bjarnason argues that the key argument for scanlation sites is that ‘there is no harm because the stories aren’t available in [English] anyway, so nobody’s losing any sales’ (Bjarnason, 2012). A fact supporting this argument is that many scanlation communities remove titles from their websites if they become published officially in English (Bjarnason, 2012).
There have been incidents when Scanlation sites have successfully partnered up with manga publishers in order to promote the official publications. An example is when Viz Media offered a marketing deal with scanlation site Toriyama’s World to promote their Shonen Jump manga magazine in 2003 (Doria, 2009). In exchange for a fraction of revenue from Viz Media, Toriyama’s World encouraged users to subscribe to Viz Media for the magazine and productively signed up more subscribers than any alternative website (Doria, 2009).
The debate over scanlation sites continues and is unlikely to end soon. It does appear that the threat of legal action from publishers such as the Japanese Digital Comic Association is coercing scanlation sites to remove copyrighted material. Within 10 days after being threatened with legal action from the Japanese Digital Comic Association, MangaFox removed over 350 titles from its website, 235 of which were under license from Viz Media (Anon., 2010).
Experimentation with digital publication methods such as Cruncyroll’s paid subscription service which enables subscribers to both read licenced manga in English and watch anime (Cha, 2010) is believed likely to lead to increased manga sales. Kun Gao of Cruncyroll appears positive in maintaining that similar models encourage subscriber consumption, reducing piracy (Gao in Cha, 2010). Similarly Hassler considers that ‘the digital availability of manga content stands to revolutionize readers’ access to the material they love’ (Hassler in Reid, 2014), meaning that as access to manga titles increases so will consumption. Bjarnason recommends that the lessening of ‘strict geographical restrictions that exclude large markets’ would significantly reduce manga piracy. Hassler’s further consideration that manga publishers have ‘learned from the scanlators’ (Hassler in Reid, 2014) offers a conclusively positive outlook on the future of the manga industry.
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Bibliography
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Reid, C. (2014). Yen Press, Square Enix Ink Global Digital Manga Pact. Publishers Weekly. [online] Available at: <http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/61552-yen-press-square-enix-ink-global-digital-manga-pact.html> [Accessed 8th October 2014].