End of an age: OneManga to shut down
For those of you who don't know, the scanlation-manga hosting giant, One Manga, has announced it will be shutting down, for good. The site is removing all content, not just the liscensed stuff, and will be completely shutting down, with the exception of the forms. The announcement, which was made by Zabi, is posted immediately on the main page of One Manga, but below is a large chunk of the proclamation.
Zabi wrote:
"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."
What do you guys have to say about this?
I can understand One Manga's decision. The idea of having a lawsuit thrown at you is not a fun thought. However, a part of me thinks the manga publishers are being utterly stupid.
Not wanting liscensed manga to be scanlated makes sense, but it does take American manga publishers FOREVER to release manga. So for the popular series, like Skip Beat! and Bleach, is it really business smart to make potential customers wait months? (Aka, I don't understand why they don't release volumes sooner, or release chapters on the internet or something.) Plus, to be honest, what liscensed manga I own I only bought because I read the first few chapters online and decided I loved the series.
But what's with not wanting unliscensed manga to be scanlated? It increases their fanbase significantly! Plus it's not like by releasing unliscensed manga in the US you're actually stealing from the company's profits. I mean 99 percent of us wouldn't bother to purchase unliscensed manga BECAUSE WE CAN'T READ IT!!!!!!!!
Either way, I think the American manga industry needs to make some serious changes. In addition to taking YEARS to release volumes, a lot of series just aren't finished. GoComi recently went under (although they still refuse to admit it) and they had a series I was serious interested in, which I'm not never going to get to finish because 1.) they went under and 2.) The scanlators of the projects were actually pretty honorable and stopped scanning it because it was liscensed. Tokyopop has pulled this crap several times too. They liscense series and then two or three volumes from the end decide they don't feel like releasing it anymore.
To me that's really childish. That's like saying "Here's this toy that I don't really like and I don't want to play with, but I'm going to throw it out JUST so you can't play with it."
What do you guys think?