So it looks like OneManga, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) English-language scanlation websites
chose to shut down before a coalition American and Japanese publishers could take steps to shut down by force.
For those who haven't kept up with manga-related news, back in June, a group of Japanese manga publishers and their American counterparts decided to go after scanlation sites. In the past, they practiced grudging toleration, occasionally requesting a series or two to be removed but otherwise letting them be. In fact, the publishers have been known to use the scanlation sites to gauge interests in their series and see which ones generated enough interest to warrant a translation.
So, what changed? To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all came down to economy. Book publishing companies have been losing sales all across the board for years now, and the Great Recession only made things worse. At some point, the executives must have wondered just how many sales they were losing to sites that displayed their product for free. Worse, they probably realized that the scanlation websites generated millions of page views - and they weren't seeing a dime of it. So, the way they saw it, the scanlation sites had to go.
Now, do I think that this will help their sales? Probably not, not by much. In Russia, sites like lib.ru have been displaying free copies of books since the dawn of Internet but that didn't really affect the sales any. It's not that uncommon for Russian authors to put copies of their novels on their official websites, but that doesn't seem to affect their sales, either. Heck, I would argue that it actually helped authors like Sergey Lukyanenko to get exposure.
That said, I don't agree with all the otaku whining about how manga publishers have no rights to shut down scanlation sites because, darn it, it's inconvenient for them. The simple fact of the matter is that scanlation sites survived as long as they did purely because manga publishers let them survive. If they want to end their policy of tacit toleration towards scanlations, than, quite frankly, it's their right. The best thing manga fans can do and accept it with grace and move on.
Of course, this is where being bilingual really helps. I can still read scanlations at Russian-language websites, and I don't see Japanese publishers making any headway in loosely regulated, often vague and corruption-ridden word of Russian copyright law enforcement any time soon.