i’m glad someone said the obvious, that people who get scanlations and download scanned comics don’t hurt sales because they don’t have any intention of buying the books in the first place.

If anything scans HELP comics in that people have a way to check out books that they wouldn’t have bothered looking at otherwise. In the long run if a book is good enough its going to find its way into someone’s hands. That’s the bottom line. I think that companies go crazy because fans can check out the crappier books for free and realize they’re not worth buying.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/anncast/2010-04-23 I dunno Julie, Ed Chavez of Vertical explains quite well the effects of scanlations on Black Jack in this podcast at ANN. While not the sole factor [besides shelf space, crowded market and aging readership], they’re still a part of why manga’s sales are down.

If a book sells the same at 12.99 as it does at 9.99, companies will price at at 12.99. Though Vertical, CMX, DHorse and VIZ make up for it by usually give the pricer books better production values w/larger trim, colour inserts and what not.

And by the 12.99 thing I mean- break even or make money at a higher price, rather then lose money on a lower price, at the same sales levels.

Also, I’d rather have a 24.99 omnibus of Mushishi 8-10 then no Mushishi at all- higher priced titles have allowed for more variety, and sometimes value [24.99 for 3 vols of content rather then 11.99 each]

I agree with what you’re saying, Julie. The economy is affecting everyone, publishers included. However, I can’t see the justification on raising the prices of books. I can understand the need to publish only a select number of series or books on an ongoing basis. But raise the price; they had better be something worth the price in that book. I also have experience a series going unfinished. I uised to read Boogiepop (from Seven Seas), but they stopped publishing because the sales numbers were down. I understand they’re reasoning. But what am I and other readers supposed to do to finish the series? Learn Japanese I guess.

One suggestion that I can make to publishers is this; use cheaper paper. If I’m not mistaken, in Japan, manga is printed on cheap newspaper-grade paper. The only color is from a tint added to the paper to hide any leftover ink, as the paper can and usually is recycled. In this way, the cost of publishing is kept down.

Illegal downloads don’t hurt? Tell that to the music industry.

Well, I’m tired of hearing how bank asset mismanagement and the housing bubble ruined the economy, but no matter how tired we are of hearing something, if it’s true, it’s true. Your assumption that people who download scanslations will never buy the product is not borne out by Internet posts such as Luke’s above. In fact, scanslations-lead-to-customers has long been an excuse for supporting scanslations. Certainly there are some scanslations readers who will never buy product, and some who will always buy product. But logic tells us there is a large middle ground who would buy the product if the scans weren’t available for free online. Aggregator sites are not losing readers — free manga is as popular as ever if not moreso — but industry behind manga you have to buy is imploding. That should tell you that scanslations are hurting the industry. (Even without the “stealing” moral argument.)

No publisher sets out to put out subpar product. First, everyone will agree that there are subpar manga on the shelves, but you will never get agreement on exactly what that subpar product is. What you consider trash is somebody else’s favorite manga. And someone else will not see the value in the manga you hold most dear. As far as the publishers are concerned, the very worst of Japan has already been weeded out. They only put out manga that has sold reasonably well in Japan, and has a good chance of selling reasonably here. Even in the worst of the glut, no publisher published a manga just to get books on the shelves. Each licensing decision was thought out. It’s just that there were a lot of manga that was tried and which failed. That always happens in entertainment.

Finally, unless there is some breakthrough in paper and printing prices, the prices for those books aren’t coming down. The companies aren’t printing books at above the $10 mark because they are gouging the fans, quite the opposite, they know very well that the lower the price the better their books would sell. But you can’t lose money on every book but make it up in volume. The prices reflect the costs of doing business.

We’re talking about an industry where the leading company has just decided that more than a hundred employees is drastically bloated. This isn’t a huge Disney-like conglomerate with an army of lawyers. The small manga companies are one person (maybe two) and a few freelancers. The medium-sized companies are less than ten manga-dedicted people with the advantage that they can share their accounting, sales, and distribution services with other parts of a larger publishing house (a publishing house that will have little sympathy for the unique problems of manga). These are companies that, even in their times of best profits didn’t have the extra money to spend on lawyers writing cease and desist letters. Should they have? Maybe, but it’s very easy to judge in hindsight. The biggest damage from the scanslators has been in the past two years or so when, probably for financial reasons, manga readers moved from buying legit copies to free-but-illegal reading.

Every manga company is, as you suggested, looking into new delivery methods, but because they have to form new and complicated partnerships for every new book they publish, they have always borrowed delivery methods from other, established industries (that way, the licensors feel safe enough to entrust their books to the companies). First it was the comic-book industry with 32-page pamphlets sold in a network of comic stores, then they emulated mass-market paperback books in chain bookstores. As I suggested above, they can’t R&D this themselves, so they have to wait until a useful and relatively proven delivery system comes along. That hasn’t happened yet.

As an employee at a bookstore, I’ve seen the decline in sales for manga. Too often kids come in, grab a stack of volumes, plop themselves down in a chair and read them without purchasing them. It makes me sad and frustrated. I do wish there was a way to get sales back up so that cuts like the loss of CMX manga, GoComi and the 40% of VIZ employees didn’t have to happen all at once. I have to agree with several other commentors in that the publishing companies should lessen the number of new titles they release. So many manga series are finished over in Japan and if they publishers would focus on getting those series translated and published and not get a couple volumes out and then move onto another series, perhaps there wouldn’t be so much frustration. If many buyers are reading the free scans online because the stories are further along in the story arcs, then its understandable that going the way of Naruto and One Piece by releasing volumes quickly is the way to go. As a buyer myself, I look forward to the newest volumes of my favorite series but when I have to wait months between releases, I have to compensate by either buying new series and starting the process all over again or going online in the hopes that there’s a scan much further along. I find most often that I actually only read the free manga if it’s a series that is not released here in the US. I try to avoid reading the free manga for series that released by VIZ and TokyoPop and others because, one I don’t really like reading them online, it hurts my eyes, and two sometimes the transaltions are terrible and I have no idea what’s being said. At least with published releases through VIZ and TokyoPop, there are professional translators doing the work. That’s not to say that there aren’t professionals doing the free scan translations but many of those sites go by the idea of ‘if you know some Japanese, feel free to take a chapter and translate for us!’ Not everyone can read Japanese and unless you know someone or can travel over to Japan, it’s very very hard to get the original Japanese volumes of the manga which means we English speakers can only rely on translations and I’d rather pay to get quality translating.

But this also means that I expect a series to be completed. I don’t like feeling as though I’ve wasted my money on a series only to have it be discontinued when there are only three volumes left in the series! I can understand if the Mangaka didn’t finish and therefore there’s nothing more to release but as mentioned before, many series are either finished or far enough ahead in Japan that it would be best to just complete a series in the US before moving on. If you have too many projects going at once, it just becomes choatic and spread thin and people will resort to going online to read their favorite series because volume 47 has been uploaded while volume 25 has just been released in your local bookstore and the series is finished in Japan!

As both a reader and an artist, I like to have the physical copies in my hands to flip through and not have to boot up my computer just to find an image that I thought was in chapter 6 of volume 7. I use the artwork as references for my own and if sales continue to drop and series continue to be discontinued, then I fear for the future of the manga industry as a whole. This is an industry that’s been around since the 70s and to see it falling this quickly is sad. I’ll gladly pay the extra $2 but I expect the series to be completed. As of right now, I unfortunatly don’t really know what can be done to help get the sales back up. I’m doing my part but I can only do so much, I guess.

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